thundered, unfollowed, unechoed; the challenge of no pursuit stayed
them, and they obeyed the call that was made on their strength with good
and gallant willingness. Far and fast they rode, happily knowing
the country well; now through the darkness of night, now through the
glimmering daybreak. Tall walls of fir-crowned rocks passed by their
eyes, all fused and dim; gray piles of monastic buildings, with the dull
chimes tolling the hour, flashed on their sight to be lost in a moment;
corn-lands yellowing for the sickle, fields with the sheaves set-up,
orchards ruddy with fruit, and black barn-roofs lost in leafy nests;
villages lying among their hills like German toys caught in the hollow
of a guarding hand; masses of forests stretching wide, somber and silent
and dark as a tomb; the shine of water's silvery line where it flowed
in a rocky channel--they passed them all in the soft gray of the waning
night, in the white veil of the fragrant mists, in the stillness of
sleep and of peace. Passed them, racing for more than life, flying with
the speed of the wind.

"I failed him to-day through my foes and his," Forest King thought, as
he laid his length out in his mighty stride. "But I love him well; I
will save him to-night." And save him the brave brute did. The grass
was so sweet and so short, he longed to stop for a mouthful; the brooks
looked so clear, he longed to pause for a drink; renewed force and
reviving youth filled his loyal veins with their fire; he could have
thrown himself down on that mossy turf, and had a roll in its thyme and
its lichens for sheer joy that his strength had come back. But he would
yield to none of these longings; he held on for his master's sake, and
tried to think, as he ran, that this was only a piece of play--only a
steeple-chase, for a silver vase and a lady's smile, such as he and his
rider had so often run for, and so often won, in those glad hours of the
crisp winter noons of English Shires far away. He turned his eyes on the
brown mare's, and she turned hers on his; they were good friends in the
stables at home, and they understood one another now. "If I were what
I was yesterday, she wouldn't run even with me," thought the King; but
they were doing good work together, and he was too true a knight and
too true a gentleman to be jealous of Mother o' Pearl, so they raced
neck-and-neck through the dawn; with the noisy clatter of water-mill
wheels, or the distant sound of a woodman's ax, or the tolling bell of
a convent clock, the only sound on the air save the beat of the flying
hoofs.

Away they went, mile on mile, league on league, till the stars faded
out in the blaze of the sun, and the tall pines rose out of the gloom.
Either his pursuers were baffled and distanced, or no hue and cry was
yet after him; nothing arrested them as they swept on, and the silent
land lay in the stillness of morning ere toil and activity awakened. It
was strangely still, strangely lonely, and the echo of the gallop seemed
to beat on the stirless, breathless solitude. As the light broke and
grew clearer and clearer, Cecil's face in it was white as death as he
galloped through the mists, a hunted man, on whose head a price was set;
but it was quite calm still, and very resolute--there was no "harking
back" in it.

They had raced nigh twenty English miles by the time the chimes of a
village were striking six o'clock; it was the only group of dwellings
they had ventured near in their flight; the leaded lattices were thrust
open with a hasty clang, and women's heads looked out as the iron tramp
of the hunters' feet struck fire from the stones. A few cries were
raised; one burgher called them to know their errand; they answered
nothing, but traversed the street with lightning speed, gone from sight
almost ere they were seen. A league farther on was a wooded bottom, all
dark and silent, with a brook murmuring through it under the leafy shade
of lilies and the tangle of water-plants; there Cecil checked the King
and threw himself out of saddle.

"He is not quite himself yet," he murmured, as he loosened the girths
and held back the delicate head from the perilous cold of the water to
which the horse stretched so eagerly; he thought more of Forest King
than he thought, even in that hour, of himself. He did all that was
needed with his own hands; fed him with the corn from the saddle-bags,
cooled him gently, led him to drink a cautious draught from the bubbling
little stream, then let him graze and rest under the shade of the
aromatic pines and the deep bronze leaves of the copper beeches; it
was almost dark, so heavy and thickly laced were the branches, and
exquisitely tranquil in the heart of the hilly country, in the peace of
the early day, with the rushing of the forest brook the sole sound that
was heard, and the everlasting sighing of the pine-boughs overhead.

Cecil leaned a while silently against one of the great gnarled trunks,
and Rake affected to busy himself with the mare; in his heart was a
tumult of rage, a volcano of curiosity, a pent-up storm of anxious
amaze, but he would have let Mother o' Pearl brain him with a kick of
her iron plates rather than press a single look that should seem like
doubt, or seem like insult in adversity to his fallen master.

Cecil's eyes, drooped and brooding, gazed a long half-hour down in
silence into the brook bubbling at his feet; then he lifted his head and
spoke--with a certain formality and command in his voice, as though he
gave an order on parade.

"Rake, listen, and do precisely what I bid you; neither more nor less.
The horses cannot accompany me, nor you either; I must go henceforth
where they would starve, and you would do worse. I do not take the King
into suffering, nor you into temptation."

Rake, who at the tone had fallen unconsciously in to the attitude of
"attention," giving the salute with his old military instinct, opened
his lips to speak in eager protestation; Cecil put up his hand.

"I have decided; nothing you can say will alter me. We are near a
by-station now; if I find none there to prevent me, I shall get away by
the first train; to hide in these woods is out of the question. You
will return by easy stages to Baden, and take the horses at once to Lord
Rockingham. They are his now. Tell him my last wish was that he should
take you into his service; and he will be a better master to you than I
have ever been. As for the King"--his lips quivered, and his voice shook
a little, despite himself--"he will be safe with him. I shall go into
some foreign service--Austrian, Russian, Mexican, whichever be open
to me. I would not risk such a horse as mine to be sold, ill-treated,
tossed from owner to owner, sent in his old age to a knacker's yard, or
killed in a skirmish by a cannon-shot. Take both him and the mare back,
and go back yourself. Believe me, I thank you from my heart for your
noble offer of fidelity, but accept it I never shall."

A dead pause came after his words; Rake stood mute; a curious
look--half-dogged, half-wounded, but very resolute--had come on his
face. Cecil thought him pained, and spoke with an infinite gentleness:

"My good fellow, do not regret it, or fancy I have no gratitude to you.
I feel your loyalty deeply, and I know all you would willingly suffer
for me; but it must not be. The mere offer of what you would do had been
quite testimony enough of your truth and your worth. It is impossible
for me to tell you what has so suddenly changed my fortunes; it is
sufficient that for the future I shall be, if I live, what you were--a
private soldier in an army that needs a sword. But let my fate be what
it will, I go to it alone. Spare me more speech, and simply obey my last
command."

Quiet as the words were, there was a resolve in them not to be disputed;
an authority not to be rebelled against. Rake stared, and looked at
him blankly; in this man who spoke to him with so subdued but so
irresistible a power of command, he could scarcely recognize the gay,
indolent, indulgent, pococurante Guardsman, whose most serious anxiety
had been the set of a lace tie, the fashion of his hunting dress, or the
choice of the gold arabesques for his smoking-slippers.

Rake was silent a moment; then his hand touched his cap again.

"Very well, sir," and without opposition or entreaty, he turned to
resaddle the mare.

Our natures are oddly inconsistent. Cecil would not have taken the man
in to exile, and danger, and temptation, and away from comfort and an
honest life, for any consideration; yet it gave him something of a
pang that Rake was so soon dissuaded from following him, and so easily
convinced of the folly of his fidelity. But he had dealt himself a far
deadlier one when he had resolved to part forever from the King. He
loved the horse better than he loved anything--fed from his hand in
foalhood, reared, broken, and trained under his own eye and his own
care, he had had a truer welcome from those loving, lustrous eyes than
all his mistresses ever gave him. He had had so many victories, so many
hunting-runs, so many pleasant days of winter and of autumn, with Forest
King for his comrade and companion! He could better bear to sever from
all other things than from the stable-monarch, whose brave heart never
failed him, and whose honest love was always his.

He stretched his hand out with his accustomed signal; the King lifted
his head where he grazed, and came to him with the murmuring noise of
pleasure he always gave at his master's caress, and pressed his
forehead against Cecil's breast, and took such tender heed, such earnest
solicitude, not to harm him with a touch of the mighty fore hoofs, as
those only who care for and know horses well will understand in its
relation.

Cecil threw his arm over his neck, and leaned his own head down on it,
so that his face was hidden. He stood motionless so many moments, and
the King never stirred, but only pressed closer and closer against
his bosom as though he knew that this was his eternal farewell to his
master. But little light came there, the boughs grew so thickly; and it
was still and solitary as a desert in the gloom of the meeting trees.

There have been many idols--idols of gold, idols of clay--less pure,
less true than the brave and loyal-hearted beast from whom he parted
now.

He stood motionless a while longer, and where his face was hidden, the
gray silken mane of the horse was wet with great, slow tears that forced
themselves through his closed eyes; then he laid his lips on the King's
forehead, as he might have touched the brow of the woman he loved; and
with a backward gesture of his hand to his servant, plunged down into
the deep slope of netted boughs and scarce penetrable leafage, that
swung back into their places, and shrouded him from sight with their
thick, unbroken screen.

"He's forgot me right and away in the King," murmured Rake, as he led
Forest King away slowly and sorrowfully, while the hunter pulled and
fretted to force his way to his master. "Well, it's only natural like.
I've cause to care for him, and plenty on it; but he ain't no sort of
reason to think about me."

That was the way the philosopher took his wound.

Alone, Cecil flung himself full-length down on the turf beneath the
beech woods; his arms thrown forward, his face buried in the grass, all
gay with late summer forest blossoms; for the first time the whole might
of the rain that had fallen on him was understood by him; for the first
time it beat him down beneath it, as the overstrained tension of nerve
and of self-restraint had their inevitable reaction. He knew what this
thing was which he had done--he had given up his whole future.

Though he had spoken lightly to his servant of his intention to enter
a foreign army, he knew himself how few the chances were that he could
ever do so. It was possible that Rockingham might so exert his influence
that he would be left unpursued, but unless this chanced so (and Baroni
had seemed resolute to forego no part of his demands), the search for
him would be in the hands of the law, and the wiles of secret police and
of detectives' resources spread too far and finely over the world for
him to have a hope of ultimate escape.

If he sought France, the Extradition Treaty would deliver him up;
Russia--Austria--Prussia were of equal danger; he would be identified,
and given up to trial. Into the Italian service he knew many a scoundrel
was received unquestioned; and he might try the Western world; though he
had no means to pay the passage, he might work it; he was a good sailor.
Yachts had been twice sunk under him, by steamers, in the Solent and the
Spezzia, and his own schooner had once been fired at by mistake for a
blockade runner, when he had brought to, and given them a broadside from
his two shotted guns before he would signal them their error.

As these things swept, disordered and aimless, through his mind, he
wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the
Guards' champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed
and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had
seamanship enough to be taken before the mast, or could stand before
the tambour-major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the same
flag!

For a while he lay like a drunken man, heavy and motionless, his brow
resting on his arm, his face buried in the grass; he had parted more
easily with the woman he loved than he had parted with Forest King. The
chimes of some far-off monastery, or castle-campanile, swung lazily in
the morning stillness; the sound revived him, and recalled to him how
little time there was if he would seek the flight that had begun on
impulse and was continued in a firm, unshrinking resolve; he must go on,
and on, and on; he must burrow like a fox, hide like a beaten cur; he
must put leagues between him and all who had ever known him; he must
sink his very name, and identity, and existence, under some impenetrable
obscurity, or the burden he had taken up for others' sake would be
uselessly borne. There must be action of some sort or other, instant and
unerring.

"It don't matter," he thought, with the old idle indifference, oddly
becoming in that extreme moment the very height of stoic philosophy,
without any thought or effort to be such; "I was going to the bad of my
own accord; I must have cut and run for the debts, if not for this; it
would have been the same thing, anyway, so it's just as well to do it
for them. Life's over, and I'm a fool that I don't shoot myself."

But there was too imperious a spirit in the Royallieu blood to let him
give in to disaster and do this. He rose slowly, staggering a little,
and feeling blinded and dazzled with the blaze of the morning sun as
he went out of the beech wood. There were the marks of the hoofs on the
damp, dewy turf; his lips trembled a little as he saw them--he would
never rid the horse again!

Some two miles, more or less, lay between him and the railway. He was
not certain of his way, and he felt a sickening exhaustion on him;
he had been without food since his breakfast before the race. A
gamekeeper's hut stood near the entrance of the wood; he had much
recklessness in him, and no caution. He entered through the half-open
door, and asked the keeper, who was eating his sausage and drinking his
lager, for a meal.

"I'll give you one if you'll bring me down that hen-harrier," growled
the man in south German; pointing to the bird that was sailing far off,
a mere speck in the sunny sky.

Cecil took the rifle held out to him, and without seeming even to pause
to take aim, fired. The bird dropped like a stone through the air into
the distant woods. There was no tremor in his wrist, no uncertainty in
his measure. The keeper stared; the shot was one he had thought beyond
any man's range, and he set food and drink before his guest with a
crestfallen surprise, oddly mingled with veneration.

"You might have let me buy my breakfast, without making me do murder,"
said Bertie quietly, as he tried to eat. The meal was coarse--he could
scarcely touch it; but he drank the beer down thirstily, and took a
crust of bread. He slipped his ring, a great sapphire graven with his
crest, off his finger, and held it out to the man.

"That is worth fifty double-Fredericks. Will you take it in exchange for
your rifle and some powder and ball?"

The German stared again, open-mouthed, and clinched the bargain eagerly.
He did not know anything about gems, but the splendor of this dazzled
his eye, while he had guns more than enough, and could get many others
at his lord's cost. Cecil fastened a shot-belt round him, took a
powder-flask and cartridge-case, and with a few words of thanks, went on
his way.

Now that he held the rifle in his hand, he felt ready for the work
that was before him; if hunted to bay, at any rate he could now have a
struggle for his liberty. The keeper stood bewildered, gazing blankly
after him down the vista of pines.

"Hein! Hein!" he growled, as he looked at the sapphire
sparkling in his broad, brown palm; "I never saw such a
with-lavishness-wasteful-and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gentleman! I
wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take his own life, belikes;
ach, Gott! He will take his own life!"

But Cecil had not bought it for that end--though he had called himself
a fool for not sending a bullet through his brain, to quench in eternal
darkness this ruined and wretched life that alone remained to him. He
walked on through the still summer dawn, with the width of the country
stretching sun-steeped around him. The sleeplessness, the excitement,
the misery, the wild running of the past night had left him strengthless
and racked with pain, but he knew that he must press onward or be
caught, sooner or later, like netted game in the poacher's silken
mesh. Where to go, what to do, he knew no more than if he were a child;
everything had always been ready to his hand; the only thought required
of him had been how to amuse himself and avoid being bored; now thrown
alone on a mighty calamity, and brought face to face with the severity
and emergency of exertion, he was like a pleasure-boat beaten under
high billows, and driven far out to sea by the madness of a raging
nor'wester. He had no conception what to do; he had but one resolve--to
keep his secret; if, to do it, he killed himself with the rifle his
sapphire ring had bought.

Carelessly daring always, he sauntered now into the station for which he
had made, without a sign on him that could attract observation; he
wore still the violet velvet Spanish-like dress, the hessians, and the
broad-leafed felt hat with an eagle's feather fastened in it, that he
had worn at the races; and with the gun in his hand there was nothing
to distinguish him from any tourist "milor," except that in one hand he
carried his own valise. He cast a rapid glance around; no warrant
for his apprehension, no announcement of his personal appearance had
preceded him here; he was safe--safe in that; safer still in the fact
that the train rushed in so immediately on his arrival there, that the
few people about had no time to notice or speculate upon him. The coupe
was empty, by a happy chance; he took it, throwing his money down with
no heed that when the little he had left was once expended he would be
penniless, and the train whirled on with him, plunging into the heart of
forest and mountain, and the black gloom of tunnels, and the golden seas
of corn-harvest. He was alone; and he leaned his head on his hands, and
thought, and thought, and thought, till the rocking, and the rushing,
and the whirl, and the noise of the steam on his ear and the giddy
gyrations of his brain in the exhaustion of overstrung exertion,
conquered thought. With the beating of the engine seeming to throb like
the great swinging of a pendulum through his mind, and the whirling
of the country passing by him like a confused phantasmagoria, his eyes
closed, his aching limbs stretched themselves out to rest, a heavy
dreamless sleep fell on him, the sleep of intense bodily fatigue, and he
knew no more.

Gendarmes awoke him to see his visa. He showed it them by sheer
mechanical instinct, and slept again in that dead weight of slumber the
moment he was alone. When he had taken his ticket, and they had asked
him to where it should be, he had answered to their amaze, "to the
farthest place it goes," and he was borne on now unwitting where it
went; through the rich champaign and the barren plains; through the
reddening vintage and over the dreary plateaux; through antique cities,
and across broad, flowing rivers; through the cave of riven rocks,
and above nestling, leafy valleys; on and on, on and on, while he knew
nothing, as the opium-like sleep of intense weariness held him in it
stupor.

He awoke at last with a start; it was evening; the stilly twilight was
settling over all the land, and the train was still rushing onward,
fleet as the wind. His eyes, as they opened dreamily, fell on a face
half obscured in the gleaming; he leaned forward, bewildered and
doubting his senses.

"Rake!"

Rake gave the salute hurriedly and in embarrassment.

"It's I, sir!--yes, sir."

Cecil thought himself dreaming still.

"You! You had my orders?"

"Yes, sir, I had your orders," murmured the ex-soldier, more confused
than he had ever been in the whole course of his audacious life, "and
they was the first I ever disobeyed--they was. You see, sir, they was
just what I couldn't swallow nohow--that's the real, right-down fact!
Send me to the devil, Mr. Cecil, for you, and I'll go at the first
bidding, but leave you just when things are on the cross for you, damn
me if I will!--beggin' your pardon, sir!"

And Rake, growing fiery and eloquent, dashed his cap down on the floor
of the coupe with an emphatic declaration of resistance. Cecil looked
at him in silence; he was not certain still whether this were not a
fantastic folly he was dreaming.

"Damn me if I will, Mr. Cecil! You won't keep me--very well; but you
can't prevent me follerin' of you, and foller you I will; and so there's
no more to be said about it, sir; but just to let me have my own lark,
as one may say. You said you'd go to the station, I went there; you
took your ticket, I took my ticket. I've been travelling behind you till
about two hours ago, then I looked at you; you was asleep sir. 'I don't
think my master's quite well,' says I to Guard; 'I'd like to get in
there along of him.' 'Get in with you, then,' says he (only we was
jabbering that willainous tongue o' theirs), for he sees the name on my
traps is the same as that on your traps--and in I get. Now, Mr.
Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don't think I'm a insolent,
ne'er-do-well for having been and gone and disobeyed you; but you
was good to me when I was sore in want of it; you was even good to my
dog--rest his soul, the poor beast! There never were a braver!--and
stick to you I will till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it's
only being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight; if I was to leave
you I should become a bad 'un again, right and away. Don't send me from
you, sir, as you took mercy on me once!"

Rake's voice shook a little toward the close of his harangue, and in
the shadows of evening light, as the train plunged through the gathering
gloom, his ruddy, bright, bronzed face looked very pale and wistful.

Cecil stretched out his hand to him in silence that spoke better than
words.

Rank hung his head.

"No, sir; you're a gentleman, and I've been an awful scamp! It's enough
honor for me that you would do it. When I'm more worth it, perhaps--but
that won't never be."

"You are worth it now, my gallant fellow." His voice was very low; the
man's loyalty touched him keenly. "It was only for yourself, Rake, that
I ever wished you to leave me."

"God bless you, sir!" said Rake passionately; "them words are better
nor ten tosses of brandy! You see, sir, I'm so spry and happy in a wild
life, I am, and if so be as you go to them American parts as you spoke
on, why I know 'em just as well as I know Newmarket Heath, every bit!
They're terrible rips in them parts; kill you as soon as look at you; it
makes things uncommon larky out there, uncommon spicy. You aren't never
sure but what there's a bowie knife a-waiting for you."

With which view of the delights of Western life, Rake, "feeling like
a fool," as he thought himself, for which reason he had diverged into
Argentine memories, applied himself to the touching and examining of the
rifle with that tenderness which only gunnery love and lore produce.

Cecil sat silent a while, his head drooped down on his hands, while the
evening deepened to night. At last he looked up.

"The King? Where is he?"

Rake flushed shamefacedly under his tanned skin.

"Beggin' your pardon, sir; behind you."

"Behind me?"

"Yes, sir; him and the brown mare. I couldn't do nothing else with 'em
you see, sir, so I shipped him along with us; they don't care for the
train a bit, bless their hearts! And I've got a sharp boy a-minding
of 'em. You can easily send 'em on to England from Paris if you're
determined to part with 'em; but you know the King always was fond of
drums and trumpets and that like. You remember, sir, when he as a colt
we broke him into it and taught him a bit of maneuvering; 'cause, till
you find what pace he had in him, you'd thought of making a charger of
him. He loves the noise of soldiering--he do; and if he thought you was
going away without him, he'd break his heart, Mr. Cecil, sir. It was all
I could do to keep him from follerin' of you this morning; he sawed my
arms off almost."

With which, Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of unpardonable
disobedience and outrageous interference, hung his head over the gun; a
little anxious and a good deal ashamed.

Cecil smiled a little, despite himself.

"Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid; you are terribly
insubordinate!"

He had not the heart to say more; the man's fidelity was too true to be
returned with rebuke; and stronger than all surprise and annoyance was a
strange mingling of pain and pleasure in him to think that the horse he
loved so well was still so near him, the comrade of his adversity as he
had been the companion of his happiest hours.

"These things will keep him a few days," he thought, as he looked at his
hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in each of his wristband-studs.
He would have pawned every atom he had about him to have had the King
with him a week longer.

The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a coming tempest
drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward through the thickening
darkness, through the spectral country--it was like his life, rushing
headlong down into impenetrable gloom. The best, the uttermost, that he
could look for was a soldier's grave, far away under some foreign soil.

A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in her own
boudoir in her Baden suite; she was going to dine with an Archduchess of
Russia, and the splendid jewels of her House glittered through the black
shower of her laces, and crowned her beautiful glossy hair, her delicate
imperial head. In her hands was a letter--oddly written in pencil on a
leaf torn out of a betting book, but without a tremor or a change in
the writing itself. And as she stood a shiver shook her frame; in the
solitude of her lighted and luxurious chamber her cheek grew pale, her
eyes grew dim.

"To refute the charge," ran the last words of what was at best but a
fragment, "I must have broken my promise to you, and have compromised
your name. Keeping silence myself, but letting the trial take place,
law-inquiries so execrable and so minute, would soon have traced through
others that I was with you that evening. To clear myself I must have
attainted your name with public slander, and drawn the horrible ordeal
on you before the world. Let me be thought guilty. It matters little.
Henceforth I shall be dead to all who know me, and my ruin would have
exiled me without this. Do not let an hour of grief for me mar your
peace, my dearest; think of me with no pain, Beatrice; only with some
memory of our past love. I have not strength yet to say--forget me; and
yet,--if it be for your happiness,--blot out from your remembrance all
thought of what we have been to one another; all thought of me and of my
life, save to remember now and then that I was dear to you."

The words grew indistinct before her sight, they touched the heart of
the world-worn coquette, of the victorious sovereign, to the core;
she trembled greatly as she read them. For--in her hands was his fate.
Though no hint of this was breathed in his farewell letter, she knew
that with a word she could clear him, free him, and call him back from
exile and shame, give him once more honor and guiltlessness in the sight
of the world. With a word she could do this; his life was in the balance
that she held as utterly as though it were now hers to sign, or to
destroy, his death-warrant. It rested with her to speak and to say he
had no guilt.

But to do this she must sacrifice herself. She stood mute, irresolute,
a shudder running through her till her diamonds shook in the light; the
heavy tears stole slowly down, one by one, and fell upon the blurred
and blackened paper; her heart ached with an exceeding bitterness.
Then shudderingly still, and as though there were a coward crime in the
action, her hand unclosed and let the letter fall into the spirit flame
of a silver lamp, burning by; the words that were upon it merited a
better fate, a fonder cherishing, but--they would have compromised her.
She let them fall, and burn, and wither. With them she gave up his life
to its burden of shame, to its fate of exile.

She would hear his crime condemned, and her lips would not open; she
would hear his name aspersed, and her voice would not be raised; she
would know that he dwelt in misery, or died under foreign suns
unhonored and unmourned, while tongues around her would babble of his
disgrace--and she would keep her peace.

She loved him--yes; but she loved better the dignity in which the world
held her, and the diamonds from which the law would divorce her if their
love were known.

She sacrificed him for her reputation and her jewels; the choice was
thoroughly a woman's.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS.

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!"

CHAPTER XIV.

"DE PROFUNDIS" BEFORE "PLUNGING."

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.

CHAPTER XV.

"L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU."

"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.

"Hola!" cried the Marquis, "thou art not generally so coy with thy
kisses, petite."

Cigarette tossed her head.

"I don't like bad clarets after good! I've just been with your Corporal,
'Bel-a-faire-peur'; you are no beauty after him, M. le Colonel."

Chateauroy's face darkened; he was a colossal-limbed man, whose bone was
iron, and whose muscles were like oak-fibers; he had a dark, keen head
like an eagle's; the brow narrow, but very high, looking higher because
the close-cut hair was worn off the temples; thin lips hidden by heavy
curling mustaches, and a skin burned black by long African service.
Still he was fairly handsome enough not to have muttered so heavy an
oath as he did at the vivandiere's jest.

"Sacre bleu! I wish my corporal were shot! One can never hear the last
of him."

Cigarette darted a quick glance at him. "Oh, ho; jealous, mon brave!"
thought her quick wits. "And why, I wonder?"

"You haven't a finer soldier in your Chasseurs, mon cher; don't wish him
shot, for the good of the service," said the Viscount de Chanrellon, who
had now a command of his own in the Light Cavalry of Algiers. "Pardieu!
If I had to choose whether I'd be backed by 'Bel-a-faire-peur,' or by
six other men in a skirmish, I'd choose him, and risk the odds."

Chateauroy tossed off his burgundy with a contemptuous impatience.

"Diable! That is the exaggerated nonsense one always hears about this
fellow--as if he were a second Roland, or a revivified Bayard! I see
nothing particular in him, except that he's too fine a gentleman for the
ranks."

"Fine? ah!" laughed Cigarette. "He made me bow this morning like a
chamberlain; and his beard is like carded silk, and he has such woman's
hands, mon Dieu! But he is a croc-mitaine, too."

"Rather!" laughed Claude de Chanrellon, as magnificent a soldier himself
as ever crossed swords. "I said he would eat fire the very minute he
played that queer game of dice with me years ago. I wish I had him
instead of you, Chateauroy; like lightning in a charge; and yet the very
man for a dangerous bit of secret service that wants the softness of a
panther. We all let our tongues go too much, but he says so little--just
a word here, a word there--when one's wanted--no more; and he's the
devil's own to fight."

The Marquis heard the praise of his Corporal, knitting his heavy brows;
it was evident the private was no favorite with him.

"The fellow rides well enough," he said, with an affectation of
carelessness; "there--for what I see--is the end of his marvels. I wish
you had him, Claude, with all my soul."

"Oh, ha!" cried Chanrellon, wiping the Rhenish off his tawny mustaches,
"he should have been a captain by this if I had. Morbleu! He is a
splendid sabreur--kills as many men to his own sword as I could myself,
when it comes to a hand-to-hand fight; breaks horses in like magic;
rides them like the wind; has a hawk's eye over open country; obeys like
clockwork; what more can you want?"

"Obeys! Yes!" said the Colonel of Chasseurs, with a snarl. "He'd obey
without a word if you ordered him to walk up to a cannon's mouth, and
be blown from it; but he gives you such a d----d languid grand seigneur
glance as he listens that one would think he commanded the regiment."

"But he's very popular with your men, too?"

"Monsieur, the worst quality a corporal can have. His idea of
maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and give them
tobacco."

"Pardieu! Not a bad way, either, with our French fire-eaters. He knows
them that he has to deal with; that brave fellow. Your squadrons would
go to the devil after him."

The Colonel gave a grim laugh.

"I dare say nobody knows the way better."

Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne by great
glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another's soup, pulling
the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with a relish, and devouring
truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, did not lose a word, and
catching the inflection of Chateauroy's voice, settled with her own
thoughts that "Bel-a-faire-peur" was not a fair field or a smooth course
with his Colonel. The weather-cock heart of the little "Friend of the
Flag" veered round, with her sex's common custom, to the side that was
the weakest.

"Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!" she cried, while she ate M. le Colonel's
foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be
expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the
better spiced by being stolen "by the rules of war"--"whatever else
your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ha! I know the
aristocrats--I do! Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is
so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such
diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and
nonchalant. Give me the aristocrats--the real thing, you know. Not the
ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread--but the
old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur."

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a
sore point in him. He was of the First Empire Nobility, and he was
weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless iron-nerved soldier, to be
discontented with the great fact that his father had been a hero of
the Army of Italy, and scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because
impatient of the minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to
have his first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a
postilion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais.

"Ah, my brunette!" he answered with a rough laugh, "have you taken
my popular Corporal for your lover? You should give your old friends
warning first, or he may chance to get an ugly spit on a saber."

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne. She felt
for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her brown, clear
cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such lovers as these.

"Ma foi!" she said coolly. "He would be more likely to spit than be
spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to see him in a duel; there
is not a prettier sight in the world when both men have science. As for
fighting for me! Morbleau! I will thank nobody to have the impudence to
do it, unless I order them out. Coqueline got shot for me, you remember;
he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that
they disfigured him terribly--it was quite a pity. I said then I would
have no more handsome men fight about me. You may, if you like, M. le
Black Hawk."

Which title she gave with a saucy laugh, hitting with a chocolate bonbon
the black African-burnt visage of the omnipotent chief she had the
audacity to attack. High or low, they were all the same to Cigarette.
She would have "slanged" the Emperor himself with the self-same
coolness, and the Army had given her a passport of immunity so wide that
it would have fared ill with anyone who had ever attempted to bring the
vivandiere to book for her uttermost mischief.

"By the way!" she went on, quick as thought, with her reckless,
devil-may-care gayety. "One thing! Your Corporal will demoralize the
army of Africa, monsieur!"

"He shall have an ounce of cold lead before he does. What in?"

"He will demoralize it," said Cigarette, with a sagacious shake of her
head. "If they follow his example we shan't have a Chasseur, or a Spahi,
or a Piou-piou, or a Sapeur worth anything--"

"Sacre! What does he do?" The Colonel's strong teeth bit savagely
through his cigar; he would have given much to have been able to find
a single thing of insubordination or laxity of duty in a soldier who
irritated and annoyed him, but who obeyed him implicitly, and was one of
the most brilliant "fire-eaters" of his regiment.

"He won't only demoralize the army," pursued the Cigarette, with
vivacious eloquence, "but if his example is followed, he'll ruin the
Prefets, close the Bureaux, destroy the Exchequer, beggar all the
officials, make African life as tame as milk and water, and rob you, M.
le Colonel, of your very highest and dearest privilege!"

"Sacre bleu!" cried her hearers, as their hands instinctively sought
their swords; "what does he do?"

Cigarette looked at them out of her arch black lashes.

"Why, he never thieves from the Arabs! If the fashion comes in, adieu to
our occupation. Court-martial him, Colonel!"

With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curls back of her
temples, and launched herself into lansquenet with all the ardor of
a gambler and the vivacity of a child; her eyes flashing, her cheeks
flushing, her little teeth set, her whole soul in a whirl of the game,
made all the more riotous by the peals of laughter from her comrades
and the wines that were washed down like water. Cigarette was a terrible
little gamester, and had gaming made very easy to her, for it was the
creed of the Army that her losses never counted, but her gains were paid
to her often double or treble. Indeed, so well did she play, and so
well did the goddess of hazard favor her, that she might have grown a
millionaire on the fruits of her dice and her cards, but for this fact,
that whatever the little Friend of the Flag had in her hands one
hour was given away the next, to the first wounded soldier, or ailing
veteran, or needy Arab woman that required the charity.

As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the Jockey Club; but
Cigarette was never the richer for it. "Bah!" she would say, when they
told her of her heedlessness, "money is like a mill, no good standing
still. Let it turn, turn, turn, as fast as ever it can, and the more
bread will come from it for the people to eat."

The vivandiere was by instinct a fine political economist.

Meanwhile, where she had left him among the stones of the ruined mosque,
the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-a-faire-peur, in a double sense,
because of his "woman's face," as Tata Leroux termed it, and because
of the terror his sword had become through North Africa, sat motionless
with his right arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust into
the sand; the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce, burning glare on
the chestnut masses of his beard and the bright glitter of his uniform.

He was a dashing cavalry soldier, who had had a dozen wounds cut over
his body by the Bedouin swords, in many and hot skirmishes; who had
waited through sultry African nights for the lion's tread, and had
fought the desert-king and conquered; who had ridden a thousand miles
over the great sand waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept
under the stars with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his
hand, all through the night; who had served, and served well, in fierce,
arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and in close
discipline; who had blent the verve, the brilliance, the daring, the
eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of the French Chasseur, with
something that was very different, and much more tranquil.

Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French Service, he sat
alone here in the shadow of the column, thoughtful, motionless, lost in
silence.

In his left hand was a Galignani, six months old, and his eye rested on
a line in the obituary:

"On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. Denzil,
Viscount Royallieu; aged 90."

CHAPTER XVI.

CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.

Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen altars of
Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile,
and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-like
rings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath
beguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment,
lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and
chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian
saluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco of
the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine dice
are rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange are
trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose
gardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla
laid down dominion.

And here--in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in the
Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirrored
sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athens
and the gold of Spain--here Cigarette danced the cancan!

A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Pique
where feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam,
with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under
columned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was written
where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along
porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its
impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician
warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods
bear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry
to Rome was quoted.

The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent of
Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that towered
in youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silvered
with age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian
hordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners,
flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie
flaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes
of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton's
heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license,
heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the
purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once
dishonored and adored.

Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets,
under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they
had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the
Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer.
And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light
feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who
never remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb.

It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried
mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an
imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches
of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel
wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the
Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed
into brightness under the jets of flame--trumpery, yet trumpery which,
thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did not
vulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor was bare
and well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy
odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu. Riotous
music pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silvery
ring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack slang,
camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly.
Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes,
and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humor
prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had
just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult
of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and
grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women
stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.

She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had danced
till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in the
saddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, who
never gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing now
like a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a
long summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then,
when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, on
the green space before a tent full of general officers, on the bare
floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or as
here in the music-hall of a Cafe.

Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend
of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of
soldiers--war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff with
wounds--she would do it till they forgot their ills and got as
intoxicated with it as with champagne. For her gros bebees, if they
were really in want of it, she would do anything. She would flout a
star-covered general, box the ears of a brilliant aid, send killing
missiles of slang at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refuse
point-blank a Russian grand duke; but to "mes enfants," as she was given
to calling the rough tigers and grisly veterans of the Army of Africa,
Cigarette was never capricious; however mischievously she would rally,
or contemptuously would rate them, when they deserved it.

And she was dancing for them now.

Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with a
scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her gay
little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look like a
fuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, on its
delicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild grace of an
Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl--as untutored and instinctive
in her as its song to a bird, as its swiftness to a chamois. To see
Cigarette was like drinking light, fiery wines, whose intoxication was
gay as mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa,
all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the caprices
of her sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering,
circling, whirling; glancing like a saber's gleam, tossing like a
flower's head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an arrow,
darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an instant
resting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lily
rests on the water's breast--Cigarette en Bacchante no man could resist.

When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium,
she did with her beholders what she would. The famous Cachucha,
that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontifical
vestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets and
the gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible,
more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It
was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.

All her heart was in it--that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk
and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child,
which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes,
with which she laced her dashing little uniform.

In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil
under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia,
in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the
earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of
black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the
Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves,
Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life
seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her
little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in those
tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch
the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it
afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.

So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famous
group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back
from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the
floor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she
beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her
impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators were
renowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the ear
of Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of the
day of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men who
had the salient features of all the varied species that make up the
soldiers of Africa.

There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped round
his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a
pestilence--the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis;
brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once
back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for
forage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but to
the service a slave, and in the combat a lion.

There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive
beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to
neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences,
but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal
adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled
unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.

There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest,
happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing the
camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of the
battalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press on
laughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and
as full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.

There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for that
unceremonious slang phrase--a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blas
and the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand and
the wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an
African, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; with
a purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his men
through the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd
over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yet
who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt,
and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on the
loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of
David for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club
life.

There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, with
a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; a
veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdog
his lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; brief
as Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or the
chastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word--"Fire."

There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highest
repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speed
that could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood alone
once the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them
back, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and his
pantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framing
a matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare as
a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden
treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron of
couscoussou to a tom-cat.

There was Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from
the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic
expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a
born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion,
the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his
graceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradise
was a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven was a duel
with an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but with the Italian
laziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the sun, and with such
episodes of romance, mischief, love, and deviltry in his twenty-five
years of existence as would leave behind them all the invention of
Dumas, pere ou fils.

All these and many more like them were the spectators of Cigarette's
ballet; applauding with the wild hurrah of the desert, with the clashing
of spurs, with the thunder of feet, with the demoniac shrieks of
irrepressible adoration and delight.

And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the ring of
familiar faces, and glance from them with an impatient disappointment
as she danced; her gros bebees were not enough for her. She wanted a
Chasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and she
shook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and
went on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless
abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawk
that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, and
wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.

L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses-marais. He
was in the house; she knew it; had she not seen him drinking with some
others, or rather paying for all, but taking little himself, just as she
entered? He was in the house, this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur--and was
not here to see her dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars;
the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amie
du Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Bataillons to
fantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Algiers to Oran, in the
Champagne of Messieurs les Generaux as in the Cric of the Loustics round
a camp-fire!

He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden ledge of a
narrow window in an inner room, from which, one by one, some Spahis and
some troopers of his own tribu, with whom he had just been drinking such
burgundies and brandies as the place could give, had sloped away, one by
one, under the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction,
however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were emptied;
bottles more in number and higher in cost than was prudent in a corporal
who had but his pay, and that scant enough to keep himself, and who had
known what it was to find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a
luxury beyond all reach, and to have to sell his whole effects up to the
last thing in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dying
of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African fever.

But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the reckless life
of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, brotherly fellowship
that bound the soldiers of each battalion, or each squadron, so closely
in a fraternity of which every member took as freely as he gave; its
gay, careless carpe diem camp-philosophy--the unconscious philosophy of
men who enjoyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because they
knew they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its swift and
vivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one hour rich as a king
in loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to be
the next day famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urging
their sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, glad to
sell a cartouche if they dared so break regimental orders, or to rifle
a hen-roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; changing
everything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and driven to
pay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched grass to keep
their beasts alive through the sickliness of a sirocco.

All these taught no caution to any nature normally without it; and
the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom they named
Bel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had bound his red waist-sash
about his loins, and the officers of the bureau had looked over the new
volunteer, murmuring admiringly in their teeth "This gallant will do
great things!" had been that all he had was given, free as the winds, to
any who asked or needed.

The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own
manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country,
a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and
poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in
the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out
by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one
reproach, that made his fellow soldiers impatient and suspicious of
him, was that he refused any share in those rough arguments of blows
and lunges with which they were accustomed to persuade every victim
they came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or drink, or
riches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skins
of brandy and coins hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappy
as to own in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin
was as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let him
be ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an eccentricity,
and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which not even his daring
and his popularity could wholly procure him pardon.

But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness with which
his pay was lent, given, or spent in the very moment of its receipt. If
a man of his tribu wanted anything, he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur would
offer his last sous to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would sell
the last trifle he possessed to get enough to assist his comrade. It
was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of his
lawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and made
them forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habit
of solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a
fraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and the
sentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.

One of those moods was on him now.

He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had
laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them
at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and
the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in
while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the
fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of
the casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his
teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and
clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.

The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow
leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven
stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the
dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,
stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry
sky above its four high walls.

He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him;
there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrack
or bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded
the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the
hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the
sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his
future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on
which he gazed.

Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-ground
for the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructor
had watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, "This is no raw
recruit,--this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than
we can teach. He has served before now--served in some emperor's picked
guard!"

And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign,
the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendid
soldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, of
exploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array
of military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by
unnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had only
slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stood
now--a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique--a step only just accorded
him because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number in
countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside any
longer.

The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man--his Chief.

Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could come
into actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the great
man to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged him
from all advancement. His thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at an
inspection, the accidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript
had furnished pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent
opprobrium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in his
saddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage than
the blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze of his
forehead. His thoughts were on it now.

"There are many losses that are bitter enough," he mused; "but there is
not one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!"

A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrill
violins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook him
from his reverie.

"They are bons enfants," he thought, with a half smile, as he listened;
"they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever
were in that old world of mine."

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of
Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing to
exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the
Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her
mother tongue.

"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been
drinking at his expense, you rascal?"

The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.

"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere;
"you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your
children, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draught
of brandy!"

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence
was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs
at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared
forth a defiance.

"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He