Early that morning, when the snowy cloud of pigeons were circling down to take their daily alms from Cigarette, where her bright brown face looked out from the lattice-hole, Cecil, with some of the roughriders of his regiment, was sent far into the interior to bring in a string of colts, bought of a friendly desert tribe, and destined to be shipped to France for the Imperial Haras. The mission took two days; early on the third day they returned with the string of wild young horses, whom it had taken not a little exertion and address to conduct successfully through the country into Algiers.
He was usually kept in incessant activity, because those in command over him had quickly discovered the immeasurable value of a bas-officier who was certain to enforce and obtain implicit obedience, and certain to execute any command given him with perfect address and surety, yet, who, at the same time, was adored by his men, and had acquired a most singularly advantageous influence over them. But of this he was always glad; throughout his twelve years’ service under the Emperor’s flag, he had only found those moments in which he was unemployed intolerable; he would willingly have been in the saddle from dawn till midnight.
Chateauroy was himself present when the colts were taken into the stable-yard; and himself inquired, without the medium of any third person, the whole details of the sale and of the transit. It was impossible, with all his inclination, to find any fault either with the execution of the errand or with the brief, respectful answers by which his corporal replied to his rapid and imperious cross-questionings. There were a great number of men within hearing, many of them the most daring and rebellious pratiques of the regiment; and Cecil would have let the coarsest upbraidings scourge him rather than put the temptation to mutiny in their way which one insubordinate or even not strictly deferential word from him would have given. Hence the inspection passed off peaceably; as the Marquis turned on his heel, however, he paused a moment.
“Victor!”
“Mon Commandant?”
“I have not forgotten your insolence with those ivory toys. But Mme. la Princesse herself has deigned to solicit that it shall be passed over unpunished. She cannot, of course, yield to your impertinent request to remain also unpaid for them. I charged myself with the fulfillment of her wishes. You deserve the stick, but since Milady herself is lenient enough to pardon you, you are to take this instead. Hold your hand, sir!”
Cecil put out his hand; he expected to receive a heavy blow from his commander’s saber, that possibly might break the wrist. These little trifles were common in Africa.
Instead a rouleau of Napoleons was laid on his open palm. Chateauroy knew the gold would sting more than the blow.
For the moment Cecil had but one impulse — to dash the pieces in the giver’s face. In time to restrain the impulse, he caught sight of the wild, eager hatred gleaming in the eyes of Rake, of Petit Picpon, of a score of others, who loved him and cursed their Colonel, and would at one signal from him have sheathed their swords in the mighty frame of the Marquis, though they should have been fired down the next moment themselves for the murder. The warning of Cigarette came to his memory; his hand clasped on the gold; he gave the salute calmly as Chateauroy swung himself away.
The troops looked at him with longing, questioning eyes; they knew enough of him by now to know the bitterness such gold, so given, had for him. Any other, even a corporal, would have been challenged with a storm of raillery, a volley of congratulation, and would have had shouted or hissed after him opprobrious accusations of “faisant suisse” if he had not forthwith treated his comrades royally from such largesse. With Bel-a-faire-peur they held their peace; they kept the silence which they saw that he wished to keep, as, his hour of liberty being come, he went slowly out of the great court with the handful of Napoleons thrust in the folds of his sash.
Rather unconsciously than by premeditation his steps turned through the streets that led to his old familiar haunt, the As de Pique; and dropping down on a bench under the awning, he asked for a draught of water. It was brought him at once; the hostess, a quick, brown little woman from Paris, whom the lovers of Eugene Sue called Rogolette, adding of her own accord a lump of ice and a slice or two of lemon, for which she vivaciously refused payment, though generosity was by no means her cardinal virtue.
“Bel-a-faire-peur” awakened general interest through Algiers; he brought so fiery and so daring a reputation with him from the wars and raids of the interior, yet he was so calm, so grave, so gentle, so listless. It was known that he had made himself the terror of Kabyle and Bedouin, yet here in the city he thanked the negro boy who took him a glass of lemonade at an estaminet, and sharply rebuked one of his men for knocking down an old colon with a burden of gourds and of melons; such a Roumi as this the good people of the Franco–African capital held as a perfect gift of the gods, and not understanding one whit, nevertheless fully appreciated.
He did not look at the newspapers she offered him; but sat gazing out from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Neapolitan felucca, down the checkered shadows and the many-colored masses of the little, crooked, rambling, semi-barbaric alley. He was thinking of the Napoleons in his sash and of the promise he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would keep it he was resolved. The few impressive, vivid words of the young vivandiere had painted before him like a picture the horrors of mutiny and its hopelessness; rather than that, through him, these should befall the men who had become his brethren-inarms, he felt ready to let the Black Hawk do his worst on his own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness, he had never known in the excitement of active service came on him, brought by this sting of insult brought from the fair hand of an aristocrate.
There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The uttermost that could ever come to him would be a grade something higher in the army that now enrolled him; the gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau. Algerine warfare was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy or the Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with unerring omniscience a leader’s genius under the kepi of a common trooper. Though he should show the qualities of a Massena or a Kleber, the chances were a million to one that he would never get even as much as a lieutenancy; and the raids on the decimated tribes, the obscure skirmishes of the interior, though terrible in slaughter and venturesome enough, were not the fields on which great military successes were won and great military honors acquired. The French fought for a barren strip of brown plateau that, gained, would be of little use or profit to them; he thought that he did much the same, that his future was much like those arid sand-plains, these thirsty, verdureless stretches of burned earth — very little worth the reaching.
The heavy folds of a Bedouin’s haick, brushing the papers off the bench, broke the thread of his musings. As he stooped for them, he saw that one was an English journal some weeks old. His own name caught his eye — the name buried so utterly, whose utterance in the Sheik’s tent had struck him like a dagger’s thrust. The flickering light and darkness, as the awning waved to and fro, made the lines move dizzily upward and downward as he read — read the short paragraph touching the fortunes of the race that had disowned him:
“The Royallieu Succession. — We regret to learn that the Rt. Hon. Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to the family title on his father’s death, has expired at Mentone, whither his health had induced him to go some months previous. The late Lord was unmarried. His next brother was, it will be remembered, many years ago, killed on a southern railway. The title, therefore, now falls to the third and only remaining son, the Hon. Berkeley Cecil, who, having lately inherited considerable properties from a distant relative, will, we believe, revive all the old glories of this Peerage, which have, from a variety of causes, lost somewhat of their ancient brilliancy.”
Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the record of his father’s death, when Cigarette had rallied him with her gay challenge among the Moresco ruins. His face flushed hotly under the warm, golden hue of the desert bronze, then lost all its color as suddenly, till it was as pale as any of the ivory he carved. The letters of the paper reeled and wavered, and grew misty before his eyes; he lost all sense of the noisy, changing, polyglot crowd thronging past him; he, a common soldier in the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every law of birthright, he was now a Peer of England.
His first thought was for the dead man. True, there had been little amity, little intimacy, between them; a negligent friendliness, whenever they had met, had been all that they had ever reached. But in their childhood they had been carelessly kind to one another, and the memory of the boy who had once played beside him down the old galleries and under the old forests, of the man who had now died yonder where the southern sea-board lay across the warm, blue Mediterranean, was alone on him for the moment. His thoughts had gone back, with a pang, almost ere he had read the opening lines, to autumn mornings in his youngest years when the leaves had been flushed with their earliest red, and the brown, still pools had been alive with water-birds, and the dogs had dropped down charging among the flags and rushes, and his brother’s boyish face had laughed on him from the wilderness of willows, and his brother’s boyish hands had taught him to handle his first cartridge and to fire his first shot. The many years of indifference and estrangement were forgotten, the few years of childhood’s confidence and comradeship alone remembered, as he saw the words that brought him in his exile the story of his brethren’s fate and of his race’s fortunes. His head sank, his face was still colorless, he sat motionless with the printed sheet in his hand. Once his eyes flashed, his breath came fast and uneven; he rose with a sudden impulse, with a proud, bold instinct of birth and freedom. Let him stand here in what grade he would, with the badge of a Corporal of the Army of Africa on his arm, this inheritance that had come to him was his; he bore the name and the title of his house as surely as any had ever borne it since the first of the Norman owners of Royallieu had followed the Bastard’s banner.
The vagabond throngs — Moorish, Frank, Negro, Colon — paused as they pushed their way over the uneven road, and stared at him vacantly where he stood. There was something in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing none of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited fire in his eyes, that arrested all — from the dullest muleteer, plodding on with his string of patient beasts, to the most volatile French girl laughing on her way with a group of fantassins. He did not note them, hear them, think of them; the whole of the Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no place before him; he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier of the Empire; he saw nothing but the green wealth of the old home woods far away in England; he remembered nothing save that he, and he alone, was the rightful Lord of Royallieu.
The hand of a broad-chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on his shoulder, and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust toward him with the proffered drink. It startled him and recalled him to the consciousness of where he was. He stared one moment absently in the trooper’s amazed face, and then shook him off with a suddenness that tossed back the cup to the ground; and, holding the journal clinched close in his hand, went swiftly through the masses of the people — out and away, he little noted where — till he had forced his road beyond the gates, beyond the town, beyond all reach of its dust and its babble and its discord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, where to the north the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships riding at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with the conical houses of hair, and desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there to lay them waste.
Reaching the heights he stood still involuntarily, and looked down once more on the words that told him of his birthright; in the blinding, intense light of the African day they seemed to stand out as though carved in stone; and as he read them once more a great darkness passed over his face — this heritage was his, and he could never take it up; this thing had come to him, and he must never claim it. He was Viscount Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and he was dead forever in the world’s belief; he must live, and grow old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his name and his rights buried, and his years passed as a private soldier of France.
The momentary glow which had come to him, with the sudden resurrection of hope and of pride, faded utterly as he slowly read and reread the lines of the journal on the broken terraces of the hill-side, where the great fig trees spread their fantastic shadows, and through a rocky channel a russet stream of shallow waters threaded its downward path under the reeds, and no living thing was near him save some quiet browsing herds far off, and their Arab shepherd-lad that an artist might have sketched as Ishmael. What his future might have been rose before his thoughts; what it must be rose also, bitterly, blackly, drearily in contrast. A noble without even a name; a chief of his race without even the power to claim kinship with that race; owner by law of three thousand broad English acres, yet an exile without freedom to set foot on his native land; by heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by circumstances, now and forever, till an Arab bullet should cut in twain his thread of life, a soldier of the African legions, bound to obey the commonest and coarsest boor that had risen to a rank above him: this was what he knew himself to be, and knew that he must continue to be without one appeal against it, without once stretching out his hand toward his right of birth and station.
There was a passionate revolt, a bitter heart-sickness on him; all the old freedom and peace and luxury and pleasure of the life he had left so long allured him with a terrible temptation; the honors of the rank that he should now have filled were not what he remembered. What he longed for with an agonized desire was to stand once more stainless among his equals; to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life; to return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored memory, as one whom violent death had well snatched from the shame of a criminal career.
“But who would believe me now?” he thought. “Besides, this makes no difference. If three words spoken would reinstate me, I could not speak them at that cost. The beginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer justice sake there is no drawing back now. Let him enjoy it; God knows I do not grudge him it.”
Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no evil lay in his heart against the younger brother to whose lot had fallen all good gifts of men and fate, there was almost unbearable anguish on him in this hour in which he learned the inheritance that had come to him, and remembered that he could never take again even so much of it as lay in the name of his fathers. When he had given his memory up to slander and oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame; when he had let his life die out from the world that had known him, and buried it beneath the rough, weather-stained, blood-soaked cloth of a private soldier’s uniform, he had not counted the cost then, nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had fallen on him very heavily now.
Where he stood under some sheltered columns of a long-ruined mosque whose shafts were bound together by a thousand withes and wreaths of the rich, fantastic Sahel foliage, an exceeding weariness of longing was upon him — longing for all that he had forfeited, for all that was his own, yet never could be claimed as his.
The day was intensely still; there was not a sound except when, here and there, the movement of a lizard under the dry grasses gave a low, crackling rustle. He wondered almost which was the dream and which the truth: that old life that he had once led, and that looked now so far away and so unreal; or this which had been about him for so many years in the camps and the bivouacs, the barracks and the battlefields. He wondered almost which he himself was — an English Peer on whom the title of his line had fallen, or a Corporal of Chasseurs who must take his chief’s insults as patiently as a cur takes the blows of its master; that he was both seemed to him, as he stood there with the glisten of the sea before and the swelling slopes of the hillside above, a vague, distorted nightmare.
Hours might have passed, or only moments — he could not have told; his eyes looked blankly out at the sun-glow, his hand instinctively clinched on the journal whose stray lines had told him in an Algerine trattoria that he had inherited what he never could enjoy.
“Are they content, I wonder?” he thought, gazing down that fiery blaze of shadowless light. “Do they ever remember?”
He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what he was.
The distant, mellow, ringing notes of a trumpet-call floated to his ear from the town at his feet; it was sounding the rentree en caserne. Old instinct, long habit, made him start and shake his harness together and listen. The trumpet-blast, winding cheerily from afar off, recalled him to the truth; summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of daily life. It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger; it roused him as it rouses a wounded trooper.
He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died away — spirited, yet still lingering; full of fire, yet fading softly down the wind. He listened till the last echo ceased; then he tore the paper that he held in strips, and let it float away, drifting down the yellow current of the reedy river channel; and he half drew from its scabbard the saber whose blade had been notched and dented and stained in many midnight skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert suns, and looked at it as though a friend’s eye gazed at him in the gleam of the trusty steel. And his soldier-like philosophy, his campaigner’s carelessness, his habitual, easy negligence that had sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom, came back to him with a deeper shadow on it, that was grave with a calm, resolute, silent courage.
“So best after all, perhaps,” he said half aloud, in the solitude of the ruined and abandoned mosque. “He cannot well come to shipwreck with such a fair wind and such a smooth sea. And I— I am just as well here. To ride with the Chasseurs is more exciting than to ride with the Pytchley; and the rules of the Chambree are scarce more tedious than the rules of a Court. Nature turned me out for a soldier, though Fashion spoiled me for one. I can make a good campaigner — I should never make anything else.”
And he let his sword drop back again into the scabbard, and quarreled no more with fate.
His hand touched the thirty gold pieces in his sash.
He started, as the recollection of the forgotten insult came back on him. He stood a while in thought; then he took his resolve.
A half hour of quick movement, for he had become used to the heat as an Arab and heeded it as little, brought him before the entrance-gates of the Villa Aioussa. A native of Soudan, in a rich dress, who had the office of porter, asked him politely his errand. Every indigene learns by hard experience to be courteous to a French soldier. Cecil simply asked, in answer, if Mme. La Princesse were visible. The negro returned cautiously that she was at home, but doubted her being accessible. “You come from M. le Marquis?” he inquired.
“No; on my own errand.”
“You!” Not all the native African awe of a Roumi could restrain the contemptuous amaze in the word.
“I. Ask if Corporal Victor, of the Chasseurs, can be permitted a moment’s interview with your mistress. I come by permission,” he added, as the native hesitated between his fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness of ............