The warm, transparent light of an African autumnal noon shone down through the white canvas roof of a great tent in the heart of the encamped divisions at the headquarters of the Army of the South. In the tent there was a densely packed throng — an immense, close, hushed, listening crowd, of which every man wore the uniform of France, of which the mute, undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something that was almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness in their eyes and the strained absorption of their countenances; for they were in court, and that court was the Council of War of their own southern camp.
The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that can be laid against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the many eyes of the military crowd turned on him where he stood surrounded by his guard, his crime against his chief was forgotten, and they only remembered — Zaraila.
Many of those present had seen him throughout that day of blood, at the head of his decimated squadron, with the guidon held aloft above every foe; to them that tall, slender form standing there, with a calm, weary dignity, that had nothing of the passion of the mutinous or the consciousness of the criminal in its serene repose, had shed upon it the luster of a heroism that made them ready almost to weep like women that the death of a mutineer should be the sole answer given by France to the savior of her honor.
He preserved entire reticence in court. The instant the accusation had been read to him, he had seen that his chief would not dare to couple with it the proud, pure name he had dared to outrage; his most bitter anxiety was thus at an end. For all the rest, he was tranquil.
No case could be clearer, briefer, less complex, more entirely incapable of defense. The soldiers of the guard gave evidence as to the violence and fury of the assault. The sentinel bore witness to having heard the refusal to reply; a moment after, he had seen the attack made and the blow given. The accuser merely stated that, meeting his sous-officier out of the bounds of the cavalry camp, he had asked him where he had been, and why he was there, and, on his commanding an answer, had been assaulted in the manner described, with violence sufficient to have cost his life had not the guard been so near at hand. When questioned as to what motive he could assign for the act, he replied that he considered his corporal had always incited evil feeling and mutinous conduct in the squadrons, and had, he believed, that day attributed to himself his failure to receive the Cross. The statement passed without contradiction by the prisoner, who, to the interrogations and entreaties of his legal defender, only replied that the facts were stated accurately as they occurred, and that his reasons for the deed he declined to assert.
When once more questioned as to his country and his past by the president, he briefly declined to give answer. When asked if the names by which he was enrolled were his own, he replied that they were two of his baptismal names, which had served his purpose on entering the army. When asked if he accepted as true the charge of exciting sedition among the troops, he replied that it was so little true that, over and over again, the men would have mutinied if he had given them a sign, and that he had continually induced them to submit to discipline sheerly by force of his own example. When interrogated as to the cause of the language he had used to his commanding officer, he said briefly that the language deserved the strongest censure as for a soldier to his colonel, but that it was justified as he had used it, which was as man to man, though he was aware the plea availed nothing in military law, and was impermissible for the safety of the service. When it was inquired of him if he had not repeatedly inveighed against his commanding officer for severity, he briefly denied it; no man had ever heard him say a syllable that could have been construed into complaint; at the same time, he observed that all the squadrons knew perfectly well personal enmity and oppression had been shown him by his chief throughout the whole time of his association with the regiment. When pressed as to the cause that he assigned for this, he gave, in a few comprehensive outlines, the story of the capture and the deliverance of the Emir’s bride; this was all that could be elicited from him; and even this was answered only out of deference to the authority of the court, and from his unwillingness, even now, to set a bad example before the men with whom he had served so long. When it was finally demanded of him if he had aught to urge in his own extenuation, he paused a moment, with a gaze under which even the hard, eagle eyes grew restless, looked across to Chateauroy, and addressed his antagonist rather than the president.
“Only this: that a tyrant, a liar, and a traducer cannot wonder if men prefer death to submission beneath insult. But I am well aware this is no vindication of my act as a soldier, and I have no desire to say words which, whatever their truth, might become hereafter dangerous legacies, and dangerous precedents to the army.”
That was all which he answered, and neither his counsel nor his accusers could extort another syllable from him.
He knew that what he had done was justified to his own conscience, but he did not seek to dispute that it was unjustifiable in military law. True, had all been told, it was possible enough that his judges would exonerate him morally, even if they condemned him legally; his act would be seen blameless as a man’s, even while still punishable as a soldier’s; but to purchase immunity for himself at the cost of bringing the fairness of her fame into the coarse babble of men’s tongues was an alternative, craven and shameful, which never even once glanced across his thoughts.
He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heartless and well-nigh worthless; it was not to the woman whom he loved with all the might of an intense passion, and whom he knew pure and glorious as the morning sun, that he would break his faith now.
All through the three days that the council sat his look and his manner never changed — the first was quite calm, though very weary; the latter courteous, but resolute, with the unchanged firmness of one who knew his own past action justified. For the rest, many noticed that, during the chief of the long, exhausting hours of his examination and his trial, his thoughts seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to the present with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid suspense of an accused, whose life and death swung in the judgment-balance.
In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left; he knew well enough that by the blow which had vindicated her honor he had forfeited his own existence. All he wished was that his sentence had been dealt without this formula of debate and of delay, which could have issue but in one end. There was not one man in court who was not more moved than he, more quick to terror and regret for his doom. To many among his comrades who had learned to love the gentle, silent “aristocrat,” who bore every hardship so patiently, and humanized them so imperceptibly by the simple force of an unvaunted example, those three days were torture. Wild, brutal brigands, whose year was one long razzia of plunder, rapine, and slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls’ when they asked how the issue went for him; and the blood-stained marauders, who thought as little of assassination for a hidden pot of gold as butchers of drawing a knife across a sheep’s throat, grew still and fear-stricken with a great awe when the muttering passed through the camp that they would see no more among their ranks that “woman’s face” which they had beheld so often foremost in the fight, with a look on it that thrilled their hearts like their forbidden chant of the Marseillaise. For when the third day closed, they knew that he must die.
There were men, hard as steel, ravenous of blood as vultures, who, when they heard that sentence given, choked great, deep sobs down into the cavernous depths of their broad, seared, sinewy breasts; but he never gave sigh or sign. He never moved once while the decree of death was read to him; and there was no change in the weary calmness of his eyes. He bent his head in acquiescence.
“C’est bien!” he said simply.
It seemed well to him. Dead, his secret would lie in the grave with him, and the long martyrdom of his life be ended.
In the brightness of the noon Cigarette leaned out of her little oval casement that framed her head like an old black oak carving — a head with the mellow bloom on its cheeks, and the flash of scarlet above its dark curls, and the robin-like grace of poise and balance as it hung out there in the sun.
Cigarette had been there a whole hour in thought; she who never had wasted a moment in meditation or reverie, and who found the long African day all too short for her busy, abundant, joyous life, that was always full of haste and work, just as a bird’s will seem so, though the bird have no more to do than to fly at its will through summer air, and feed at its will from brook and from berry, from a ripe ear of the corn or from a deep cup of the lily. For the first time she was letting time drift away in the fruitless labor of vain, purposeless thought, because, for the first time also, happiness was not with her.
They were gone forever — all the elastic joyance, all the free, fair hours, all the dauntless gayety of childhood, all the sweet, harmonious laughter of a heart without a care. They were gone forever; for the touch of love and of pain had been laid on her; and never again would her radiant eyes smile cloudlessly, like the young eagle’s, at a sun that rose but to be greeted as only youth can great another dawn of life that is without a shadow.
And she leaned wearily there, with her cheek lying on the cold, gray Moorish stone; the color and the brightness were in the rays of the light, in the rich hues of her hair and her mouth, in the scarlet glow of her dress; there was no brightness in her face. The eyes were vacant as they watched the green lizard glide over the wall beyond, and the lips were parted with a look of unspeakable fatigue; the tire, not of the limbs, but of the heart. She had come thither, hoping to leave behind her on the desert wind that alien care, that new, strange passion, which sapped her strength, and stung her pride, and made her evil with such murderous lust of vengeance; and they were with her still. Only something of the deadly, biting ferocity of jealousy had changed into a passionate longing to be as that woman was who had his love; into a certain hopeless, sickening sense of having forever lost that which alone could have given her such beauty and such honor in the sight of men as those this woman had.
To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had his passion should not return it. To the child of the camp, though she often mocked at caste, all the inexorable rules, all the reticent instincts of caste, were things unknown. She would have failed to comprehend all the thousand reasons which would have forbidden any bond between the great aristocrat and a man of low grade and of dubious name. She only thought of love as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly cherished, wildly indulged, and without tie or restraint.
“And I came without my vengeance!” she mused. To the nature that felt the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, there was wounding humiliation in her knowledge that she had left her rival unharmed, and had come hither, out from his sight and his presence, lest he should see in her one glimpse of that folly which she would have killed herself under her own steel rather than have been betrayed, either for his contempt or his compassion.
“And I came without my vengeance!” she mused, in that oppressive noon, in that gray and lonely place, in that lofty tower-solitude, where there was nothing between her and the hot, hard, cruel blue of the heavens, vengeance looked the only thing that was left her; the only means whereby that void in her heart could be filled, that shame in her life be washed out. To love! and to love a man who had no love for her, whose eyes only beheld another’s face, whose ears only thirsted for another’s voice! Its degradation stamped her a traitress in her own sight — traitress to her code, to her pride, to her country, to her flag!
And yet, at the core of her heart so tired a pang was aching! She who had gloried in being the child of the whole people, the daughter of the whole army, felt lonely and abandoned, as though she were some bird which an hour ago had been flying in all its joy among its brethren and now, maimed with one shot, had fallen, with broken pinion and torn plumage, to lie alone upon the sand and die.
The touch of a bird’s wing brushing her hair brought the dreamy comparison to her wandering thoughts. She started and lifted her head; it was a blue carrier-pigeon, one of the many she fed at that casement, and the swiftest and surest of several she sent with messages for the soldiers between the various stations and corps. She had forgotten she had left the bird at the encampment.
She caressed it absently, while the tired creature sank down on her bosom; then only she saw that there was a letter beneath one wing. She unloosed it, and looked at it without being able to tell its meaning; she could not read a word, printed or written. Military habits were too strong with her for the arrival not to change her reverie into action; whoever it was for, it must be seen. She gave the pigeon water and grain, then wound her way down the dark, narrow stairs, through the height of the tower, out into the passage below.
She found an old French cobbler sitting at a stall in a casement, stitching leather; he was her customary reader and scribe in this quarter. She touched him with the paper. “Bon Mathieu! Wilt thou read this to me?”
“It is for thee, Little One, and signed ‘Petit Pot-deterre.’”
Cigarette nodded listlessly.
“’Tis a good lad, and a scholar,” she answered absently. “Read on!”
And he read aloud:
“‘There is ill news. I send the bird on a chance to find thee. Bel-a-faire-peau struck the Black Hawk — a slight blow, but with threat to kill following it. He has been tried, and is to be shot. There is no appeal. The case is clear; the Colonel could have cut him down, were that all. I thought you should know. We are all sorry. It was done on the night of the great fete. I am thy humble lover and slave.’”
So the boy-Zouave’s scrawl, crushed, and blotted, and written with great difficulty, ran in its brief phrases that the slow muttering of the old shoemaker drew out in tedious length.
Cigarette heard; she never made a movement or gave a sound, but all the blood fled out of her brilliant face, leaving it horribly blanched beneath its brown sun-scorch; and her eyes — distended, senseless, sightless — were fastened on the old man’s slowly moving mouth.
“Read it again!” she said simply, when all was ended. He started and looked up at her face; the voice had not one accent of its own tone left.
He obeyed, and read it once more to the end. Then a loud, shuddering sigh escaped her, like the breath of one stifling under flames.
“Shot!” she said vacantly. “Shot!”
Her vengeance had come without her once lifting her hand to summon it.
The old man rose hurriedly.
“Child! Art thou ill?”
“The blow was struck for her!” she muttered. “It was that night, you hear — that night!”
“What night? Thou lookest so strangely! Dost thou love this doomed soldier?”
Cigarette laughed — a laugh whose echo thrilled horribly through the lonely Moresco courtway.
“Love? Love? I hated him, look you! So I said. And I longed for my vengeance. It is come!”
She was still a moment; her white, parched mouth quivering as though she were under physical torture, her strained eyes fastened on the empty air, the veins in her throat swelling and throbbing till they glowed to purple. Then she crushed the letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any antelope through the streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the city to the quay.
The people ever gave way before her; but now they scattered like frightened sheep from her path. There was something that terrified them in that bloodless horror set upon her face, and in that fury of resistless speed with which she rushed upon her way.
Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she paused; it was as one face, on which the strong light of the noontide poured, came before her. The senseless look changed in her eyes; she wheeled out of her route, and stopped before the man who had thus arrested her. He was leaning idly over the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped his arm before he saw her.
“You have his face!” she muttered. “What are you to him?”
He made no answer; he was too amazed.
“You are of his race,” she persisted. “You are brethren by your look. What are you to him?”
“To whom?”
“To the man who calls himself Louis Victor! A Chasseur of my army!”
Her eyes were fastened entirely on him; keen, ruthless, fierce, in this moment as a hawk’s. He grew pale and murmured an incoherent denial. He sought to shake her off, first gently, then more rudely; he called her mad, and tried to fling her from him; but the lithe fingers only wound themselves closer on his arm.
“Be still — fool!” she muttered; and there was that in the accent that lent a strange force and dignity in that moment to the careless and mischievous plaything of the soldiery — force that overcame him, dignity that overawed him. “You are of his people; you have his eyes, and his look, and his features. He disowns you, or you him. No matter which. He is of your blood; and he lies under sentence of death. Do you know that?”
With a stifled cry, the other recoiled from her; he never doubted that she spoke the truth; nor could any who had looked upon her face.
“Do not lie to me,” she said curtly. “It avails you nothing. Read that.”
She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; his hand trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that moment that this strange creature — half soldier, half woman, half brigand, half child — knew all his story and all his shame from his brother.
“Shot!” he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when he had read on to the end. “Shot! Oh, my God! and I——”
She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the bazaar, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled with the horror, the remorse, the overwhelming shock of his brother’s doom.
“He will be shot,” she said with a strange calmness. “We shoot down many men in our army. I knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not doubt; but discipline will not stay for that —”
“Silence, for mercy’s sake! Is there no hope — no possibility?”
Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came through them. “None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant. It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?”
“I am his brother!”
She was silent; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her strange that she should thus have met one of his blood in the crowds of Algiers. She was absorbed in the one catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat her very life away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage remained at their keenest and strongest.
“You are his brother,” she said slowly, so much as an affirmation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relationship and their history from Cecil. “You must go to him, then.”
He shook from head to foot.
“Yes, yes! But it will be too late!”
She did not know that the words were cried out in all the contrition of an unavailing remorse; she gave them only their literal significance, and shuddered as she answered him.
“That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I must know more. Tell me his name, his rank.”
He was silent; coward and egotist though he was, both cowardice and egotism were killed in him under the overwhelming horror with which he felt himself as truly by moral guilt a fratricide as though he had stabbed his elder through the heart.
“Speak!” hissed Cigarette through her clenched teeth. “If you have any kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your blood, who will be shot there like a dog, do not waste a second — answer me, tell me all.”
He turned his wild, terrified glance upon her; he had in that moment no sense but to seize some means of reparation, to declare his brother’s rights, to cry out to the very stones of the streets his own wrong and his victim’s sacrifice.
“He is the head of my house!” he answered her, scarce knowing what he answered. “He should bear the title that I bear now. He is here, in this misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of living souls! If he dies, it is not they who have killed him; it is I!”
She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.
“Settle with yourself for that sin,” she said bitterly. “Your remorse will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be sincere. Write me out here that title you say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your house; then sign it, and give it to me.”
He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.
“Who are you? What are you? If you have the power to do it, for the love of God rescue him! It is I who have murdered him — I— who have let him live on in this hell for my sake!”
“For your sake!”
She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public chastisement. The courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous fear and his living lie. His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now.
She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and wondering disdain that there should be on earth a male life capable of such fear and of such ignominy as this. Then the strong and rapid power in her took its instant ascendancy over the weaker nature.
“Monsieur, I do not know your story, I do not want. I am not used to men who let others suffer for them. What I want is your written statement of your brother’s name and station; give it me.”
He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized him. She brought him pens and paper from the Turk’s store, and dictated what he wrote:
“I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs d’Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England. I hereby also acknowledge that I have succeeded to and borne the title illegally, under the supposition of his death.
“BERKELEY CECIL.” (Signed)
He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the torture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let circumstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve long years. He let her draw the paper from him and fold it away in her belt. He watched her with a curious, dreamy sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her bidding.
“What is it you will do?” he asked her.
“The best that shall lie in my power. Do you the same.”
“Can his life yet be saved?”
“His honor may — his honor shall.”
Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke though it was stern and rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over it. She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would choose the vindication of his honor before the rescue of his life. He laid his hand on her as she moved.
“Stay! — stay! One word ——”
She flung him off her again.
“This is no time for words. Go to him — coward! — and let the balls that kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of manhood left in you!”
Then, swiftly as a swallow darts, she quitted him and flew on her headlong way, down through the pressure of the people, and the throngs of the marts, and the noise, and the color, and the movement of the streets.
The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode out of the city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as the antelope and as wild, with her only equipment some pistols in her holsters, and a bag of rice and a skin of water slung at her saddle-bow.
They asked her where she went; she never answered. The hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers. Her comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright, brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.
“What is it with the Cigarette?” they asked each other. None could tell; the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies. The gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon’s on it were the last they ever saw of Cigarette.
All her fluent, untiring speech was gone — gone with the rose hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child’s joyance from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a soldier’s courage, with a martyr’s patience.
And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant’s hands in fearless glee to the mane of roughriders’ chargers. She never swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot currents of the cleft air with only one sense — that she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few moments of a charmed life fled away!
She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal — no more — betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the evening of the day to the dawn of the second day following; and some slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She could not tell how long he had to live.
There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader’s horse had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of D’Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do. Once only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in her eyes — the worst hunger — that which craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.
She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise; nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched, monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage, the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination; the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the waters to Circe.
The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quivering, to the ground. Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress of inspection throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand questions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with the other.
“Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief.”
She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those who heard. She was not the Child of the Army whom they knew so well. She was a creature, desperate, hard-pressed, mute as death, strong as steel; above all, hunted by despair.
They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding. The one whom she sought was great and supreme here as a king; they dreaded to approach his staff, to ask his audience.
Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her Cross and held it out to an adjutant standing beneath the gates.
“Take that to the man who gave it me. Tell him Cigarette waits; and with each moment that she waits a soldier’s life is lost. Go!”
The adjutant took it, and went. Over and over again she had brought intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a contemplated razzia, warning of an internal revolt, or tidings of an enco............