"Yes."

"And must always think so?"

"Yes." He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard—the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. "Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful; for God's sake, get me sent out of this camp to-night. I am powerless."

There was that in the accent which struck his listener to the heart. He was powerless, fettered hand and foot as though he were a prisoner; a night's absence, and he would be shot as a deserter. He had grown accustomed to this rendering up of all his life to the rules of others; but now and then the galled spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at the bonds.

"I will try," said Cigarette simply, without any of her audacity or of her vanity in the answer. "Go you to the fire; you are cold."

"Are you sure he will not return?"

"Not he. They are gone to eat and drink; I go with them. What is it you fear?"

"My own weakness."

She was silent. She could just watch his features by the dim light, and she saw his mouth quiver under the fullness of his beard. He felt that if he looked again on the face of the man he loved he might be broken into self-pity, and unloose his silence, and shatter all the work of so many years. He had been strong where men of harder fiber and less ductile temper might have been feeble; but he never thought that he had been so; he only thought that he had acted on impulse, and had remained true to his act through the mere instinct of honor—an instinct inborn in his blood and his Order—an instinct natural and unconscious with him as the instinct by which he drove his breath.

"You are a fine soldier," said Cigarette musingly; "such men are not weak."

"Why? We are only strong as tigers are strong—just the strength of the talon and fang. I do not know. I was weak as water once; I may be again, if—if——"

He scarcely knew that he was speaking aloud; he had forgotten her! His whole heart seemed burned as with fire by the memory of that one face so familiar, so well loved, yet from which he must shrink as though some cowardly sin were between them. The wretchedness on him seemed more than he could bear; to know that this man was so near that the sound of his voice raised could summon him, yet that he must remain as dead to him—remain as one dead after a craven and treacherous guilt.

He turned suddenly, almost violently, upon Cigarette.

"You have surprised my folly from me; you know my secret so far; but you are too brave to betray me, you are too generous to tell of this? I can trust you to be silent?"

Her face flushed scarlet with astonished anger; her little, childlike form grew instinct with haughty and fiery dignity.

"Monsieur, that question from one soldier of France to another is insult. We are not dastards!"

There was a certain grave reproach that mingled with the indignant scorn of the answer, and showed that her own heart was wounded by the doubt, as well as her military pride by the aspersion. Even amid the conflict of pain at war in him he felt that, and hastened to soothe it.

"Forgive me, my child; I should not have wronged you with the question. It is needless, I know. Men can trust you to the death, they say."

"To the death—yes."

The answer was thoughtful, dreamy, almost sad, for Cigarette. His thoughts were too far from her in their tumult of awakened memories to note the tone as he went rapidly on:

"You have ingenuity, compassion, tact; you have power here, too, in your way. For the love of Heaven get me sent out on some duty before dawn! There is Biribi's murder to be avenged—would they give the errand to me?"

She thought a moment.

"We will see," she said curtly. "I think I can do it. But go back, or you will be missed. I will come to you soon."

She left him, then, rapidly; drawing her hand quickly out of the clasp of his.

Cigarette felt her heart aching to its core for the sorrow of this man who was nothing to her. He did not know what she had done for him in his suffering and delirium; he did not know how she had watched him all that night through, when she was weary, and bruised, and thirsting for sleep; he did not know; he held her hand as one comrade another's, and never looked to see if her eyes were blue or were black, were laughing or tear-laden. And yet she felt pain in his pain; she was always giving her life to his service. Many besides the little Friend of the Flag beat back as folly the noblest and purest thing in them.

Cecil mechanically returned to the fire at which the men of his tribe were cooking their welcome supper, and sat down near them; rejecting, with a gesture, the most savory portion which, with their customary love and care for him, they were careful to select and bring to him. There had never been a time when they had found him fail to prefer them to himself, or fail to do them kindly service, if of such he had a chance; and they returned it with all that rough and silent attachment that can be so strong and so stanch in lives that may be black with crime or red with slaughter.

He sat like a man in a dream, while the loosened tongues of the men ran noisily on a hundred themes as they chaffed each other, exchanged a fire of bivouac jokes more racy than decorous, and gave themselves to the enjoyment of their rude meal, that had to them that savor which long hunger alone can give. Their voices came dull on his ear; the ruddy warmth of the fire was obscured to his sight; the din, the laughter, the stir all over the great camp, at the hour of dinner were lost on him. He was insensible to everything except the innumerable memories that thronged upon him, and the aching longing that filled his heart with the sight of the friend of his youth.

"He said once that he would take my hand before all the world always, come what would," he thought. "Would he take it now, I wonder? Yes; he never believed against me."

And, as he thought, the same anguish of desire that had before smitten him to stand once more guiltless in the presence of men, and once more bear, untarnished, the name of his race and the honor of his fathers, shook him now as strong winds shake a tree that yet is fast rooted at its base, though it sway a while beneath the storm.

"How weak I am!" he thought bitterly. "What does it matter? Life is so short, one is a coward indeed to fret over it. I cannot undo what I did. I cannot, if I could. To betray him now! God! not for a kingdom, if I had the chance! Besides, she may live still; and, even were she dead, to tarnish her name to clear my own would be a scoundrel's baseness—baseness that would fail as it merited; for who could be brought to believe me now?"

The thoughts unformed drifted through his mind, half dulled, half sharpened by the deadly pain, and the rush of old brotherly love that had arisen in him as he had seen the face of his friend beside the watch-fire of the French bivouac. It was hard; it was cruelly hard; he had, after a long and severe conflict, brought himself into contentment with his lot, and taught himself oblivion of the past, and interest in the present, by active duties and firm resolve; he had vanquished all the habits, controlled most of the weaknesses, and banished nearly all the frailties and indulgences of his temperament in the long ordeal of African warfare. It was cruelly hard that now when he had obtained serenity, and more than half attained forgetfulness, these two—her face and his—must come before him; one to recall the past, the other to embitter the future!

As he sat with his head bent down and his forehead leaning on his arm, while the hard biscuit that served for a plate stood unnoticed beside him, with the food that the soldiers had placed on it, he did not hear Cigarette's step till she touched him on the arm. Then he looked up; her eyes were looking on him with a tender, earnest pity.

"Hark! I have done it," she said gently. "But it will be an errand very close to death that you must go on—"

He raised himself erect, eagerly.

"No matter that! Ah, mademoiselle, how I thank you!"

"Chut! I am no Paris demoiselle!" said Cigarette, with a dash of her old acrimony. "Ceremony in a camp—pouf! You must have been a court chamberlain once, weren't you? Well, I have done it. Your officers were talking yonder of a delicate business; they were uncertain who best to employ. I put in my speech—it was dead against military etiquette, but I did it. I said to M. le General: 'You want the best rider, the most silent tongue, and the surest steel in the squadrons? Take Bel-a-faire-peur, then.' 'Who is that?' asked the general; he would have sent out of camp anybody but Cigarette for the interruption. 'Mon General,' said I, 'the Arabs asked that, too, the other day, at Zaraila.' 'What!' he cried, 'the man Victor—who held the ground with his Chasseurs? I know—a fine soldier. M. le Colonel, shall we send him?' The Black Hawk had scowled thunder on you; he hates you more still since that affair of Zaraila, especially because the general has reported your conduct with such praise that they cannot help but promote you. Well, he had looked thunder, but now he laughed. 'Yes, mon General,' he answered him, 'take him, if you like. It is fifty to one whoever goes on that business will not come back alive, and you will rid me of the most insolent fine gentleman in my squadrons.' The general hardly heard him; he was deep in thought; but he asked a good deal about you from the Hawk, and Chateauroy spoke for your fitness for the errand they are going to send you on, very truthfully, for a wonder. I don't know why; but he wants you to be sent, I think; most likely that you may be cut to pieces. And so they will send for you in a minute. I have done it as you wished."

There was something of her old brusquerie and recklessness in the closing sentences; but it had not her customary debonair lightness. She knew too well that the chances were as a hundred to one that he would never return alive from this service on which he had entreated to be dispatched. Cecil grasped both her hands in his with warm gratitude, that was still, like the touch of his hands, the gratitude of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman.

"God bless you, Cigarette! You are a true friend, my child. You have done me immeasurable benefits—"

"Oh! I am a true friend," said the Little One, somewhat pettishly. She would have preferred another epithet. "If a man wants to get shot as a very great favor, I always let him pleasure himself. Give a man his own way, if you wish to be kind to him. You are children, all of you, nothing but children, and if the toy that pleases you best is death, why—you must have it. Nothing else would content you. I know you. You always want what flies from you, and are tired of what lies to your hand. That is always a man."

"And a woman, too, is it not?"

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, I dare say! We love what is new—what is strange. We are humming-tops; we will only spin when we are fresh wound up with a string to our liking."

"Make an exception of yourself, my child. You are always ready to do a good action, and never tire of that. From my heart I thank you. I wish to Heaven I could prove it better."

She drew her hands away from him.

"A great thing I have done, certainly! Got you permission to go and throw a cartel at old King Death; that is all! There! That is your summons."

The orderly approached, and brought the bidding of the general in command of the Cavalry for Cecil to render himself at once to his presence. These things brook no second's delay in obedience; he went with a quick adieu to Cigarette, and the little Friend of the Flag was left in his vacant place beside the fire.

And there was a pang at her heart.

"Ten to one he goes to his death," she thought. But Cigarette, little mischief-maker though she was, could reach very high in one thing; she could reach a love that was unselfish, and one that was heroic.

A few moments, and Cecil returned.

"Rake," he said rapidly, in the French he habitually used, "saddle my horse and your own. I am allowed to choose one of you to accompany me."

Rake, in paradise, and the envied of every man in the squadron, turned to his work—with him a task of scarce more than a second; and Cecil approached his little Friend of the Flag.

"My child, I cannot attempt to thank you. But for you, I should have been tempted to send my lance through my own heart."

"Keep its lunge for the Arbicos, mon ami," said Cigarette brusquely—the more brusquely because that new and bitter pang was on her. "As for me, I want no thanks."

"No; you are too generous. But not the less do I wish I could render them more worthily than by words. If I live, I will try; if not, keep this in my memory. It is the only thing I have."

He put into her hand the ring she had seen in the little bon-bon box; a ring of his mother's that he had saved when he had parted with all else, and had put off his hand and into the box of Petite Reine's gift the day he entered the Algerian army.

Cigarette flushed scarlet with passions he could not understand, and she could not have disentangled.

"The ring of your mistress! Not for me, if I know it! Do you think I want to be paid?"

"The ring was my mother's," he answered her simply. "And I offer it only as souvenir."

She lost all her color and all her fiery wrath; his grave and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled and rebuked her; but she raised the ring off the ground where she had flung it, and placed it back in his hand.

"If so, still less should you part with it. Keep it; it will bring you happiness one day. As for me, I have done nothing!"

"You have done what I value the more for that noble disclaimer. May I thank you thus, Little One?"

He stooped and kissed her; a kiss that the lips of a man will always give to the bright, youthful lips of a women, but a kiss, as she knew well, without passion, even without tenderness in it.

With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and a refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested herself from him, her face burning, her heart panting, and plunged away from him into the depth of the shadow; and he never sought to follow her, but threw himself into saddle as his gray was brought up. Another instant, and, armed to the teeth, he rode out of the camp into the darkness of the silent, melancholy, lonely Arab night.



CHAPTER XXX.

SEUL AU MONDE.

The errand on which he went was one, as he was well aware, from which it were a thousand chances to one that he ever issued alive.

It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation with dispatches for the chief in command there, and to do this he had to pass through a fiercely hostile region, occupied by Arabs with whom no sort of peace had ever been made, the most savage as well as the most predatory of the wandering tribes. His knowledge of their tongue, and his friendship with some men of their nation, would avail him nothing here; for their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was said that all prisoners who had fallen into their hands had been put to death with merciless barbarities. This might be true or not true; wild tales were common among Algerian campaigners; whichever it were, he thought little of it as he rode out on to the lonely plains. Every kind of hazardous adventure and every variety of peril had been familiar with him in the African life; and now there were thoughts and memories on him which deadened every recollection of merely physical risk.

"We must ride as hard and as fast as we can, and as silently," were the only words he exchanged with Rake, as he loosened his gray to a gallop.

"All right, sir," answered the trooper, whose warm blood was dancing, and whose blue eyes were alive like fire with delight. That he had been absent on a far-away foraging raid on the day of Zaraila had been nothing short of agony to Rake, and the choice made of him for this duty was to him a gift of paradise. He loved fighting for fighting's sake; and to be beside Cecil was the greatest happiness life held for him.

They had two hundred miles to traverse, and had received only the command he had passed to Rake, to ride "hard, fast, and silently." To the hero of Zaraila the general had felt too much soldierly sympathy to add the superfluous injunction to do his uttermost to carry safely and successfully to their destination the papers that were placed in his care. He knew well that the errand would be done, or the Chasseur would be dead.

It was just nightfall; the after-glow had faded only a few moments before. Giving their horses, which they were to change once, ten hours for the distance, and two for bait and for rest, he reckoned that they would reach the camp before the noon of the coming day, as the beasts, fresh and fast in the camp, flew like greyhounds beneath them.

Another night ride that they had ridden together came to the minds of both; but they spoke not a word as they swept on, their sabers shaken loose in their sheaths, their lances well gripped, and the pistols with which they had been supplied sprung in their belts, ready for instant action if a call should come for it. Every rood of the way was as full of unseen danger as if laid over mines. They might pass in safety; they might any moment be cut down by ten score against two. From every hanging scarp of rugged rock a storm of musket-balls might pour; from every screen of wild-fig foliage a shower of lances might whistle through the air; from every darkling grove of fir trees an Arab band might spring and swoop on them; but the knowledge scarcely recurred to the one save to make him shake his sword more loose for quick disengagement, and only made the sunny blue eyes of the other sparkle with a vivid and longing zest.

The night grew very chill as it wore on; the north wind rose, rushing against them with a force and icy touch that seemed to freeze their bones to the marrow after the heat of the day and the sun that had scorched them so long. There was no regular road; they went across the country, their way sometimes leading over level land, over which they swept like lightning, great plains succeeding one another with wearisome monotony; sometimes on the contrary, lying through ravines, and defiles, and gloomy woods, and broken, hilly spaces, where rent, bare rocks were thrown on one another in gigantic confusion, and the fantastic shapes of the wild fig and the dwarf palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the darkness. For there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by the storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky; and the only sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the shriek of the night bird, and now and then the sound of shallow water-courses, where the parched beds of hidden brooks had been filled by the autumnal rain.

The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, and the horses lay well and warmly to their work. They halted to rest and bait the beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered from the blasts of the bise, and green with short, sweet grass, sprung up afresh after the summer drought.

"Do you ever think of him, sir?" said Rake softly, with a lingering love in his voice, as he stroked the grays and tethered them.

"Of whom?"

"Of the King, sir. If he's alive, he's getting a rare old horse now."

"Think of him! I wish I did not, Rake."

"Wouldn't you like to see him agen, sir?"

"What folly to ask! You know—"

"Yes, sir, I know," said Rake slowly. "And I know—leastways I picked it out of a old paper—that your elder brother died, sir, like the old lord, and Mr. Berk's got the title."

Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say this thing which he had learned, and which he could not tell whether or no Cecil knew likewise. His eyes looked with straining eagerness through the gloom into his master's; he was uncertain how his words would be taken. To his bitter disappointment, Cecil's face showed no change, no wonder.

"I have heard that," he said calmly—as calmly as though the news had no bearing on his fortunes, but was some stranger's history.

"Well, sir, but he ain't the lord!" pleaded Rake passionately. "He won't never be while you're living, sir!"

"Oh, yes, he is! I am dead, you know."

"But he won't, sir!" reiterated Rake. "You're Lord Royallieu if ever there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever there will be one."

"You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can claim none."

The man looked very wistfully at him; all these years through he had never learned why his master was thus "dead" in Africa, and he had too loyal a love and faith ever to ask, or ever to doubt but that Cecil was the wronged and not the wrong-doer.

"You ain't a outlaw, sir," he muttered. "You could take the title, if you would."

"Oh, no! I left England under a criminal charge. I should have to disprove that before I could inherit."

Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. "You could disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you chose."

"No; or I should not have come here. Let us leave the subject. It was settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royallieu. I would not disturb him, if I had the power, and I have not it. Look, the horses are taking well to their feed."

Rake asked him no more. He had never had a harsh word from Cecil in their lives; but he knew him too well, for all that, to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put aside. But his heart ached sorely for his master; he would so gladly have seen "the king among his own again," and would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a Cavalier strove for the White Rose; and he sat in silence, perplexed and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, dim, desolate African landscape stretching before him, with here and there a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept the clouds apart. His volatile speech was chilled, and his buoyant spirits were checked. That Cecil was justly outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason to believe for one instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to wrench up the great stones above him from their base as seek to change the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant as a reed and careless as a child.

They were before long in saddle again and off, the country growing wilder at each stride the horses took.

"It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues," said Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle. "They have come northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later. If they cut me down, don't wait; but slash my pouch loose and ride off with it."

"All right, sir," said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself, "Leave you alone with them demons? Damn me if I will!"

And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds.

Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the champagnes.

Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety, like a kitten's play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and one who might never return.

It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear—she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him—a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!

She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he—he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known—he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.

Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.

Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.

"What is your name?" she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.

"Well—some call me Seraph."

"Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion? I should have though she was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?"

"Lyonnesse."

"What a droll name! What are you?"

"A soldier."

"Good! What grade?"

"A Colonel of Guards."

Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, "He has the seat of the English Guards."

"My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his title," cried one of the officers.

Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.

"Ouf! Titles are nothing to me. I am a child of the People. So you are a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph? Well, that is not much, to my thinking. Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing privates' uniforms, and littering down their own horses. Bah! Have you that sort of thing in Albion?"

"Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep crossings? Oh, yes!" laughed her interlocutor. "But you speak of aristocrats in your ranks—that reminds me. Have you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor?"

He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who answered him in the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper name, heightened and tight-strung.

"A fine fellow," continued the Chef d'Escadron to whom he had appealed. "He behaved magnificently the other day at Zaraila; he must be distinguished for it. He is just sent on a perilous errand, but though so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, and woe to the Arabs who slay him! Are you acquainted with him?"

"Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of him. I have been told he seems above his present position. Is it so?"

"Likely enough, monsieur; he seems a gentleman. But then we have many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can make no difference for that. Cigarette can tell you more of him; she used to complain that he bowed like a Court chamberlain."

"Oh, ha!—I did!" cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony because pained and irritated by being appealed to on the subject. "And of course, when so many of his officers have the manners of Pyrenean bears, it is a little awkward for him to bring us the manner of a Palace!"

Which effectually chastised the Chef d'Escadron, who was one of those who had a ton of the roughest manners, and piqued himself on his powers of fence much more than on his habits of delicacy.

"Has this Victor any history?" asked the English Duke.

"He has written one with his sword; a fine one," said Cigarette curtly. "We are not given here to care much about any other."

"Quite right; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen his carvings wished to serve him, if it were possible; and—"

"Ho! That is Milady, is suppose!" Cigarette's eyes flashed fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. "What did she tell you about him?"

"I am ignorant of whom you speak?" he answered, with something of surprise and annoyance.

"Are you?" said Cigarette, in derision. "I doubt that. Of whom should I speak but of her? Bah? She insulted him, she offered him gold, she sent my men the spoils of her table, as if they were paupers, and he thinks it all divine because it is done by Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague! Bah! when he was delirious, the other night, he could babble of nothing but of her—of her—of her!"

The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every other thought; she was a child in much, she was untutored in all; she had no thought that by the scornful vituperation of "Milady" she could either harm Cecil or betray herself. But she was amazed to see the English guest change color with a haughty anger that he strove to subdue as he half rose and answered her with an accent in his voice that reminded her—she knew not why—of Bel-a-faire-peur and of Marquise.

"Mme. la Princess Corona d'Amague is my sister; why do you venture to couple the name of this Chasseur with hers?"

Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, dared to anything by the mere fact of being publicly arraigned.

"Pardieu! Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with the Eagles of France?—a pretty idea, truly! So she is your sister, is she? Milady? Well, then, tell her from me to think twice before she outrages a soldier with 'patronage'; and tell her, too, that had I been he I would have ground my ivory toys into powder before I would have let them become the playthings of a grande dame who tendered me gold for them!"

The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was mingled with a vivid sense of intense annoyance and irritated pride, that the name he cherished closest should be thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandiere and in connection with a trooper of Chasseurs.

"I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle," he said, with an impatient stroke to his beard. "There is no occasion for it. Mme. Corona d'Amague, my sister," he continued, to the officers present, "became accidentally acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of yours; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding. She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity—"

"M. le Duc!" cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and startling as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the warmth of wrath at once jealous and generous, "keep your compassion until it is asked of you. No soldier of France needs it; that I promise you. I know this man that you talk of 'pitying.' Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the guidon; I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from under his horse, and his first conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to a wretch who had thieved from him. Our life here is hell upon earth to such as he, yet none ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone to the chances of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses' kisses; he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored. Such a one is not to have the patronage of a Milady Corona, nor the pity of a stranger of England. Let the first respect him; let the last imitate him!"

And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their lighted tent.

"C'est Cigarette!" said the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities.

"A strange little Amazon!" said their guest. "Is she in love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?"

The Major shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know that, monsieur," answered one. "She will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor."

Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Chasseur's fortunes, he should have brought in the name he loved so well—the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe—into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner.

Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief words:

"Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us. He fights well—it is often a blackguard's virtue!"

His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at the introduction of his sister's name into the discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.

Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper! If Cigarette had been of his own sex he could have dashed the white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in one breath.

And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his narrow camp pallet, tired with a long day in saddle under the hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this unknown French trooper.

But Cigarette remained wakeful.

She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante, with her head on the beast's glossy flank and her hand among his mane. She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks, the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.

To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake—wide-awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with wrath. The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken—of that aristocrat whose name had been on Cecil's lips when he had been delirious. She had kept his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some unknown French soldier. She could not tell what the history was, but she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother's ring as the sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were lying in his coffin. No matter what the precise reason was—women, or debt, or accident, or ruin—these two, who had been familiar comrades, were now as strangers to each other; the one slumbered in ignorance near her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes of his friend recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled her, it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even now—this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of the night chase one another along the dreary plains—a shot might have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and country; even now all might be over!

And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before, at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth.

Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her own kiss would have touched the rose-bud, waxen petals of a cluster of oleander-blossoms; and she cared for him still!



While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the French camp around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette watched afar off the dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they circled slowly round at their outpost duty—eight leagues off, through a vast desert of shadow and silence, the two horsemen swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds obscured the skies. Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.

Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frowning ledge of rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of leveled, waiting muskets.

Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts. And causing thus to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had nothing to lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They might be driven into the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now far and wide over the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them; they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy, they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique must cover ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and sprung.

They had reached the center of the plain when the sound they had long looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, breathless stillness of the night. It was the Allah-il-Allah of their foes, the war-cry of the Moslem. Out of the gloom—whether from long pursuit or some near hiding-place they could not tell—there broke suddenly upon them the fury of an Arab onslaught. In the darkness all they could see were the flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snorting nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas—whether two, or twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not know—they never did know. All of which they were conscious was that in an instant, from the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked space, they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing, horrible entanglement of conflict, without the power to perceive or to number their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts of attack and of defense. All they were sensible of was one of those confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and din—an eternity in semblance, a second in duration—that can never be traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis of Gaul.

How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they struck, how they were encompassed, how they thrust back those who were hurled on them in the black night, with the north sea-wind like ice upon their faces, and the loose African soil drifting up in clouds of sand around them, they could never have told. Nor how they strained free from the armed ring that circled them, and beat aside the shafts of lances and the blades of swords, and forced their chargers breast to breast against the fence of steel and through the tempest of rage, and blows, and shouts, and wind, and driven sand, cut their way through the foe whose very face they scarce could see, and plunged away into the shadows across the desolation of the plain, pursued, whether by one or by the thousand they could not guess; for the gallop was noiseless on the powdered soil, and the Arab yell of baffled passion and slaughterous lust was half drowned in the rising of the wind-storm. Had it been day, they would have seen their passage across the level table-land traced by a crimson stream upon the sand, in which the blood of Frank and Arab blended equally.

As it was, they dashed headlong down through the darkness that grew yet denser and blacker as the storm rose. For miles the ground was level before them, and they had only to let the half-maddened horses, that had as by a miracle escaped all injury, rush on at their own will through the whirl of the wind that drove the dust upward in spiral columns and brought icy breaths of the north over the sear, sunburned, southern wastes.

For a long space they had no sense but that of rapid, ceaseless motion through the thick gloom and against the pressure of the violent blasts. The speed of their gallop and the strength of the currents of air were like some narcotic that drowned and that dizzied perception. In the intense darkness neither could see, neither hear, the other; the instinct of the beasts kept them together, but no word could be heard above the roar of the storm, and no light broke the somber veil of shadow through which they passed as fast as leopards course through the night. The first faint streak of dawn grew gray in the east when Cecil felt his charger stagger and sway beneath him, and halt, worn out and quivering in every sinew with fatigue. He threw himself off the animal in time to save himself from falling with it as it reeled and sank to the ground.

"Massena cannot stir another yard," he said. "Do you think they follow us still?"

There was no reply.

He strained his sight to pierce the darkness, but he could distinguish nothing; the gloom was still too deep. He spoke more loudly; still there was no reply. Then he raised his voice in a shout; it rang through the silence, and, when it ceased, the silence reigned again.

A deadly chill came on him. How had he missed his comrade? They must be far apart, he knew, since no response was given to his summons; or—the alternative rose before him with a terrible foreboding.

That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a ghastly loneliness that seemed filled with desolation. His horse was stretched before him on the sand, powerless to rise and drag itself a rood onward, and fast expiring. From the plains around him not a sound came, either of friend or foe. The consciousness that he was alone, that he had lost forever the only friend left to him, struck on him with that conviction which so often foreruns the assurance of calamity. Without a moment's pause he plunged back in the direction he had come, leaving the charger on the ground to pant its life out as it must, and sought to feel his way along, so as to seek as best he could the companion he had deserted. He still could not see a rood before him, but he went on slowly, with some vague hope that he should ere long reach the man whom he knew death or the fatality of accident alone would keep from his side. He could not feel or hear anything that gave him the slightest sign or clew to aid his search; he only wandered farther from his horse, and risked falling afresh into the hands of his pursuers; he shouted again with all his strength, but his own voice alone echoed over the plains, while his heart stood still with the same frozen dread that a man feels when, wrecked on some barren shore, his cry for rescue rings back on his own ear over the waste of waters.

The flicker of the dawn was growing lighter in the sky, and he could see dimly now, as in some winter day's dark twilight, though all around him hung the leaden mist, with the wild winds driving furiously. It was with difficulty also that he kept his feet against their force; but he was blown onward by their current, though beaten from side to side, and he still made his way forward. He had repassed the ground already traversed by some hundred yards or more, which seemed the length of many miles in the hurricane that was driving over the earth and sky, when some outline still duskier than the dusky shadow caught his sight; it was the body of a horse, standing on guard over the fallen body of a man.

Another moment and he was beside them.

"My God! Are you hurt?"

He could see nothing but an indistinct and shapeless mass, without form or color to mark it out from the brooding gloom and from the leaden earth. But the voice he knew so well answered him with the old love and fealty in it; eager with fear for him.

"When did you miss me, sir? I didn't mean you to know; I held on as long as I could; and when I couldn't no longer, I thought you was safe not to see I'd knocked over, so dark as it was."

"Great Heavens! You are hurt, then?"

"Just finished, sir. Lord! It don't matter. Only you ride on, Mr. Cecil; ride on, I say. Don't mind me."

"What is it? When were you struck? O Heaven! I never dreamt——"

Cecil hung over him, striving in vain through the shadows to read the truth from the face on which he felt by instinct the seal of death was set.

"I never meant you should know, sir. I meant just to drop behind and die on the quiet. You see, sir, it was just this way; they hit me as we forced through them. There's the lance-head in my loins now. I pressed it in hard, and kept the blood from flowing, and thought I should hold out so till the sun rose. But I couldn't do it so long; I got sick and faint after a while, and I knew well enough it was death. So I dropped down while I'd sense left to check the horse and get out of saddle in silence. I hoped you wouldn't miss me, in the darkness and the noise the wind was making; and you didn't hear me then, sir. I was glad."

His voice was checked in a quick, gasping breath; his only thought had been to lie down and die in the solitude so that his master might be saved.

A great sob shook Cecil as he heard; no false hope came to him; he felt that this man was lost to him forever, that this was the sole recompense which the cruelty of Africa would give to a fidelity passing the fidelity of woman; these throes of dissolution the only payment with which fate would ever requite a loyalty that had held no travail weary, no exile pain, and no danger worthy counting, so long as they were encountered and endured in his own service.

"Don't take on about it, sir," whispered Rake, striving to raise his head that he might strain his eyes better through the gloom to see his master's face. "It was sure to come some time; and I ain't in no pain—to speak of. Do leave me, Mr. Cecil—leave me, for God's sake, and save yourself!"

"Did you leave me?"

The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered it; but through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it.

"That was different, sir," he said simply. "Let me lie here, and go you on. It'll soon be over, and there's naught to be done."

"O God! is no help possible?"

"Don't take on, sir; it's no odds. I always was a scamp, and scamps die game, you know. My life's been a rare spree, count it all and all; and it's a great, good thing, you see, sir, to go off quick like this. I might have been laid in hospital. If you'd only take the beast and ride on, sir—"

"Hush! hush! Would you make me coward, or brute, or both?"

The words broke in an agony from him. The time had been when he had been himself stretched in what he had thought was death, in just such silence, in just such solitude, upon the bare, baked earth, far from men's aid, and near only to the hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey. Then he had been very calm, and waited with indifference for the end; now his eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impatience, the terror, of despair. Death had smitten down many beside him; buoyant youth and dauntless manhood he had seen a thousand times swept under the great waves of war and lost forever, but it had an anguish for him here that he would never have known had he felt his own life-blood well out over the sand. The whole existence of this man had been sacrificed for him, and its only reward was a thrust of a lance in a midnight fray—a grave in an alien soil.

His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the sounds of the living world. The exhaustion that follows on great loss of blood was upon the soldier who for the last half hour had lain there in the darkness and the stillness, quietly waiting death, and not once seeking even to raise his voice for succor lest the cry should reach and should imperil his master.

The morning had broken now, but the storm had not lulled. The northern winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold violence, and the rains burst and poured, with the fury of water-spouts on the crust of the parched, cracked earth. Around them there was nothing heard or seen except the leaden, angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane, and the white light of the coming day breaking lividly through the clouds. The world held no place of more utter desolation, more unspeakable loneliness; and in its misery Cecil, flung down upon the sands beside him, could do nothing except—helpless to aid, and powerless to save—watch the last breath grow feebler and feebler, until it faded out from the only life that had been faithful to him.

By the fitful gleams of day he could see the blood slowly ebbing out from the great gap where the lance-head was still bedded with its wooden shaft snapped in two; he could see the drooped head that he had raised upon his knee, with the yellow, northern curls that no desert suns had darkened; and Rake's eyes, smiling so brightly and so bravely still, looked up from under their weary lids to his.

"I'd never let you take my hand before, sir; just take it once now—will you?—while I can see you still."

Their hands met as he asked it, and held each other close and long; all the loyal service of the one life, and all the speechless gratitude of the other, told better than by all words in that one farewell.

A light that was not from the stormy dusky morning shone over the soldier's face.

"Time was, sir," he said, with a smile, "when I need to think as how, some day or another, when I should have done something great and grand, and you was back among your own again, and they here had given me the Cross, I'd have asked you to have done that before all the Army, and just to have said to 'em, if so you liked, 'He was a scamp, and he wasn't thought good for naught; but he kept true to me, and you see it made him go straight, and I aren't ashamed to call him my friend.' I used to think that, sir, though 'twas silly, perhaps. But it's best as it is—a deal best, no doubt. If you was only back safe in camp—-"

"O God! cease! I am not worthy one thought of love like yours."

"Yes, you are, sir—leastways, you was to me. When you took pity on me, it was just a toss-up if I didn't go right to the gallows. Don't grieve that way, Mr. Cecil. If I could just have seen you home again in your place, I should have been glad—that's all. You'll go back one day, sir; when you do, tell the King I ain't never forgot him."

His voice grew faint as the last sentence stole from his lips; he lay quite still, his head leaned back against his mater; and the day came, with the north winds driving over the plains and the gray mists tossed by them to and fro like smoke.

There was a long silence, a pause in which the windstorm ceased, and the clouds of the loosed sands sunk. Alone, with the wastes stretching around them, were the living and the dying man, with the horse standing motionless beside them, and, above, the gloom of the sullen sky. No aid was possible; they could but wait, in the stupefaction of despair, for the end of all to come.

In that awful stillness, in that sudden lull in the madness of the hurricane, death had a horror which it never wore in the riot of the battlefield, in the intoxication of the slaughter. There was no pity in earth or heaven; the hard, hot ground sucked down its fill of blood; the icy air enwrapped them like a shroud.

The faithfulness of love, the strength of gratitude, were of no avail; the one perished in agony, the other was powerless to save.

In that momentary hush, as the winds sank low, the heavy eyes, half sightless now, sought with their old wistful, doglike loyalty the face to which so soon they would be blind forever.

"Would you tell me once, sir—now? I never asked—I never would have done—but may be I might know in this last minute. You never sinned that sin you bear the charge on?"

"God is my witness, no."

The light, that was like sunlight, shone once more in the aching, wandering eyes.

"I knew, I knew! It was—"

Cecil bowed his head over him, lower and lower.

"Hush! He was but a child; and I—"

With a sudden and swift motion, as though new life were thrilling in him, Rake raised himself erect, his arms stretched outward to the east, where the young day was breaking.

"I knew, I knew! I never doubted. You will go back to your own some day, and men shall learn the truth—thank God! thank God!"

Then, with that light still on his face, his head fell backward; and with one quick, brief sigh his life fled out forever.



The time passed on; the storm had risen afresh; the violence of the gusts blew yellow sheets of sand whirling over the plains. Alone, with the dead one across his knees, Cecil sat motionless as though turned to stone. His eyes were dry and fixed; but ever and again a great, tearless sob shook him from head to foot. The only life that linked him with the past, the only love that had suffered all things for his sake, were gone, crushed out as though they never had been, like some insect trodden in the soil.

He had lost all consciousness, all memory, save of that lifeless thing which lay across his knees, like a felled tree, like a broken log, with the glimmer of the tempestuous day so chill and white upon the upturned face.

He was alone on earth; and the solitudes around him were not more desolate than his own fate.

He was like a man numbed and stupefied by intense cold; his veins seemed stagnant, and his sight could only see those features that became so terribly serene, so fearfully unmoved with the dread calm of death. Yet the old mechanical instincts of a soldier guided him still; he vaguely knew that his errand had to be done, must be done, let his heart ache as it would, let him long as he might to lie down by the side of his only friend, and leave the torture of life to grow still in him also for evermore.

Instinctively, he moved to carry out the duty trusted to him. He looked east and west, north and south; there was nothing in sight that could bring him aid; there were only the dust clouds hurled in billows hither and thither by the bitter winds still blowing from the sea. All that could be done had to be done by himself alone. His own safety hung on the swiftness of his flight; for aught he knew, at every moment, out of the mist and the driven sheets of sand there might rush the desert horses of his foes. But this memory was not with him; all he thought of was that burden stretched across his limbs, which laid down one hour here unwatched, would be the prey of the jackal and the vulture. He raised it reverently in his arms, and with long, laborious effort drew its weight up across the saddle of the charger which stood patiently waiting by, turning its docile eyes with a plaintive, wondering sadness on the body of the rider it had loved. Then he mounted himself; and with the head of his lost comrade borne up upon his arm, and rested gently on his breast, he rode westward over the great plain to where his mission lay.

The horse paced slowly beneath the double load of dead and living; he would not urge the creature faster on; every movement that shook the drooping limbs, or jarred the repose of that last sleep, seemed desecration. He passed the place where his own horse was stretched; the vultures were already there. He shuddered; and then pressed faster on, as though the beasts and birds of prey would rob him of his burden ere he could give it sanctuary. And so he rode, mile after mile, over the barren land, with no companion save the dead.

The winds blew fiercely in his teeth; the sand was in his eyes and hair; the way was long, and weary, and sown thick with danger; but he knew of nothing, felt and saw nothing save that one familiar face so strangely changed and transfigured by that glory with which death had touched it.



CHAPTER XXXI.

"JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE."

Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. The hurricane never abated, and the blinding dust rose around him in great waves. The horse fell lame; he had to dismount, and move slowly and painfully over the loose, heavy soil on foot, raising the drooping head of the lifeless rider. It was bitter, weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labor, of an intolerable pain.

Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment all consciousness; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield and leave the vultures, hovering aloft, their prey. He was still somewhat weakened by the wounds of Zaraila; he had been bruised and exhausted by the skirmish of the past night; he was weary and heart-broken; but he did not yield to his longing to sink down on the sands, and let his life ebb out; he held patiently onward through the infinite misery of the passage. At last he drew near the caravanserai where he had been directed to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway in the distance that he had to traverse, and almost alone when the face of the country changed, and was more full of color, and more broken into rocky and irregular surfaces.

As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward its shelter, as its irregular corner towers became dimly perceptible to him through the dizzy mists that had obscured his sight. By sheer instinct he found his route straight toward the open arch of its entrance-way, and into the square courtyard thronged with mules and camels and horses; for the caravanserai stood on the only road that led through that district to the south, and was the only house of call for drovers, or shelter for travelers and artists of Europe who might pass that way. The groups in the court paused in their converse and in their occupations, and looked in awe at the gray charger with its strange burden, and the French Chasseur who came so blindly forward like a man feeling his passage through the dark. There was something in the sight that had a vague terror for them before they clearly saw what this thing was which was thus brought into their presence. Cecil moved slowly on into their midst, his hand on the horse's rein; then a great darkness covered his sight; he swayed to and fro, and fell senseless on the gray stone of the paved court, while the muleteer and the camel-drivers, the Kabyls and the French, who were mingled there, crowded around him in fear and in wonder. When consciousness returned to him he was lying on a stone bench in the shadow of the wall, and a throng of lean, bronzed, eager faces about him in the midday sunlight which had broken through the windstorm.

Instantly he remembered all.

"Where is he?" he asked.

They knew he meant the dead man, and answered him in a hushed murmur of many voices. They had placed the body gently down within, in a darkened chamber.

A shiver passed over him; he stretched his hand out for water that they held to him.

"Saddle me a fresh horse; I have my work to do."

He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or self-pity might a soldier pause by the wayside while his errand was still undone, his duty unfulfilled.

He drank the water thirstily; then, reeling slightly still, from the weakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting their offers of aid. "Take me to him," he said simply. They understood him; there were French soldiers among them, and they took him, without question or comment, across the court to the little square stone cell within one of the towers, where they had laid the corpse, with nothing to break the quiet and the solitude except the low, soft cooing of some doves that had their homes in its dark corners, and flew in and out at pleasure through the oval aperture that served as window.

He motioned them all back with his hand, and went into the gloom of the chamber alone. Not one among them followed.

When he came forth again the reckless and riotous soldiers of France turned silently and reverentially away, so that they should not look upon his face. For it was well known throughout the army that no common tie had bound together the exiles of England, and the fealty of comrade to comrade was sacred in their sight.

The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. He crossed the court, moving still like a man without sense of what he did; he had the instinct to carry out the mission trusted to him, instantly and accurately, but he had no distinct perception or memory of aught else, save of those long-familiar features of which, ere he could return, the cruel sun of Africa would not have spared one trace.

He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch—a shadow black and intense against the golden light which, with the ceasing of the storm, flooded the land in the full morning. There were movement, noise, changes, haste in the entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachment of the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of some travelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of the humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that some of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke through his stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman whom, however madly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utter hopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him:

"You are of the Princesse Corona's suite? What does she do here?"

"Madame travels to see the country and the war."

"The war? This is no place for her. The land is alive with danger—rife with death."

"Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother. Milady does not know what fear is."

"But——"

The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloom of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a face unseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing and careless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale with the pallor of an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and altered with a wholly different emotion—emotion that was, above all, of an intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood motionless and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint, Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with the impassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger, and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.

He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped that his brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who bore resemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead and gone. The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin of his mother's darling as his own.

Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's grave.



Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent of the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last offices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived; all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists was gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a while.

It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats. The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem; and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod, its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.

When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon the grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonely and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged! It seemed to him like murder—murder with which his own hand was stained.

The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the young goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the black lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land of his exile.

He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the silence he heard a name whispered—the name of his childhood, of his past.

He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw once more his brother's face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained with an agonizing dread. Concealment was no longer possible. The younger man knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistible certainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in its chill, leaden, merciless conviction.

For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable memories choked thought or word in both. They knew each other—all was said in that.

Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer with a rapid movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other's shoulder.

"Have you lived stainlessly since?"

The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His brother shuddered beneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.

"God is my witness, yes! But you—you—they said that you were dead!"

Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the words which smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there was the accent of regret.

"I am dead," he said simply; "dead to the world and you."

He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.

"How have you lived?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Honorably. Let that suffice. And you?"

The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal—the old, timorous, terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy's face, strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.

"In honor too, I swear! That was my first disgrace, and my last. You bore the weight of my shame? Good God, what can I say? Such nobility, such sacrifice——"

He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who had lost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, but only love. As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone. While crushed with the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, he still was filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy. Even in the very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believed dead was living—living and bearing the burden of the guilt he should have borne—what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.

Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish loveliness he remembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of the man. He saw that life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with this weak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to evil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world. He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw that happiness had done for this character what adversity had done for his own. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity would have wrecked. He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word; whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.

The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in those pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.

"We believed you were dead," he murmured wildly. "They said so; there seemed every proof. But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you—I knew you, though you passed me as a stranger. I stayed on here; they told me you would return. God! what agony this day and night have been!"

Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lest he should be living.

There were many emotions at war in him—scorn, and pity, and wounded love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote a sacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held him speechless. To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to count and claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own to rest upon him—to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago he had accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undo now all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the one whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded for so long—this was not possible to him. Though it would be but his own birthright that he would demand, his own justification that he would establish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craven thing. No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made was unworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade him now to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his early fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother's place to receive the shame of his brother's action; but it had been done so long before—done on the spur of generous affection, and actuated by the strange hazard that made the keeping of a woman's secret demand the same reticence which also saved the young lad's name; to draw back from it now would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.

All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another. He could not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false to the fair repute of their name—and he would not speak with harshness. He felt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught of his brother's life. It had been saved from temptation, and therefore saved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.

The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In the many years that had passed by, although his character had not changed, his position had altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all the power that wealth and independence and the accession to his title could bestow. He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing, ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole existence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet, base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder's place, and accept this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.

"Bertie—Bertie!" he stammered, in hurried appeal—and the name of his youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race—"on my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No one did. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have said that you were innocent; I would—I would have told them how I forged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate that I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and I thought then—then—it was not worth while; it would have broken my father's heart. God help me! I was a coward!"

He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein lay the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude. Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that moved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had learned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused his wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done. Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been brought upon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in his sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon, the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the irresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that should tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril—all these kept him silent.

His brother misinterpreted that silence.

"I am in your power—utterly in your power," he moaned in his fear. "I stand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and our brother are dead? All I have inherited is yours. Do you know that, since you have never claimed it?"

"I know it."

"And you have never come forward to take your rights?"

"What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merely to hold a title."

The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his words fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature. The man who lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, and the purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple, necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco soldier.

"But—great Heaven!—this life of yours? It must be wretchedness?"

"Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it."

The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had suffered himself to show. It stung down to his listener's soul.

"No—no!" he murmured. "You are happier than I. You have no remorse to bear! And yet—to tell the world that I am guilty——"

"You need never tell it; I shall not."

He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, and had well weighed, all he surrendered in that promise—the promise to condemn himself to a barren and hopeless fate forever.

"You will not?"

The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched tongue. The one passion of fear upon him was for himself; even in that moment of supplication his disordered thoughts hovered wildly over the chances of whether, if his elder brother even now asserted his innocence and claimed his birthright, the world and its judges would ever believe him.

Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly made grave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of his own race and of his own Order never had been. His heart was full. The ingratitude and the self-absorption of this life for which his own had been destroyed smote him with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours before he had looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; a deadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, and the world's love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his early days to believe him dead after a deed of shame.

His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, sinking his head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had not changed him greatly; it had merely made him more intensely desirous of the pleasures and the powers of life, more intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the contempt of the world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had stooped to any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His was one of those natures which, having no love of evil for evil's sake, still embrace any form of evil which may save them from the penalty of their own weakness. Now, thus meeting one who for twelve years he had believed must rise from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung his every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness—the desire, at all costs, to be saved.

Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. He had loved his brother as a youth—loved him well enough to take and bear a heavy burden of disgrace in his stead. The old love was not dead; but stronger than itself was his hatred of the shame that had touched their race by the wretched crime that had driven him into exile, and his wondering scorn for the feeble and self-engrossed character that had lived contentedly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by a fictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; he did not know how to support the intolerable pain that oppressed him in the presence of the only living creature of his race; he could not answer for himself what passionate and withering words might not escape him; every instant of their interview was a horrible temptation to him—the temptation to demand from this coward his own justification before the world—the temptation to seize out of those unworthy hands his birthright and his due.

But the temptation—sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened by the strength of right, and well-nigh overwhelming with all its fair, delicious promise for the future—did not conquer him. What resisted it was his own simple instinct of justice; an instinct too straight and true either to yield to self-pity or to passionate desire—justice which made him feel that, since he had chosen to save this weakling once for their lost mother's sake, he was bound forever not to repent nor to retract. He gazed a while longer, silently, at the younger man, who sat, still rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of the freshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on his brother's shoulder. The other started and trembled; he remembered that touch in days of old.

"Do not fear me," he said, gently and very gravely. "I have kept your secret twelve years; I will keep it still. Be happy—be as happy as you can. All I bid of you in return is so to live that in your future your past shall be redeemed."

The words of the saint to the thief were not more merciful, not more noble, than the words with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of his own life, the redemption of his brother's. The other looked at him with a look that was half of terror—terror at the magnitude of this ransom that was given to save him from the bondage of evil.

"My God! You cannot mean it! And you——"

"I shall lead the life fittest for me. I am content in it. It is enough."

The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utterance. Before his memory rose one fair, proud face. "Content!" Ah, Heaven! It was the only lie that had ever passed his lips.

His hand lay still upon his brother's shoulder, leaning more heavily there, in the silence that brooded over the hushed plains.

"Let us part now, and forever. Leave Algeria at once. That is all I ask."

Then, without another word that could add reproach or seek for gratitude, he turned and went away over the great, dim level of the African waste, while the man whom he had saved sat as in stupor; gazing at the brown shadows, and the sleeping herds, and the falling stars that ran across the sky, and doubting whether the voice he had head and the face upon which he had looked were not the visions of a waking dream.



CHAPTER XXXII.

"VENETIA."

How that night was spent Cecil could never recall in full. Vague memories remained with him of wandering over the shadowy country, of seeking by bodily fatigue to kill the thoughts rising in him, of drinking at a little water-channel in the rocks as thirstily as some driven deer, of flinging himself down at length, worn out, to sleep under the hanging brow of a mighty wall of rock; of waking, when the dawn was reddening the east, with the brown plains around him, and far away, under a knot of palms was a goatherd with his flock, like an idyl from the old pastoral life of Syria. He stood looking at the light which heralded the sun, with some indefinite sense of heavy loss, of fresh calamity, upon him. It was only slowly that he remembered all. Years seemed to have been pressed into the three nights and days since he had sat by the bivouac-fire, listening to the fiery words of the little Friend of the Flag.

The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered in yielding up afresh his heritage rolled in on his memory, like the wave of some heavy sea that sweeps down all before it.

When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached him in the green alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed to him that his brother had relied on the personal likeness between them and the similarity of their handwriting to pass off as his the bill in which his own name and that of his friend was forged, no thought had crossed him to take upon himself the lad's sin. It had only been when, brought under the charge, he must, to clear himself, have at once accused the boy, and have betrayed the woman whose reputation was in his keeping, that, rather by generous impulse than by studied intention, he had taken up the burden that he had now carried for so long. Whether or no the money-lenders had been themselves in reality deceived, he could never tell; but it had been certain that, having avowed themselves confident of his guilt, they could never shift the charge on to his brother in the face of his own acceptance of it. So he had saved the youth without premeditation or reckoning of the cost. And now that the full cost was known to him, he had not shrunk back from its payment. Yet that payment was one that gave him a greater anguish than if he had laid down his life in physical martyrdom.

To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless peace; to go back to the old, fresh, fair English woodlands, to go back to the power of command and the delight of free gifts, to go back to men's honor, and reverence, and high esteem—these would have been sweet enough—sweet as food after long famine. But far more than these would it have been to go back and take the hand of his friend once more in the old, unclouded trust of their youth; to go back, and stand free and blameless among his peers, and know that all that man could do to win the heart and the soul of a woman he could at his will do to win hers whose mere glance of careless pity had sufficed to light his life to passion. And he had renounced all this. This was the cost; and he had paid it—paid it because the simple, natural, inflexible law of justice had demanded it.

One whom he had once chosen to save he could not now have deserted, except by what would have been, in his sight, dishonor. Therefore, when the day broke, and the memories of the night came with his awakening, he knew that his future was without hope—without it as utterly as was ever that of any captive shut in darkness, and silence, and loneliness, in a prison, whose only issue was the oubliettes. There is infinite misery in the world, but this one misery is rare; or men would perish from the face of the earth as though the sun withdrew its light.

Alone in that dreary scene, beautiful from its vastness and its solemnity, but unutterably melancholy, unutterably oppressive, he also wondered whether he lived or dreamed.

From among the reeds the plovers were rising; over the barren rocks the dazzling lizards glided; afar off strayed the goats; that was the only sign of animal existence. He had wandered a long way from the caravanserai, and he began to retrace his steps, for his horse was there, and although he had received license to take leisure in returning, he had no home but the camp, no friends but those wild-eyed, leopard-like throng around him like a pack of dogs, each eager for the first glance, the first word; these companions of his adversity and of his perils, whom he had learned to love, with all their vices and all their crimes, for sake of the rough, courageous love that they could give in answer.

He moved slowly back over the desolate tracks of land stretched between him and the Algerian halting-place. He had no fear that he would find his brother there. He knew too well the nature with which he had to deal to hope that old affection would so have outweighed present fear that his debtor would have stayed to meet him yet once more. On the impulse of the ungovernable pain which the other's presence had been, he had bidden him leave Africa at once; now he almost wished he had bid him stay. There was a weary, unsatisfied longing for some touch of love or of gratitude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man whom he remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the hand of their dying mother lying in benediction on the fair, silken curls.