She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old Invalide had done in the '89—a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his own Order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like, scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid luster of sweet, contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her wrong in silence—she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the ax fall down on the proud, snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips had kissed,—a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out,—and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make their feast. She stood and laughed by the side of the gray, angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed.

That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, had seen the entry of the Marseillais to Paris. She knew what the woman of the people had felt when she had bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters that fair and fallen head.

"I could do it—I could do it," she thought, with the savage instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost only its ferocity—the same ferocity as had moved the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head of her rival. The school in which the child-soldier had been reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave in their inborn, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the human shares with the animal nature. There had been no more to teach her that these were criminal or forbidden than there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves.

Now, she acted on her impulse; her impulse of open scorn of rank, of reckless vindication of her right to do just whatsoever pleasured her; and she went boldly forward and dashed aside, with no gentle hand, the folds that hung before the entrance of the tent, and stood there with the gleam of the starry night and the glow of the torches behind her, so that her picturesque and brightly colored form looked painted on a dusky, lurid background of shadow and of flame.

The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made them both look up; they were Venetia Corona and a Levantine woman, who was her favorite and most devoted attendant, and had been about her from her birth. The tent was the first of three set aside for her occupancy, and had been adorned with as much luxury as was procurable, and with many of the rich and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so far as they could be hastily collected by the skill and quickness of the French intendance. Cigarette stood silently looking at the scene on which she had thus broken without leave or question; she saw nothing of it except one head lifted in surprise at her entrance—just such a head, just so proudly carried, just so crowned with gleaming hair as that which the Marseillaise had dragged through the dust of the streets and cast out into the lust of the sharks. Venetia hesitated a moment in astonished wonder; then, with the grace and the courtesy of her race, rose and approached the entrance of her tent, in which that fierce—half a soldier, half a child—was standing, with the fitful, reddened light behind. She recognized whose it was.

"Is it you, ma petite?" she said kindly. "Come within. Do not be afraid——"

She spoke with the gentle consideration of a great lady to one whom she admired for her heroism, compassionated for her position, and thought naturally in need of such encouragement. She had liked the frank, fearless, ardent brunette face of the Little Friend of the Flag; she had liked her fiery and indomitable defense of the soldier of Zaraila; she felt an interest in her as deep as her pity, and she was above the scruples which many women of her rank might have had as to the fitness of entering into conversation with this child of the army. She was gentle to her as to a young bird, a young kitten, a young colt; what her brother had said of the vivandiere's love for one whom the girl only knew as a trooper of Chasseurs filled with an indefinable compassion the woman who knew him as her own equal and of her own Order.

Cigarette, for once, answered nothing; her eyes very lowering, burning, savage.

"You wish to see me?" Venetia asked once more. "Come nearer. Have no fear—"

The one word unloosed the spell which had kept Cigarette speechless; the one word was an insult beyond endurance, that lashed all the worst spirit in her into flame.

"Fear!" she cried, with a camp oath, whose blasphemy was happily unintelligible to her listener. "Fear! You think I fear you!—the darling of the army, who saved the squadron at Zaraila, who has seen a thousand days of bloodshed, who has killed as many men with her own hand as any Lascar among them all—fear you, you hothouse flower, you paradise-bird, you silver pheasant, who never did aught but spread your dainty colors in the sun, and never earned so much as the right to eat a pierce of black bread, if you had your deserts! Fear you—I! Why! do you not know that I could kill you where you stand as easily as I could wring the neck of any one of those gold-winged orioles that flew above your head to-day, and who have more right to live than you, for they do at least labor in their own fashion for their food, and their drink, and their dwelling? Dieu de Dieu! Why, I have killed Arabs, I tell you—great, gaunt, grim men—and made them bite the dust under my fire. Do you think I would check for a moment at dealing you death, you beautiful, useless, honeyed, poisoned, painted exotic, that has every wind tempered to you, and thinks the world only made to bear the fall of your foot!"

The fury of words was poured out without pause, and with an intense passion vibrating through them; the wine was hot in her veins, the hate was hot in her heart; her eyes glittered with murderous meaning, and she darted with one swift bound to the side of the rival she loathed, with the pistol half out of her belt; she expected to see the one she threatened recoil, quail, hear the threat in terror; she mistook the nature with which she dealt. Venetia Corona never moved, never gave a sign of the amazement that awoke in her; but she put her hand out and clasped the barrel of the weapon, while her eyes looked down into the flashing, looming, ferocious ones that menaced her, with calm, contemptuous rebuke, in which something of infinite pity was mingled.

"Child, are you mad?" she said gravely. "Brave natures do not stoop to assassination, which you seem to deify. If you have any reason to feel evil against me, tell me what it is. I always repair a wrong, if I can. But as for those threats, they are most absurd if you do not mean them; they are most wicked if you do."

The tranquil, unmoved, serious words stilled the vehement passion she rebuked with a strange and irresistible power; under her gaze the savage lust in Cigarette's eyes died out, and their lids drooped over them; the dusky, scarlet color failed from her cheeks; for the first time in her life she felt humiliated, vanquished, awed. If this "aristocrat" had shown one sign of fear, one trace of apprehension, all her violent and reckless hatred would have reigned on, and, it might have been, have rushed from threat to execution; but showing the only quality, that of courage, for which she had respect, her great rival confused and disarmed her. She was only sensible, with a vivid, agonizing sense of shame, that her only cause of hatred against this woman was that he loved her. And this she would have died a thousand deaths rather than have acknowledged.

She let the pistol pass into Venetia's grasp; and stood, irresolute and ashamed, her fluent tongue stricken dumb, her intent to wound, and sting, and outrage with every vile, coarse jest she knew, rendered impossible to execute. The purity and the dignity of her opponent's presence had their irresistible influence, an influence too strong for even her debonair and dangerous insolence. She hated herself in that moment more than she hated her rival.

Venetia laid the loaded pistol down, away from both, and seated herself on the cushions from which she had risen. Then she looked once more, long and quietly, at her unknown antagonist.

"Well?" she said, at length. "Why do you venture to come here? And why do you feel this malignity toward a stranger who never saw you until this morning?"

Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, though a rare and galling sense of intense inferiority, of intense mortification, was upon her; though she would almost have given the Cross which was on her breast that she had never come into this woman's sight.

"Oh, ah!" she answered recklessly, with the red blood flushing her face again at the only evasion of truth of which the little desperado, with all her sins, had ever been guilty. "I hate you, Milady, because of your Order—because of your nation—because of your fine, dainty ways—because of your aristocrat's insolence—because you treat my soldiers like paupers—because you are one of those who do no more to have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun, and who oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it never has carried a twig or a moss!"

Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and of surprise that bitterly discomfited the speaker. To Venetia Corona the girl-soldier seemed mad; but it was a madness that interested her, and she knew at a glance that this child of the army was of no common nature and no common mind.

"I do not wish to discuss democracy with you," she answered, with a tone that sounded strangely tranquil to Cigarette after the scathing acrimony of her own. "I should probably convince you as little as you would convince me; and I never waste words. But I heard you to-day claim a certain virtue—justice. How do you reconcile with that your very hasty condemnation of a stranger of whose motives, actions, and modes of life it is impossible you can have any accurate knowledge?"

Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her heart was hot with rage. She had come prepared to upbraid and to outrage this patrician with every jibe and grossness camp usage could supply her with, and—she stood dumb before her! She could only feel an all-absorbing sense of being ridiculous, and contemptible, and puerile in her sight.

"You bring two charges against me," said Venetia, when she had vainly awaited answer. "That I treat your comrades like paupers, and that I rob the people—my own people, I imagine you to mean—of their dues. In the first, how will you prove it?—in the second, how can you know it?"

"Pardieu, Milady!" swore Cigarette recklessly, seeking only to hold her own against the new sense of inferiority and of inability that oppressed her. "I was in the hospital when your fruits and your wines came; and as for your people, I don't speak of them,—they are all slaves, they say, in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can turn any gold in the furrows—I speak of the people. Of the toiling, weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes who labor on, and on, and on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sunlight and take your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered poor! What right have you to have your path strewn with roses, and every pain spared from you; only to lift your voice and say, 'Let that be done,' to see it done?—to find life one long, sweet summer day of gladness and abundance, while they die out in agony by thousands, ague-stricken, famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want only of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn to dawn like gold upon your head?"

Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her hearer's face grew very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke, those luminous, earnest eyes, whose power even the young democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers.

"Ah, child! Do you think we never think of that? You wrong me—you wrong my Order. There are many besides myself who turn over that terrible problem as despairingly as you can ever do. As far as in us lies, we strive to remedy its evil; the uttermost effort can do but little, but that little is only lessened—fearfully lessened—whenever Class is arrayed against Class by that blind antagonism which animates yourself."

Cigarette's intelligence was too rapid not to grasp the truths conveyed by these words; but she was in no mood to acknowledge them.

"Nom de Dieu, Milady!" she swore in her teeth. "If you do turn over the problem—you aristocrats—it is pretty work, no doubt! Just putting the bits of a puzzle-ball together so long as the game pleases you, and leaving the puzzle in chaos when you are tired! Oh, ha! I know how fine ladies and fine gentlemen play at philanthropies! But I am a child of the People, mark you; and I only see how birth is an angel that gives such as you eternal sunlight and eternal summer, and how birth is a devil that drives down the millions into a pit of darkness, of crime, of ignorance, of misery, of suffering, where they are condemned before they have opened their eyes to existence, where they are sentenced before they have left their mothers' bosoms in infancy. You do not know what that darkness is. It is night—it is ice—it is hell!"

Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard; pain had been so far from her own life, and there was an intense eloquence in the low, deep words that seemed to thrill through the stillness.

"Nor do you know how many shadows checker that light which you envy! But I have said; it is useless for me to argue these questions with you. You commence with a hatred of a class; all justice is over wherever that element enters. If I were what you think, I should bid you leave my presence which you have entered so rudely. I do not desire to do that. I am sure that the heroine of Zaraila has something nobler in her than mere malignity against a person who can never have injured her; and I would endure her insolence for the sake of awakening her justice. A virtue, that was so great in her at noon, cannot be utterly dead at nightfall."

Cigarette's fearless eyes drooped under the gaze of those bent so searchingly, yet so gently, upon her; but only for a moment. She raised them afresh with their old dauntless frankness.

"Dieu! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth from a French soldier, and failed to get them! I hate you, never mind why—I do, though you never harmed me. I came here for two reasons: one, because I wanted to look at you close—you are not like anything that I ever saw; the other, because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage you, if I could find a way how. And you will not let me do it. I do not know what it is in you."

In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer homage than lay in that irate, reluctant wonder of this fiery foe.

She smiled slightly.

"My poor child, it is rather something in yourself—a native nobility that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent as your soul desires—"

Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience.

"Pardieu! Do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my 'insolence' in earnest! You may be a sovereign grand dame everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you for me, I promise you!"

"I do not seek to do so. If I did not feel interest in you, do you suppose I should suffer for a moment the ignorant rudeness of an ill-bred child? You fail in the tact, as in the courtesy, that belong to your nation."

The rebuke was gentle, but it was all the more severe for its very serenity. It cut Cigarette to the quick; it covered her with an overwhelming sense of mortification and of failure. She was too keen and too just, despite all her vanity, not to feel that she had deserved the condemnation, and not to know that her opponent had all the advantage and all the justice on her side. She had done nothing by coming here; nothing except to appear as an insolent and wayward child before her superb rival, and to feel a very anguish of inferiority before the grace, the calm, the beauty, the nameless, potent charm of this woman, whom she had intended to humiliate and injure!

The inborn truth within her, the native generosity and candor that soon or late always overruled every other element in the Little One, conquered her now. She dashed down her Cross on the ground, and trod passionately on the decoration she adored.

"I disgrace it the first day I wear it! You are right, though I hate you, and you are as beautiful as a sorceress! There is no wonder he loves you!"

"He! Who?"

There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the interview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose.

The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she said; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many emotions in her.

"The man who carves the toys you give your dog to break!" she answered bitterly. "Dieu de Dieu! he loves you. When he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he said so; but he never knew what he said, and he never knew that I heard him. You are like the women of his old world; though through you he got treated like a dog, he loves you!"

"Of whom do you venture to speak?"

The cold, calm dignity of the question, whose very tone was a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of Cigarette's speech.

"Sacre bleu! Of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his wares to you like a hawker. And you think it insult, I will warrant!—insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to ennoble him, to dare to love Mme. la Princesse Corona! I think otherwise. I think that Mme. la Princesse Corona never had a love of so much honor, though she has had princes and nobles and all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, through that beauty that is like a spell!"

Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own hatred for her rival, which drove her to magnify the worth of the passion of which she was so jealous, that she might lessen, if she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, she never paused to care what she said, or heed what its consequences might become. She felt incensed, amazed, irritated, to see no trace of any emotion come on her hearer's face; the hot, impetuous, expansive, untrained nature underrated the power for self-command of the Order she so blindly hated.

"You speak idly and at random, like the child you are," the grande dame answered her with chill, contemptuous rebuke. "I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you his confidante in such a matter?"

"He!" retorted Cigarette. "He belongs to your class, Milady. He is as silent as the grave. You might kill him, and he would never show it hurt. I only know what he muttered in his fever."

"When you attended him?"

"Not I!" cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that she was betraying herself. "He lay in the scullion's tent where I was; that was all; and he was delirious with the shot-wounds. Men often are—"

"Wait! Hear me a little while, before you rush on in this headlong and foolish speech," interrupted her auditor, who had in a moment's rapid thought decided on her course with this strange, wayward nature. "You err in the construction you have placed on the words, whatever they were, which you heard. The gentleman—he is a gentleman—whom you speak of bears me no love. We are almost strangers. But by a strange chain of circumstances he is connected with my family; he once had great friendship with my brother; for reasons that I do not know, but which are imperative with him, he desires to keep his identity unsuspected by everyone; an accident alone revealed it to me, and I have promised him not to divulge it. You understand?"

Cigarette gave an affirmative gesture. Her eyes were fastened suddenly, yet with a deep, bright glow in them, upon her companion; she was beginning to see her way through his secret—a secret she was too intrinsically loyal even now to dream of betraying.

"You spoke very nobly for him to-day. You have the fealty of one brave character to another, I am sure!" pursued Venetia Corona, purposely avoiding all hints of any warmer feeling on her listener's part, since she saw how tenacious the girl was of any confession of it. "You would do him service if you could, I fancy. Am I right?"

"Oh, yes!" answered Cigarette, with an over-assumption of carelessness. "He is bon zig; we always help each other. Besides, he is very good to my men. What is it you want of me?"

"To preserve secrecy on what I have told you for his sake; and to give him a message from me."

Cigarette laughed scornfully; she was furious with herself for standing obediently like a chidden child to hear this patrician's bidding, and to do her will. And yet, try how she would, she could not shake off the spell under which those grave, sweet, lustrous eyes of command held her.

"Pardieu, Milady! Do you think I babble like any young drunk with his first measure of wine? As for your message, you had better let him come and hear what you have to say; I cannot promise to remember it!"

"Your answer is reckless; I want a serious one. You spoke like a brave and a just friend to him to-day; are you willing to act as such to-night? You have come here strangely, rudely, without pretext or apology; but I think better of you than you would allow me to do, if I judged only from the surface. I believe that you have loyalty, as I know that you have courage."

Cigarette set her teeth hard.

"What of that?"

"This of it. That one who has them will never cherish malice unjustifiably, or fail to fulfill a trust."

Cigarette's clear, brown skin grew very red.

"That is true," she muttered reluctantly. Her better nature was growing uppermost, though she strove hard to keep the evil one predominant.

"Then you will cease to feel hatred toward me for so senseless a reason as that I belong to an aristocracy that offends you; and you will remain silent on what I tell you concerning the one whom you know as Louis Victor?"

Cigarette nodded assent; the sullen fire-glow still burned in her eyes, but she succumbed to the resistless influence which the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had over her. She was studying Venetia Corona all this while with the keen, rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy; studying her features, her form, her dress, her attitude, all the many various and intangible marks of birth and breeding which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem so strange, so dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the while the sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own boldness, her own debasement was growing upon her, eating, sharply into the metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet making her heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself.

"He is of your Order, then?" she asked abruptly.

"He was—yes."

"Oh, ha!" cried Cigarette, with her old irony. "Then he must be always, mustn't he? You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King's purple or a Roumi's canvas shirt. Blood tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some say my father was a Prince of France—maybe! So, he is of your Order? Bah! I knew that the first day I saw his hands. Do you want me to tell you why he lives among us, buried like this?"

"Not if you violate any confidence to do so."

"Pardieu! He makes no confidence, I promise you. Not ten words will Monsieur say, if he can help it, about anything. He is as silent as a lama. But we learn things without being told in camp; and I know well enough he is here to save someone else, in someone's place; it is a sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom."

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve of her class, made her shrink from discussing the history of one whom she knew—shrink from having any argument on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy. Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the only means through which she could send him a warning that must be sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the "aristocrat," to whom she was so singular and novel a rarity as though she were some young savage of desert western isles.

"Look you, Milady," said Cigarette, half sullenly, half passionately, for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her in their utterance, "that man suffers; his life here is a hell upon earth—I don't mean for the danger, he is bon soldat; but for the indignity, the subordination, the license, the brutality, the tyranny. He is as if he were chained to the galleys. He never says anything. Oh, no! he is of your kind you know! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu! he suffers. Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him? Can you ransom him in no way? Can you go away out of Africa and leave him in this living death to get killed and thrust into the sand, like his comrade the other day?"

Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; they cut her to the soul. It was not for the first time that the awful desolation of his future had been present before her; but it was the first time that the fate to which she would pass away and leave him had been so directly in words before her. Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her better nature, and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity with which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed her rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid skill. She was pleading against herself; no matter. In that instant she was capable of crucifying herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent.

"I have heard," she went on vehemently, for the utterance to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, "that you of the Noblesse are stanch as steel to your own people. It is the best virtue that you have. Well, he is of your people. Will you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave him to eat his heart out in bitterness and misery? He was your brother's friend; he was known to you in his early time; you said so. And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Milady, not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage?—to go back to your palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and be happy, while this man is left on bearing his yoke here?—and it is a yoke that galls, that kills!—bearing it until, in some day of desperation, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and makes its pulse cease forever? If you do, you patricians are worse still than I thought you!"

Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came over her face as the vivid phrases followed each other. She was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the challenge and the insolence of their manner. She knew that the Little One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious to conceal her love; and she was touched, not less by the magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus prefigured before her.

"Your reproaches are unneeded," she replied, slowly and wearily. "I could not abandon one who was once the friend of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great pain. But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think I could do with so much ease. I am not in its secret; I do not know the reason of its seeming suicide; I have no more connection with its intricacies than you have. This gentleman has chosen his own path; it is not for me to change his choice or spy into his motives."

Cigarette's flashing, searching eyes bent all their brown light on her.

"Mme. Corona, you are courageous; to those who are so, all things are possible."

"A great fallacy! You must have seen many courageous men vanquished. But what would you imply by it?"

"That you can help this man, if you will."

"Would that I could; but I can discern no means—"

"Make them."

Even in that moment her listener smiled involuntarily at the curt, imperious tones, decisive as Napoleon's "Partons!" before the Passage of the Alps.

"Be certain, if I can, I will. Meantime, there is one pressing danger of which you must be my medium to warn him. He and my brother must not meet. Tell him that the latter, knowing him only as Louis Victor, and interested in the incidents of his military career, will seek him out early to-morrow morning before we quit the camp. I must leave it to him to avoid the meeting as best he may be able."

Cigarette smiled grimly.

"You do not know much of the camp. Victor is only a bas-officier; if his officers call him up, he must come, or be thrashed like a slave for contumacy. He has no will of his own."

Venetia gave an irrepressible gesture of pain.

"True; I forgot. Well, go and send him to me. My brother must be taken into his confidence, whatever that confidence reveals. I will tell him so. Go and send him to me; it is the last chance."

Cigarette gave no movement of assent; all the jealous rage in her flared up afresh to stifle the noble and unselfish instincts under which she had been led during the later moments. A coarse and impudent scoff rose to her tongue, but it remained unuttered; she could not speak it under that glance, which held the evil in her in subjection, and compelled her reluctant reverence against her will.

"Tell him to come here to me," repeated Venetia, with the calm decision of one to whom any possibility of false interpretation of her motives never occurred, and who was habituated to the free action that accompanied an unassailable rank. "My brother must know what I know. I shall be alone, and he can make his way hither, without doubt, unobserved. Go and say this to him. You are his loyal little friend and comrade."

"If I be, I do not see why I am to turn your lackey, Madame," said Cigarette bitterly. "If you want him, you can send for him by other messengers!"

Venetia Corona looked at her steadfastly, with a certain contempt in the look.

"Then your pleading for him was all insincere? Let the matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired."

The undeviating gentleness of the tone made the rebuke cut deeper, as her first rebuke had cut, than any sterner censure or more peremptory dismissal could have done. Cigarette stood irresolute, ashamed, filled with rage, torn by contrition, impatient, wounded, swayed by jealous rage and by the purer impulses she strove to stifle.

The Cross she had tossed down caught her sight as it glittered on the carpet strewn over the hard earth; she stooped and raised it; the action sufficed to turn the tide with her impressionable, ardent, capricious nature; she would not disgrace that.

"I will go," she muttered in her throat; "and you—you—O God! no wonder men love you when even I cannot hate you!"

Almost ere the words were uttered she had dashed aside the hangings before the tent entrance, and had darted out into the night air. Venetia Corona gazed after the swiftly flying figure as it passed over the starlit ground, lost in amazement, in pity, and in regret; wondering afresh if she had only dreamed of this strange interview in the Algerian camp, which seemed to have come and gone with the blinding rapidity of lightning.

"A little tigress!" she thought; "and yet with infinite nobility, with wonderful germs of good in her. Of such a nature what a rare life might have been made! As it is, her childhood we smile at and forgive; but, great Heaven! what will be her maturity, her old age! Yet how she loves him! And she is so brave she will not show it."

With the recollection came the remembrance of Cigarette's words as to his own passion for herself, and she grew paler as it did so. "God forbid he should have that pain, too!" she murmured. "What could it be save misery for us both!"

Yet she did not thrust the fancy from her with contemptuous nonchalance as she had done every other of the many passions she had excited and disdained; it had a great sadness and a greater terror for her. She dreaded it slightly for herself.

She wished now that she had not sent for him. But it was done; it was for sake of their old friendship; and she was not one to vainly regret what was unalterable, or to desert what she deemed generous and right for the considerations of prudence or of egotism.



CHAPTER XXXV.

ORDEAL BY FIRE.

Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned throughout the camp as the men surrendered themselves to the enjoyment of the largesses of food and of wine allotted to them by their Marshal's command in commemoration of Zaraila, one alone remained apart; silent and powerless to rouse himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endurance, of their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him well, and they also loved him too well to press such participation on him. They knew that it was no lack of sympathy with them that made him so grave amid their mirth, so mute amid their volubility. Some thought that he was sorely wounded by the delay of the honors promised him. Others, who knew him better, thought that it was the loss of his brother-exile which weighed on him, and made all the scene around him full of pain. None approached him; but while they feasted in their tents, making the celebration of Zaraila equal to the Jour de Mazagran, he sat alone over a picket-fire on the far outskirts of the camp.

His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to risk with every moment that ordeal of recognition which he so utterly dreaded; and to flee was to leave his name to the men, with whom he had served so long, covered with obloquy and odium, buried under all the burning shame and degradation of a traitor's and deserter's memory. The latter course was impossible to him; the only alternative was to trust that the vastness of that great concrete body, of which he was one unit, would suffice to hide him from the discovery of the friend whose love he feared as he feared the hatred of no foe. He had not been seen as he had passed the flag-staff; there was little fear that in the few remaining hours any chance could bring the illustrious guest of a Marshal to the outpost of the scattered camp.

Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pinewood; she was so near, and he could not behold her!—though he might never see her face again; though they must pass out of Africa, home to the land that he desired as only exiles can desire, while he still remained silent, knowing that, until death should release him, there could be no other fate for him, save only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncompanioned, unpitied, unrewarded life. But to break his word as the price of his freedom was not possible to his nature or in his creed. This fate was, in chief, of his own making; he accepted it without rebellion, because rebellion would have been in this case both cowardice and self-pity.

He was not conscious of any heroism in this; it seemed to him the only course left to a man who, in losing the position, had not abandoned the instincts of a gentleman.

The evening wore away, unmeasured by him; the echoes of the soldiers' mirth came dimly on his ear; the laughter, and the songs, and the music were subdued into one confused murmur by distance; there was nothing near him except a few tethered horses, and far way the mounted figure of the guard who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encampment. The fire burned on, for it had been piled high before it was abandoned; the little white dog of his regiment was curled at his feet; he sat motionless, sunk in thought, with his head drooped upon his breast. The voice of Cigarette broke on his musing.

"Beau sire, you are wanted yonder."

He looked up wearily; could he never be at peace? He did not notice that the tone of the greeting was rough and curt; he did not notice that there was a stormy darkness, a repressed bitterness, stern and scornful, on the Little One's face; he only thought that the very dogs were left sometimes at rest and unchained, but a soldier never.

"You are wanted!" repeated Cigarette, with imperious contempt.

He rose on the old instinct of obedience.

"For what?"

She stood looking at him without replying; her mouth was tightly shut in a hard line that pressed inward all its soft and rosy prettiness. She was seeing how haggard his face was, how heavy his eyes, how full of fatigue his movements. Her silence recalled him to the memory of the past day.

"Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sympathy in all your honors," he said gently, as he laid his hand on her shoulder. "Believe me, it was unintentional. No one knows better than I how richly you deserved them; no one rejoices more that you should have received them."

The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion; she shook herself roughly out of his hold.

"Point de phrases! All the army is at my back; do you think I cannot do without you? Sympathy too! Bah! We don't know those fine words in camp. You are wanted, I tell you—go!"

"But where?"

"To your Silver Pheasant yonder—go!"

"Who? I do not—"

"Dame! Can you not understand? Milady wants to see you; I told her I would send you to her. You can use your dainty sentences with her; she is of your Order!"

"What! she wishes—"

"Go!" reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot. "You know the great tent where she is throned in honor—Morbleu!—as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my soldiers' linen were not of more use and more deserved such lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never done aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She waits for you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, I tell you. She is of your own people; we are not!"

The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one after another, rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred repressed emotions. He paused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick upon him; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the evening shadows.

Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very evil, almost savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, that ached so hotly in her, and was chained down by that pride which was as intense in the Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court. Reckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex would have deemed, and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had it been returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the People was as sensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest and chastest among women could have been; she dreaded above every other thing that he should ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired his love.

Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural instinct to do the thing that was right, even to her foes, any one of the unstudied and unanalyzed qualities in her had made her serve him even at her rival's bidding. But it had cost her none the less hardly because so manfully done; none the less did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid, childlike fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat in her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty which had subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self-sacrifice which grew side by side with the baser impulses of passion.

As she crouched down by the side of the fire all the gracious, spiritual light that had been upon her face was gone; there was something of the goaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity of a brave animal hard-pressed and over-driven.

Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her love for him, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, and the desire of vengeance that reigned in her. Carried away by the first, she had, for the hour, risen above the last, and allowed the nobler wish to serve and rescue him to prevail over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was ever premeditated; all was the offspring of the caprices of the impulse of the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed; she was only sensible of the burning envy that consumed her of this woman who seemed to her more than mortal in her wonderful, fair loveliness, in her marvelous difference from everything of their sex that the camp and the barrack ever showed.

"And I have sent him to her when I should have fired my pistol into her breast!" she thought, as she sat by the dying embers. And she remembered once more the story of the Marseilles fisherwoman. She understood that terrible vengeance under the hot, southern sun, beside the ruthless, southern seas.



Meanwhile he, who so little knew or heeded how he occupied her heart, passed unnoticed through the movements of the military crowds, crossed the breadth that parted the encampment from the marquees of the generals and their guests, gave the countersign and approached unarrested, and so far unseen save by the sentinels, the tents of the Corona suite. The Marshal and his male visitors were still over their banquet wines; she had withdrawn early, on the plea of fatigue; there was no one to notice his visit except the men on guard, who concluded that he went by command. In the dusky light, for the moon was very young, and the flare of the torches made the shadows black and uncertain, no one recognized him; the few soldiers stationed about saw one of their own troopers, and offered him no opposition, made him no question. He knew the password; that was sufficient. The Levantine waiting near the entrance drew the tent-folds aside and signed to him to enter. Another moment, and he was in the presence of her mistress, in that dim, amber light from the standing candelabra, in that heavy, soft-scented air perfumed from the aloe-wood burning in a brazier, through which he saw, half blinded at first coming from the darkness without, that face which subdued and dazzled even the antagonism and the lawlessness of Cigarette.

He bowed low before her, preserving that distant ceremonial due from the rank he ostensibly held to hers.

"Madame, this is very merciful! I know not how to thank you."

She motioned to him to take a seat near to her, while the Levantine, who knew nothing of the English tongue, retired to the farther end of the tent.

"I only kept my word," she answered, "for we leave the camp to-morrow; Africa next week."

"So soon!"

She saw the blood forsake the bronzed fairness of his face, and leave the dusky pallor there. It wounded her as if she suffered herself. For the first time she believed what the Little One had said—that this man loved her.

"I sent for you," she continued hurriedly, her graceful languor and tranquillity for the first time stirred and quickened by emotion, almost by embarrassment. "It was very strange, it was very painful, for me to trust that child with such a message. But you know us of old; you know we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest or outward semblance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue constructions. There are many things I desire to say to you——"

She paused; he merely bent his head; he could not trust the calmness of his voice in answer.

"First," she continued, "I must entreat you to allow me to tell Philip what I know. You cannot conceive how intensely oppressive it becomes to me to have any secret from him. I never concealed so much as a thought from my brother in all my life, and to evade even a mute question from his brave, frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him."

"Anything else," he muttered. "Ask me anything else. For God's sake, do not let him dream that I live!"

"But why? You still speak to me in enigmas. To-morrow, moreover, before we leave, he intends to seek you out as what he thinks you—a soldier of France. He is interested by all he hears of your career; he was first interested by what I told him of you when he saw the ivory carvings at my villa. I asked the little vivandiere to tell you this, but, on second thoughts it seemed best to see you myself once more, as I had promised."

There was a slow weariness in the utterance of the words. She had said that she could not reflect on leaving him to such a fate as this of his in Africa without personal suffering, or without an effort to induce him to reconsider his decision to condemn himself to it for evermore.

"That French child," she went on rapidly, to cover both the pain that she felt and that she dealt, "forced her entrance here in a strange fashion; she wished to see me, I suppose, and to try my courage too. She is a little brigand, but she had a true and generous nature, and she loves you very loyally."

"Cigarette?" he asked wearily; his thoughts could not stay for either the pity or interest for her in this moment. "Oh, no! I trust not. I have done nothing to win her love, and she is a fierce little condottiera who disdains all such weakness. She forced her way in here? That was unpardonable; but she seems to bear a singular dislike to you."

"Singular, indeed! I never saw her until to-day."

He answered nothing; the conviction stole on him that Cigarette hated her because he loved her.

"And yet she brought you my message?" pursued his companion. "That seems her nature—violent passions, yet thorough loyalty. But time is precious. I must urge on you what I bade you come to hear. It is to implore you to put your trust, your confidence in Philip. You have acknowledged to me that you are guiltless—no one who knows what you once were could ever doubt it for an instant—then let him hear this, let him be your judge as to what course is right and what wrong for you to pursue. It is impossible for me to return to Europe knowing you are living thus and leaving you to such a fate. What motive you have to sentence yourself to such eternal banishment I am ignorant; but all I ask of you is, confide in him. Let him learn that you live; let him decide whether or not this sacrifice of yourself be needed. His honor is an punctilious as that of any man on earth; his friendship you can never doubt. Why conceal anything from him?"

His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once before had chilled her to the soul.

"Do you think, if I could speak in honor, I should not tell you all?"

A flush passed over her face, the first that the gaze of any man had ever brought there. She understood him.

"But," she said, gently and hurriedly, "may it not be that you overrate the obligations of honor? I know that many a noble-hearted man has inexorably condemned himself to a severity of rule that a dispassionate judge of his life might deem very exaggerated, very unnecessary. It is so natural for an honorable man to so dread that he should do a dishonorable thing through self-interest or self-pity, that he may very well overestimate the sacrifice required of him through what he deems justice or generosity. May it not be so with you? I can conceive no reason that can be strong enough to require of you such fearful surrender of every hope, such utter abandonment of your own existence."

Her voice failed slightly over the last words; she could not think with calmness of the destiny that he accepted. Involuntarily some prescience of pain that would forever pursue her own life unless his were rescued lent an intense earnestness, almost entreaty, to her argument. She did not bear him love as yet; she had seen too little of him, too lately only known him as her equal; but there were in her, stranger than she knew, a pity, a tenderness, a regret, an honor for him that drew her toward him with an indefinable attraction, and would sooner or later warm and deepen into love. Already it was sufficient, though she deemed it but compassion and friendship, to make her feel that an intolerable weight would be heavy on her future if his should remain condemned to this awful isolation and oblivion while she alone of all the world should know and hold his secret.

He started from her side as he heard, and paced to and fro the narrow limits of the tent like a caged animal. For the first time it grew a belief to him, in his thoughts, that were he free, were he owner of his heritage, he could rouse her heart from its long repose and make her love him with the soft and passionate warmth of his dead Arab mistress—a thing that had been so distant from her negligence and her pride as warmth from the diamond or the crystal. He felt as if the struggle would kill him. He had but to betray his brother, and he would be unchained from his torture; he had but to break his word, and he would be at liberty. All the temptation that had before beset him paled and grew as naught beside this possibility of the possession of her love which dawned upon him now.

She, knowing nothing of this which moved him, believed only that he weighed her words in hesitation, and strove to turn the balance.

"Hear me," she said softly. "I do not bid you decide; I only bid you confide in Philip—in one who, as you must well remember, would sooner cut off his own hand than counsel a base thing or do an unfaithful act. You are guiltless of this charge under which you left England; you endure it rather than do what you deem dishonorable to clear yourself. That is noble—that is great. But it is possible, as I say, that you may exaggerate the abnegation required of you. Whoever was the criminal should suffer. Yours is magnificent magnanimity; but it may surely be also false justice alike to yourself and the world."

He turned on her almost fiercely in the suffering she dealt him.

"It is! It was a madness—a Quixotism—the wild, unconsidered act of a fool. What you will! But it is done; it was done forever—so long ago—when your young eyes looked on me in the pity of your innocent childhood. I cannot redeem its folly now by adding to it baseness. I cannot change the choice of a madman by repenting of it with a coward's caprice. Ah, God! you do not know what you do—how you tempt. For pity's sake, urge me no more. Help me—strengthen me—to be true to my word. Do not bid me do evil that I may enter paradise through my sin!"

He threw himself down beside her as the incoherent words poured out, his arms flung across the pile of cushions on which he had been seated, his face hidden on them. His teeth clinched on his tongue till the blood flowed; he felt that if the power of speech remained with him he should forswear every law that had bound him to silence, and tell her all, whatever the cost.

She looked at him, she heard him, moved to a greater agitation than ever had had sway over her; for the first time the storm winds that swept by her did not leave her passionless and calm; this man's whole future was in her hands. She could bid him seek happiness dishonored; or cleave to honor, and accept wretchedness forever.

It was a fearful choice to hold.

"Answer me! Choose for me!" he said vehemently. "Be my law, and be my God!"

She gave a gesture almost of fear.

"Hush, hush! The woman does not live who should be that to any man."

"You shall be it to me! Choose for me!"

"I cannot! You leave so much in darkness and untold——"

"Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for me, save one thing only—that I love you."

She shuddered.

"This is madness! What have you seen of me?"

"Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no other woman. Ah! I was but an African trooper in your sight, but in my own I was your equal. You only saw a man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle charity were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every grace and gesture. You forget! I was nothing to you; but you were so much to me. I loved you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear. It is madness! Oh, yes! I should have said so, too, in those old years. A madness I would have sworn never to feel. But I have lived a hard life since then, and no men ever love like those who suffer. Now you know all; know the worst that tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my happiness with the price of dishonor as the one desire—to stand in my rightful place before men, and be free to strive with you for what they have not won!"

As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her face; it grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, as though to draw her breath was oppressive. The wild words overwhelmed her with their surprise not less than they shocked her with their despair. An intense truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had done. She had no love for him yet, or she thought not; she was very proud, and resisted such passions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that such love might be possible. It was the nearest submission to it she had ever given. She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept silence long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and her dignity could be touched with it, she felt something akin to terror at the magnitude of the choice left to her.

"You give me great pain, great surprise," she murmured. "All I can trust is that your love is of such sudden birth that it will die as rapidly—"

He interrupted her.

"You mean that, under no circumstances—not even were I to possess my inheritance—could you give me any hope that I might wake your tenderness?"

She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, haughty instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had made her so indifferent—and many said so pitiless—to all. At his gaze, however her own changed and softened, grew shadowed, and then wandered from him.

"I do not say that. I cannot tell——"

The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal from him what half dawned on herself—the possibility that, more in his presence and under different circumstances, she might feel her heart go to him with a warmer and a softer impulse than that of friendship. The heroism of his life had moved her greatly.

His head dropped down again upon his arms.

"O God! It is possible, at least! I am blind—mad. Make my choice for me! I know not what to do."

The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down over her colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that made her heart ache with a sorrow only less than his own. The grief was for him chiefly; yet something of it for herself. Some sense of present bitterness that fell on her from his fate, some foreboding of future regret that would inevitably and forever follow her when she left him to his loneliness and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed and cloudless existence had encountered. Love was dimly before her as the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unacknowledged, but possible under certain conditions, only known as such when it was also impossible through circumstances.

He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; these were the only means through which any man could have ever reached her sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, though a very noble and a very generous woman, she was also a woman of the world. She knew that it was not for her to say even thus much to a man who was in one sense well-nigh a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt sick at heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had moved her previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, and throw off the imputed shame that lay on him. Yet all the grand traditions of her race forbade her to counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led through a forfeiture of honor.

"Choose for me, Venetia!" he muttered at last once more.

She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and thrust the gold hair off her temples.

"Heaven help me, I cannot—I dare not! And—I am no longer capable of being just!"

There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt that so greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, his return to all which was his own—desired even his presence among them in her own world—that she could no longer give him calm and unbiased judgment. He heard, and the burning tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked almost ere it was known, by the dread lest for her sake she should ever give him so much pity that such pity became love.

He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her eyes—a look under which her own never quailed or drooped, but which they answered with that same regard which she had given him when she had declared her faith in his innocence.

"If I thought it possible you could ever care——"

She moved slightly from him; her face was very white still, and her voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it answered him.

"If I could—believe me, I am not a woman who would bid you forsake your honor to spare yourself or me. Let us speak no more of this. What can it avail, except to make you suffer greater things? Follow the counsels of your own conscience. You have been true to them hitherto; it is not for me, or through me, that you shall ever be turned aside from them."

A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard.

"They are noble words. And yet it is so easy to utter, so hard to follow them. If you had one thought of tenderness for me, you could not speak them."

A flush passed over her face.

"Do not think me without feeling—without sympathy—pity—"

"These are not love."

She was silent; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than any emotion she had ever known.

"If you loved me," he pursued passionately—"ah, God! the very word from me to you sounds insult; and yet there is not one thought in me that does not honor you—if you loved me, could you stand there and bid me drag on this life forever; nameless, friendless, hopeless; having all the bitterness, but none of the torpor of death; wearing out the doom of a galley slave, though guiltless of all crime?"

"Why speak so? You are unreasoning. A moment ago you implored me not to tempt you to the violation of what you hold your honor; because I bid you be faithful to it, you deem me cruel!"

"Heaven help me! I scarce know what I say. I ask you, if you were a woman who loved me, could you decide thus?"

"These are wild questions," she murmured; "what can they serve? I believe that I should—I am sure that I should. As it is—as your friend—"

"Ah, hush! Friendship is crueler than hate."

"Cruel?"

"Yes; the worst cruelty when we seek love—a stone proffered us when we ask for bread in famine!"

There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer; she was moved and shaken by it—not to fear, for fear was not in her nature, but to something of awe, and something of the despairing hopelessness that was in him.

"Lord Royallieu," she said slowly, as if the familiar name were some tie between them, some cause of excuse for these, the only love words she had ever heard without disdain and rejection—"Lord Royallieu, it is unworthy of you to take this advantage of an interview which I sought, and sought for your own sake. You pain me, you wound me. I cannot tell how to answer you. You speak strangely, and without warrant."

He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on his chest. He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew that he had broken through every law he had prescribed himself, and that he had sinned against the code of chivalry which should have made her sacred from such words while they were those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in secrecy and shame. Unless he could stand justified in her sight and in that of all men, he had no right to seek to wring out tenderness from her regret and from her pity. Yet all his heart went out to her in one irrepressible entreaty.

"Forgive me, for pity's sake! After to-night I shall never look upon your face again."

"I do forgive," she said gently, while her voice grew very sweet. "You endure too much already for one needless pang to be added by me. All I wish is that you had never met me, so that this last, worst thing had not come unto you!"

A long silence fell between them; where she leaned back among her cushions, her face was turned from him. He stood motionless in the shadow, his head still dropped upon his breast, his breathing loud and slow and hard. To speak of love to her was forbidden to him, yet the insidious temptation wound close and closer round his strength. He had only to betray the man he had sworn to protect, and she would know his innocence, she would hear his passion; he would be free, and she—he grew giddy as the thought rose before him—she might, with time, be brought to give him other tenderness than that of friendship. He seemed to touch the very supremacy of joy; to reach it almost with his hand; to have honors, and peace, and all the glory of her haughty loveliness, and all the sweetness of her subjugation, and all the soft delights of passions before him in their golden promise, and he was held back in bands of iron, he was driven out from them desolate and accursed.

Unlike Cain, he had suffered in his brother's stead, yet, like Cain, he was branded and could only wander out into the darkness and the wilderness.

She watched him many minutes, he unconscious of her gaze; and while she did so, many conflicting emotions passed over the colorless delicacy of her features; her eyes were filled and shadowed with many altering thoughts; her heart was waking from its rest, and the high, generous, unselfish nature in her strove with her pride of birth, her dignity of habit.

"Wait," she said softly, with the old imperial command of her voice subdued, though not wholly banished. "I think you have mistaken me somewhat. You wrong me if you think that I could be so callous, so indifferent, as to leave you here without heed as to your fate. Believe in your innocence you know that I do, as firmly as though you substantiated it with a thousand proofs; reverence your devotion to your honor you are certain that I must, or all better things were dead in me."

Her voice sank inaudible for the instant; she recovered her self-control with an effort.

"You reject my friendship—you term it cruel—but at least it will be faithful to you; too faithful for me to pass out of Africa and never give you one thought again. I believe in you. Do you not know that that is the highest trust, to my thinking, that one human life can show in another's? You decide that it is your duty not to free yourself from this bondage, not to expose the actual criminal, not to take up your rights of birth. I dare not seek to alter that decision. But I cannot leave you to such a future without infinite pain, and there must—there shall be—means through which you will let me hear of you—through which, at least, I can know that you are living."

She stretched her hands toward him with that same gesture with which she had first declared her faith in his guiltlessness; the tears trembled in her voice and swam in her eyes. As she had said, she suffered for him exceedingly. He, hearing those words which breathed the only pity that had ever humiliated him, and the loyal trust which was but the truer because the sincerity of faith in lieu of the insanity of love dictated it, made a blind, staggering, unconscious movement of passionate, dumb agony. He seized her hands in his and held them close against his breast one instant, against the loud, hard panting of his aching heart.

"God reward you! God keep you! If I stay, I shall tell you all. Let me go, and forget that we ever met! I am dead—let me be dead to you!"

With another instant he had left the tent and passed out into the red glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia Corona dropped her proud head down upon the silken cushions where his own had rested, and wept as women weep over their dead—in such a passion as had never come to her in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life.

It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, and had never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder.

His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its white, still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal of love seemed to search her very heart. If this man perished in any of the thousand perils of war she would forever feel herself his assassin. She had his secret, she had his soul, she had his honor in her hands; and she could do nothing better for them both than to send him from her to eternal silence, to eternal solitude!

Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from her couch and paced to and fro in the narrow confines of her tent. Her tranquillity was broken down; her pride was abandoned; her heart, at length, was reached and sorely wounded. The only man she had ever found, whom it would have been possible to her to have loved, was one already severed from her by a fate almost more hideous than death.

And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her face; her eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, shapeless fancy floated vaguely through her mind.

If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, and learned to give him back this love he bore her, it was in her to prove that love, no matter what cost to her pride and her lineage. If his perfect innocence were made clear in her own sight, there was greatness and there was unselfishness enough in her nature to make her capable of regarding alone his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the opinion of the world. If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of that purity she now believed it, she—proud as she was with the twin pride of lineage and of nature—would be capable of incurring the odium and the marvel of all who knew her by uniting her fate to his own, by making manifest her honor and her tenderness for him, though men saw in him only a soldier of the empire, only a base-born trooper, beneath her as Riom beneath the daughter of D'Orleans. She was of a brave nature, of a great nature, of a daring courage, and of a superb generosity. Abhorring dishonor, full of glory in the stainless history of her race, and tenacious of the dignity and of the magnitude of her House, she yet was too courageous and too haughty a woman not to be capable of braving calumny, if conscious of her own pure rectitude beneath it; not to be capable of incurring false censure, if encountered in the path of justice and of magnanimity. It was possible, even on herself it dawned as possible, that so great might become her compassion and her tenderness for this man that she would, in some distant future, when the might of his love and the severity of his suffering should prevail with her, say to him:

"Keep your secret from the world as you will. Prove your innocence only to me; let me and the friend of your youth alone know your name and your rights. And knowing all, knowing you myself to be hero and martyr in one, I shall not care what the world thinks of you, what the world says of me. I will be your wife; I have lands, and riches, and honors, and greatness enough to suffice for us both."

If ever she loved him exceedingly, she would become capable of this sacrifice from the strength, and the graciousness, and the fearlessness of her nature, and such love was not so distant from her as she thought.



Outside her tent there was a peculiar mingling of light and shadow; of darkness from the moonless and now cloud-covered sky, of reddened warmth from the tall, burning pine-boughs thrust into the soil in lieu of other illumination. The atmosphere was hot from the flames, and chilly with the breath of the night winds; it was oppressively still, though from afar off the sounds of laughter in the camp still echoed, and near at hand the dull and steady tramp of the sentinels fell on the hard, parched soil. Into that blended heat and cold, dead blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence; drunk with pain as deliriously as men grow drunk with raki. The challenge rang on the air:

"Who goes there?"

He never heard it. Even the old, long-accustomed habits of a soldier's obedience were killed in him.

"Who goes there?" the challenge rang again.

Still he never heard, but went on blindly. From where the tents stood there was a stronger breadth of light through which he had passed, and was passing still—a light strong enough for it to be seen whence he came, but not strong enough to show his features.

"Halt, or I fire!" The sentinel brought the weapon to his shoulder and took a calm, close, sure aim. He did not speak; the password he had forgotten as though he had never heard or never given it.

Another figure than that of the soldier on guard came out of the shadow, and stood between him and the sentinel. It was that of Chateauroy; he was mounted on his gray horse and wrapped in his military cloak, about to go the round of the cavalry camp. Their eyes met in the wavering light like the glow from a furnace-mouth: in a glance they knew each other.

"It is one of my men," said the chief carelessly to the sentinel. "Leave me to deal with him."

The guard saluted, and resumed his beat.

"Why did you refuse the word, sir?"

"I did not hear."

There was no reply.

"Why are you absent from your squadron?"

There was no reply still.

"Have you no tongue, sir? The stick shall soon make you speak! Why are you here?"

There was again no answer.

Chateauroy's teeth ground out a furious oath; yet a flash of brutal delight glittered in his eyes. At last he had hounded down this man, so long out of his reach, into disobedience and contumacy.

"Why are you here, and where have you been?" he demanded once more.

"I will not say."

The answer, given at length, was tranquil, low, slowly and distinctly uttered, in a deliberate refusal, in a deliberate defiance.

The dark and evil countenance above him grew livid with fury.

"I can have you thrashed like a dog for that answer, and I will. But first listen here, beau sire! I know as well as though you had confessed to me. Your silence cannot shelter your great mistress' shame. Ah, ha! So Mme. la Princesse is so cold to her equals, only to choose her lovers out of my blackguards, and take her midnight intrigues like a camp courtesan!"

Cecil's face changed terribly as the vile words were spoken. With the light and rapid spring of a leopard, he reached the side of his commander, one hand on the horse's mane, the other on the wrists of his chief, that it gripped like an iron vise.

"You lie! And you know that you lie. Breathe her name once more, and, by God, as we are both living men, I will have your life for your outrage!"

And, as he spoke, with his left hand he smote the lips that had blasphemed against her.

It was broken asunder at last—all the long and bitter patience, all the calm and resolute endurance, all the undeviating serenity beneath provocation, which had never yielded through twelve long years, but which had borne with infamy and with tyranny with such absolute submission for sake of those around him, who would revolt at his sign and be slaughtered for his cause. The promise he had given to endure all things for their sakes—the sakes of his soldiery, of his comrades—was at last forgotten. All he remembered was the vileness that dared touch her name, the shame that through him was breathed on her. Rank, duty, bondage, consequence, all were forgotten in that one instant of insult that mocked in its odious lie at her purity. He was no longer the soldier bound in obedience to submit to the indignities that his chief chose to heap on him; he was a gentleman who defended a woman's honor, a man who avenged a slur on the life that he loved.

Chateauroy wrenched his wrist out of the hold that crushed it, and drew his pistol. Cecil knew that the laws of active service would hold him but justly dealt with if the shot laid him dead in that instant for his act and his words.

"You can kill me—I know it. Well, use your prerogative; it will be the sole good you have ever done to me."

And he stood erect, patient, motionless, looking into his chief's eyes with a calm disdain, with an unuttered challenge that, for the first moment, wrung something of savage respect and of sullen admiration out from the soul of his great foe.

He did not fire; it was the only time in which any trait of abstinence from cruelty had been ever seen in him. He signed to the soldiers of the guard with one hand, while with the other he still covered with his pistol the man whom martial law would have allowed him to have shot down, or have cut down, at his horse's feet.

"Arrest him," he said simply.

Cecil offered no resistance; he let them seize and disarm him without an effort at the opposition which could have been but a futile, unavailing trial of brute force. He dreaded lest there should be one sound that should reach her in that tent where the triad of standards drooped in the dusky distance. He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of that despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste dignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. He was content with what he had done—content to have met once, not as soldier to chief, but as man to man, the tyrant who held his fate.

For once, beneath the spur of that foul outrage to the dignity and the innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had allowed a passionate truth to force its way through the barriers of rank and the bonds of subservience. Insult to himself he had borne as the base prerogative of his superior, but insult to her he had avenged with the vengeance of equal to equal, of the man who loved on the man who calumniated her.

And as he sat in the darkness of the night with the heavy tramp of his guards forever on his ear, there was peace rather than rebellion in his heart—the peace of one heartsick with strife and with temptation, who beholds in death a merciful ending to the ordeal of existence. "I shall die in her cause at least," he thought. "I could be content if I were only sure that she would never know."

For this was the chief dread which hung on him, that she should ever know, and in knowing, suffer for his sake.

The night rolled on, the army around him knew nothing of what had happened. Chateauroy, conscious of his own coarse guilt against the guest of his Marshal, kept the matter untold and undiscovered, under the plea that he desired not to destroy the harmony of the general rejoicing. The one or two field-officers with whom he took counsel agreed to the wisdom of letting the night pass away undisturbed. The accused was the idol of his own squadron; there was no gauge what might not be done by troops heated with excitement and drunk with wine, if they knew that their favorite comrade had set the example of insubordination, and would be sentenced to suffer for it. Beyond these, and the men employed in his arrest and guard, none knew what had chanced; not the soldiery beneath that vast sea of canvas, many of whom would have rushed headlong to mutiny and to destruction at his word; not the woman who in the solitude of her wakeful hours was haunted by the memory of his love-words, and felt steal on her the unacknowledged sense that, if his future were left to misery, happiness could never more touch her own; not the friend of his early days, laughing and drinking with the officers of the staff.

None knew; not even Cigarette. She sat alone, so far away that none sought her out, beside the picket-fire that had long died out, with the little white dog of Zaraila curled on the scarlet folds of her skirt. Her arms rested on her knees, and her temples leaned on her hands tightly twisted among the dark, silken curls of her boyish hair. Her face had the same dusky, savage intensity upon it; and she never once moved from that rigid attitude.

She had the Cross on her heart—the idol of her long desire, the star to which her longing eyes had looked up ever since her childhood through the reek of carnage and the smoke of battle; and she would have flung it away like dross, to have had his lips touch hers once with love.

And she knew herself mad; for the desires and the delights of love die swiftly, but the knowledge of honor abides always. Love would have made her youth sweet with an unutterable gladness, to glide from her and leave her weary, dissatisfied, forsaken. But that Cross, the gift of her country, the symbol of her heroism, would be with her always, and light her forever with the honor of which it was the emblem; and if her life should last until youth passed away, and age came, and with age death, her hand would wander to it on her dying bed, and she would smile, as she died, to hear the living watchers murmur: "That life had glory—that life was lived for France."

She knew this; but she was young; she was a woman-child; she had the ardor of passionate youth in her veins, she had the desolation of abandoned youth in her heart. And honor looked so cold beside love!

She rose impetuously; the night was far spent, the camp was very still, the torches had long died out, and a streak of dawn was visible in the east. She stood a while, looking very earnestly across the wide, black city of tents.

"I shall be best away for a time. I grow mad, treacherous, wicked here," she thought. "I will go and see Blanc-Bec."

Blanc-Bec was the soldier of the Army of Italy.

In a brief while she had saddled and bridled Etoile-Filante, and ridden out of the camp without warning or farewell to any; she was as free to come and to go as though she were a bird on the wing. Thus she went, knowing nothing of his fate. And with the sunrise went also the woman whom he loved—in ignorance.



CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE.

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.