CHAPTER XXIII.
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE.
"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!"
The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette's tight-pressed,bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. She was sitting onthe edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfortless as a truss of straw, andlooking down the long hospital room, with its endless rows of beds andits hot sun shining blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls.
She was well known and well loved there. When her little brilliant-huedfigure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, down the drearylength of those chambers of misery, bloodless lips, close-clinched intorture, would stir with a smile, would move with a word of welcome.No tender-voiced, dove-eyed Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray andsoft, and like a living psalm of consolation, beside those couches ofmisery, bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that theFriend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, weregentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest blackguard prostratethere; but they never smiled, they never took the dying heart of a manback with one glance to the days of his childhood, they never gave asweet, wild snatch of song like a bird's on a spring-blossoming boughthat thrilled through half-dead senses, with a thousand voices froma thousand buried hours. "But the Little One," as said a gaunt,gray-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealingslowly up his jagged, torn frame--"the Little One--do you see--she isyouth, she is life; she is all we have lost. That is her charm! TheSisters are good women, they are very good; but they only pity us. TheLittle One, she loves us. That is the difference; do you see?"
It was all the difference--a wide difference; she loved them all, withthe warmth and fire of her young heart, for the sake of France and oftheir common Flag. And though she was but a wild, wayward, mischievousgamin,--a gamin all over, though in a girl's form,--men would tell incamp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their brown, scarredcheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heatedforeheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long nights oftorment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or pawned assoon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how in their deliriumthe sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regiment would soothe them,singing above their wretched beds some carol or chant of their ownnative province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for,were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-songof the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules ofAlsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri--Cigaretteknew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to everysoldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother'scradle-song and of his first love's lips. And there had been times whenthose songs, suddenly breaking through the darkness of night, suddenlylulling the fiery anguish of wounds, had made the men who one hourbefore had been like mad dogs, like goaded tigers--men full of thelusts of slaughter and the lust of the senses, and chained powerless andblaspheming to a bed of agony--tremble and shudder at themselves, andturn their faces to the wall and weep like children, and fall asleep, atlength, with wondering dreams of God.
"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!" said Cigarette, now grindingher pretty teeth. She was in her most revolutionary and reckless mood,drumming the rataplan with her spurred heels, and sitting smoking on thecorner of old Miou-Matou's mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired thattitle among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat intoa stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, being laid upwith a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his shoulders, a rib or sobroken, and one or two other little trifling casualties.
Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed in thedepths of his great, hairy chest. "Dream of glory, and end on a grabat!Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures--to sweep off an Arbico'sneck nice and clean--swish!" and he described a circle with his lean,brawny arm with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, wouldlisten thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience orDella Quercia work.
"Pleasures! My God! Infinite, endless misery!" murmured a man on herright hand. He was not thirty years of age; with a delicate, dark,beautiful head that might have passed as model to a painter for a St.John. He was dying fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies.
Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him.
"Well! is it not misery that is glory?"
"We think that it is when we are children. God help me!" murmured theman who lay dying of lung-disease.
"Ouf! Then we think rightly! Glory! Is it the cross, the star, thebaton? No![*] He who wins those runs his horse up on a hill, out of shotrange, and watches through his glass how his troops surge up, wave onwave, in the great sea of blood. It is misery that is glory--the miserythat toils with bleeding feet under burning suns without complaint; thatlies half-dead through the long night with but one care--to keep thetorn flag free from the conqueror's touch; that bears the rain of blowsin punishment, rather than break silence and buy release by betrayalof a comrade's trust; that is beaten like the mule, and galled like thehorse, and starved like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet doesthe thing which is right, and the thing which is brave, despite all;that suffers, and endures, and pours out his blood like water to thethirsty sands, whose thirst is never stilled, and goes up in the morningsun to the combat, as though death were paradise that the Arbicos dream;knowing the while, that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoofthrough the throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over thewrithing limb. That is glory. The misery that is heroism because Franceneeds it, because a soldier's honor wills it. That is glory. It is hereto-day in the hospital as it never is in the Cour des Princes, where theglittering host of the marshals gather!"
[*] Having received ardent reproaches from field officers and commanders of divisions for the injustice done their services by this sentence, I beg to assure them that the sentiment is Cigarette's--not mine. I should be very sorry for an instant to seem to depreciate that "genius of command" without whose guidance an army is but a rabble, or to underrate that noblest courage which accepts the burden of arduous responsibilities and of duties as bitter in anxiety as they are precious in honor.
Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in her brightcheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her nation moved her,and moved strangely the hearts of her hearers; for though she couldneither read nor write, there was in Cigarette the germ of that powerwhich the world mistily calls genius.
There were men lying in that sick-chamber brutalized, crime-stained,ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and, like them, reared anddriven for the slaughter; yet there was not one among them to whom someray of light failed to come from those words, through whom some thrillfailed to pass as they heard them. Out yonder in the free air, inthe barrack court, or on the plains, the Little One would rate themfuriously, mock them mercilessly, rally them with the fist of a saber,if they were mutinous, and lash them with the most pitiless ironies ifthey were grumbling; but here, in the hospital, the Little One lovedthem, and they knew it, and that love gave a flute-like music to thepassion of her voice.
Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with her brass heel.
"All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat; eh, Pere Matou?" shesaid curtly. She was half impatient of her own momentary lapse intoenthusiasm, and she knew the temper of her "children" as accurately asa bugler knows the notes of the reveille--knew that they loved to laugheven with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts halfbreaking over a comrade's corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, "Ah, thegood fellow! He's swallowed his own cartouche!"
"Paradise!" growled Pere Matou. "Ouf! Who wants that? If one had a fewbidons of brandy, now----"
"Brandy? Oh, ha! you are to be much more of aristocrats now than that!"cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire curling on her rosy piquantlips. "The Silver P
heasants have taken to patronize you. If I were you,I would not touch a glass, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you havethe spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of hertable--pardieu! That is not for soldiers of France!"
"What dost thou say?" growled Miou-Matou, peering up under his gray,shaggy brows.
"Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That is all. Sapristi!How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan with two words to one'smaitre d'hotel, and a rouleau of gold that one never misses! The richthey can buy all things, you see, even heaven, so cheap!" With whichwithering satire Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that hemust be already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk ofchampagne to him; and flitting down between the long rows of beds withthe old disabled veterans who tended them, skimmed her way, like a birdas she was, into another great chamber, filled, like the first, withsuffering in all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript,tossing in African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundredwounds.
Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through theentrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la PrincesseCorona d'Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy tothe invalid soldiers--a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that wouldbrighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princessemight be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was a silverpheasant--bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats--when they were ofthe sex feminine. "An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle," she wouldsay, "but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock." Which was thereason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolenceimaginable, but took the part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," andof such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarteringsunder the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here anda touch there,--tender, soft, and bright,--since, however ironic hermood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay insuch sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through thenarrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she camemost specially to visit--a bed on which was stretched the emaciated formof a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god.
The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tightclinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavycircles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning miserythat gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again andagain by the matador, and yet cannot die.
She bent over him softly.
"Tiens, M. Leon! I have brought you some ice."
His weary eyes turned on her gratefully; he sought to speak, but theeffort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh; it shook him with horribleviolence from head to foot, and the foam on his auburn beard was redwith blood.
There was no one by to watch him; he was sure to die; a week sooner orlater--what mattered it! He was useless as a soldier; good only to bethrown into a pit, with some quicklime to hasten destruction and do thework of the slower earthworms.
Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves acold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness andfreshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled the convulsion; hiseyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted,but relieved; and she--thoughtfully for her--slid herself down on thefloor, and began singing low and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on theraft of a water-lily leaf. She sung quadriales, to be sure,Beranger's songs and odes of the camp; for she knew of no hymn but the"Marseillaise," and her chants were all chants like the "Laus Veneris."But the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush inthe spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet that itsoothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the pain-torturedspirits.
"Ah, that is sweet," murmured the dying man. "It is like thebrooks--like the birds--like the winds in the leaves."
He was but half conscious; but the lulling of that gliding voice broughthim peace. And Cigarette sung on, only moving to reach him some freshtouch of ice, while time traveled on, and the first afternoon shadowscrept across the bare floor. Every now and then, dimly through theopenings of the windows, came a distant roll of drums, a burst ofmilitary music, an echo of the laughter of a crowd; and then her headwent up eagerly, an impatient shade swept across her expressive face.
It was a fete-day in Algiers; there were flags and banners flutteringfrom the houses; there were Arab races and Arab maneuvers; there was areview of troops for some foreign general; there were all the mirth andthe mischief that she loved, and that never went on without her; and sheknew well enough that from mouth to mouth there was sure to be asking,"Mais ou done est Cigarette?" Cigarette, who was the Generalissima ofAfrica!
But still she never moved; though all her vivacious life was longing tobe out and in their midst, on the back of a desert horse, on the headof a huge drum, perched on the iron support of a high-hung lantern,standing on a cannon while the Horse Artillery swept full gallop, firingdown a volley of argot on the hot homage of a hundred lovers, drinkingcreamy liqueurs and filling her pockets with bonbons from handsomesubalterns and aids-de-camp, doing as she had done ever since she couldremember her first rataplan. But she never moved. She knew that inthe general gala these sick-beds would be left more deserted and lesssoothed than ever. She knew, too, that it was for the sake of this man,lying dying here from the lunge of a Bedouin lance through his lungs,that the ivory wreaths and crosses and statuettes had been sold.
And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a time for her"children."
The day stole on; Leon Ramon lay very quiet; the ice for his chestand the song for his ear gave him that semi-oblivion, dreamy andcomparatively painless, which was the only mercy which could come tohim. All the chamber was unusually still; on three of the beds the sheethad been drawn over the face of the sleepers, who had sunk to a lastsleep since the morning rose. The shadows lengthened, the hours followedone another; Cigarette sang on to herself with few pauses; whenever shedid so pause to lay soaked linen on the soldier's hot forehead, or totend him gently in those paroxysms that wrenched the clotted blood fromoff his lungs, there was a light on her face that did not come from thegolden heat of the African sun.
Such a light those who know well the Children of France may have seen,in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful upon the young face of aconscript or a boy-insurgent as he lifted a dying comrade, or pushed tothe front to be slain in another's stead; the face that a moment beforehad been keen for the slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklesslygay as the saucy refrain the lips caroled.
A step sounded on the bare boards; she looked up; and the wounded manraised his weary lids with a gleam of gladness under them; Cecil bentabove his couch.
"Dear Leon! How is it with you?"
His voice was softened to infinite tenderness; Leon Ramon had been formany a year his comrade and his friend; an artist of Paris, a man ofmarvelous genius, of high idealic creeds, who, in a fatal moment of rashdespair, had flung his talents, his broken fortunes, his pure and noblespirit, into the fiery furnace of the hell of military Africa; and nowlay dying here, a common soldier, forgotten as though he were already inhis grave.
"The review is just over. I got ten minutes to spare, and came to youthe instant I could," pursued Cecil. "See here what I bring you! You,with your artist's soul, will feel yourself all but well when you lookon these!"
He spoke with a hopefulness he could never feel, for he knew that thelife of Leon Ramon was doomed; and as the other strove to gain breathenough to answer him, he gently motioned him to silence, and placedon his bed some peaches bedded deep in moss and circled round withstephanotis, with magnolia, with roses, with other rarer flowers still.
The face of the artist-soldier lightened with a longing joy; his lipsquivered.
"Ah, God! they have the fragrance of my France!"
Cecil said nothing, but moved them nearer in to the clasp of hie eagerhands. Cigarette he did not see.
r /> There were some moments of silence, while the dark eyes of the dying manthirstily dwelt on the beauty of the flowers, and his dry, ashen lipsseemed to drink in their perfumes as those athirst drink in water.
"They are beautiful," he said faintly, at length. "They have our youthin them. How came you by them, dear friend?"
"They are not due to me," answered Cecil hurriedly. "Mme. laPrincess Corona sends them to you. She has sent great gifts to thehospital--wines, fruits, a profusion of flowers, such as those. Throughher, these miserable chambers will bloom for a while like a garden;and the best wines of Europe will slake your thirst in lieu of thatmiserable tisane."
"It is very kind," murmured Leon Ramon languidly; life was too feeblein him to leave him vivid pleasures in aught. "But I am ungrateful. LaCigarette here--she has been so good, so tender, so pitiful. For once Ihave almost not missed you!"
Cigarette, thus alluded to, sprang to her feet with her head tossedback, and all her cynicism back again; a hot color was on her cheeks,the light had passed from her face, she struck her white teeth together.She had thought "Bel-a-faire-peur" chained to his regiment in the fieldof maneuver, or she would never have come thither to tend his friend.She had felt happy in her self-sacrifice; she had grown into a gentle,pensive, merciful mood, singing here by the side of the dying soldier,and now the first thing she heard was of the charities of Mme. laPrincesse!
That was all her reward! Cigarette received the recompense thatusually comes to generous natures which have strung themselves to someself-surrender that costs them dear.
Cecil looked at her surprised, and smiled.
"Ma belle, is it you? That is, indeed, good. You were the good angelof my life the other night, and to-day come to bring consolation to myfriend--"
"Good angel! Chut, M. Victor! One does not know those mots sucres inAlgiers. There is nothing of the angel about me, I hope. Your friend,too! Do you think I have never been used to taking care of my comradesin hospital before you played the sick-nurse here?"
She spoke with all her brusque petulance in arms again; she hated thathe should imagine she had sacrificed her fete-day to Leon Ramon, becausethe artist-trooper was dear to him; she hated him to suppose that shehad waited there all the hours through on the chance that he would findher at her post, and admire her for her charity. Cigarette was far tooproud and disdainful a young soldier to seek either his presence or hispraise.
He smiled again; he did not understand the caprices of her changefulmoods, and he did not feel that interest in her which would have madehim divine the threads of their vagaries.
"I did not think to offend you, my little one," he said gently. "I meantonly to thank you for your goodness to Ramon in my absence."
Cigarette shrugged her shoulders.
"There was no goodness, and there need be no thanks. Ask Pere Matou howoften I have sat with him hours through."
"But on a fete-day! And you who love pleasure, and grace it so well--"
"Ouf! I have had so much of it," said the little one contemptuously. "Itis so tame to me. Clouds of dust, scurry of horses, fanfare of trumpets,thunder of drums, and all for nothing! Bah! I have been in a dozenbattles--I--and I am not likely to care much for a sham fight."
"Nay, she is unjust to herself," murmured Leon Ramon. "She gave up thefete to do this mercy--it has been a great one. She is more generousthan she will ever allow. Here, Cigarette, look at these scarletrosebuds; they are like your bright cheeks. Will you have them? I havenothing else to give."
"Rosebuds!" echoed Cigarette, with supreme scorn. "Rosebuds for me? Iknow no rose but the red of the tricolor; and I could not tell a weedfrom a flower. Besides, I told Miou-Matou just now, if my children do asI tell them, they will not take a leaf or a peach-stone from this grandedame--how does she call herself?--Mme. Corona d'Amague!"
Cecil looked up quickly: "Why not?"
Cigarette flashed on him her brilliant, brown eyes with a fire thatamazed him.
"Because we are soldiers, not paupers!"
"Surely; but--"
"And it is not for the silver pheasants, who have done nothing todeserve their life but lain in nests of cotton wool, and eaten grainthat others sow and shell for them, and spread their shining plumage ina sun that never clouds above their heads, to insult, with the insolenceof their 'pity' and their 'charity,' the heroes of France, who perish asthey have lived, for their Country and their Flag!"
It was a superb peroration! If the hapless flowers lying there had beena cartel of outrage to the concrete majesty of the French Army, theArmy's champion could not have spoken with more impassioned force andscorn.
Cecil laughed slightly; but he answered, with a certain annoyance:
"There is no 'insolence' here; no question of it. Mme. la Princessedesired to offer some gift to the soldiers of Algiers; I suggested toher that to increase the scant comforts of the hospital, and gladden theweary eyes of sick men with beauties that the Executive never dreams ofbestowing, would be the most merciful and acceptable mode of exercisingher kindness. If blame there be in the matter, it is mine."
In defending the generosity of what he knew to be a genuine and sincerewish to gratify his comrades, he betrayed what he did not intend to haverevealed, namely, the conversation that had passed between himselfand the Spanish Princesse. Cigarette caught at the inference with thequickness of her lightning-like thought.
"Oh, ha! So it is she!"
There was a whole world of emphasis, scorn, meaning, wrath,comprehension, and irony in the four monosyllables; the dying man lookedat her with languid wonder.
"She? Who? What story goes with these roses?"
"None," said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance in his voice;to have his passing encounter with this beautiful patrician pass into abarrack canard, through the unsparing jests of the soldiery aroundhim, was a prospect very unwelcome to him. "None whatever. A generousthoughtfulness for our common necessities as soldiers--"
"Ouf!" interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one-third finished."The stalled mare will not go with the wild coursers; an aristocrat maylive with us, but he will always cling to his old order. This is thestory that runs with the roses. Milady was languidly insolent over someivory chessmen, and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languorand insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu! Milady,knowing no gods but those two, worships them, and sends to the soldiersof France, as the sort of sacrifice her gods love, fruits, and winesthat, day after day, are set on her table, to be touched, if tasted atall, with a butterfly's sip; and Corporal Victor finds this a charitysublime--to give what costs nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out fromthe profusion of a life of waste and indulgence! And I say that, if mychildren are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke like dogs dyingof thirst rather than slake their throats with alms cast to them as ifthey were beggars!"
With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the gifts of thePrincesse Corona d'Amague, Cigarette struck light to her brule-guele,and thrusting it between her lips, with her hands in the folds of herscarlet waist-sash, went off with the light, swift step natural to her,exaggerated into the carriage she had learned of the Zouaves; laughingher good-morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed theircouches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place wherethe dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudentdrinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebratedwine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir.
Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her. She had given up herwhole fete-day to wait on the anguish and to soothe the solitude of hisfriend lying dying there; and her reward had been to hear him speak ofthis aristocrat's donations, that cost her nothing but the trouble of afew words of command to her household, as though they were the saintlycharities of some angel from heaven!
"Diantre!" she muttered, as her hand wandered to the ever-beloved formsof the pistols within her sash. "Any of them would throw a draught ofwine in his face, and la
y him dead for me with a pass or two ten minutesafter. Why don't I bid them? I have a mind----"
In that moment she could have shot him dead herself without a moment'sthought. Storm and sunlight swept, one after another, with electricalrapidity at all times, through her vivid, changeful temper; and hereshe had been wounded and been stung in the very hour in which she hadsubdued her national love of mirth, and her childlike passion for show,and her impatience of all confinement, and her hatred of all thingsmournful, in the attainment of this self-negation! Moreover, theremingled with it the fierce and intolerant heat of the passionate andscarce-conscious jealousy of an utterly untamed nature, and of Gallicblood, quick and hot as the steaming springs of the Geyser.
"You have vexed her, Victor," said Leon Ramon, as she was lost to sightthrough the doors of the great, desolate chamber.
"I hope not; I do not know how," answered Cecil. "It is impossibleto follow the windings of her wayward caprices. A child--a soldier--adancer--a brigand--a spoiled beauty--a mischievous gamin--how is one totreat such a little fagot of opposites?"
The others smiled.
"Ah! you do not know the Little One yet. She is worth a study. I paintedher years ago--'La Vivandiere a Sept Ans.' There was not a picture inthe Salon that winter that was sought like it. I had traveled in Algeriathen; I had not entered the army. The first thing I saw of Cigarette wasthis: She was seven years old; she had been beaten black and blue; shehad had two of her tiny teeth knocked out. The men were furious--she wasa pet with them; and she would not say who had done it, though she knewtwenty swords would have beaten him flat as a fritter if she had givenhis name. I got her to sit to me some days after. I pleased her withher own picture. I asked her to tell me why she would not say who hadill-treated her. She put her head on one side like a robin, and told me,in a whisper: 'It was one of my comrades--because I would not stealfor him. I would not have the army know--it would demoralize them. If aFrench soldier ever does a cowardly thing, another French soldier mustnot betray it.' That was Cigarette--at seven years. The esprit de corpswas stronger than her own wrongs. What do you say to that nature?"
"That is superb!--that it might be molded to anything. The pity is--"
"Ah," said the artist-trooper, half wearily, half laughingly. "Spare methe old world-worn, threadbare formulas. Because the flax and the lalezablossom for use, and the garden flowers grow trained and pruned, mustthere be no bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and swings free inthe wind in its fearless, fair fashion? Believe me, dear Victor, it isthe lives which follow no previous rule that do the most good and givethe most harvest."
"Surely. Only for this child--a woman--in her future--"
"Her future! Well, she will die, I dare say, some bright day or another,at the head of a regiment; with some desperate battle turned by thevalor of her charge, and the sight of the torn tricolor upheld in herlittle hands. That is what Cigarette hopes for--why not? There willalways be a million of commonplace women ready to keep up the decoroustraditions of their sex, and sit in safety over their needles by theside of their hearths. One little lioness here and there in a generationcannot do overmuch harm."
Cecil was silent. He would not cross the words of the wounded man bysaying what might bring a train of less pleasant thoughts--saying what,in truth, was in his mind, that the future which he had meant for thelittle Friend of the Flag was not that of any glorious death by combat,but that of a life (unless no bullet early cut its silver cord intwain) when youth should have fled, and have carried forever with ither numberless graces, and left in its stead that ribaldry-stained,drink-defiled, hardened, battered, joyless, cruel, terrible thing whichis unsightly and repugnant to even the lowest among men; which is asthe lees of the drunk wine, as the ashes of the burned-out fires, as thediscord of the broken and earth-clogged lyre.
Cigarette was charming now--a fairy-story set into living motion--afantastic little firework out of an extravaganza, with the impudenceof a boy-harlequin and the witching kitten-hood of a girl's beauty.But when this youth that made it all fair should have passed (and youthpasses soon when thus adrift on the world), when there should be leftin its stead only shamelessness, hardihood, vice, weariness--those whofound the prettiest jest in her now would be the first to cast aside,with an oath, the charred, wrecked rocket-stick of a life from which nogolden, careless stream of many-colored fires of coquette caprices wouldrise and enchant them then.
"Who is it that sent these?" asked Leon Ramon, later on, as his handsstill wandered among the flowers; for the moment he was at peace; theice and the hours of quietude had calmed him.
Cecil told him again.
"What does Cigarette know of her?" he pursued.
"Nothing, except, I believe, she knew that Mme. Corona accepted mychess-carvings."
"Ah! I thought the Little One was jealous, Victor."
"Jealous? Pshaw! Of whom?"
"Of anyone you admire--especially of this grande dame."
"Absurd!" said Cecil, with a sense of annoyance. "Cigarette is far toobold a little trooper to have any thoughts of those follies; and as forthis grande dame, as you call her, I shall, in every likelihood, neversee her again--unless when the word is given to 'Carry Swords' or'Lances' at the General's Salute, where she reins her horse beside M. leMarechal's at a review, as I have done this morning."
The keen ear of the sick man caught the inflection of an impatience, ofa mortification, in the tone that the speaker himself was unconsciousof. He guessed the truth--that Cecil had never felt more restless underthe shadow of the Eagles than he had done when he had carried his swordup in the salute as he passed with his regiment the flagstaff wherethe aristocracy of Algiers had been gathered about the Marshal and hisstaff, and the azure eyes of Mme. la Princesse had glanced carelesslyand critically over the long line of gray horses of those Chasseursd'Afrique among whom he rode a bas-officier.
"Cigarette is right," said Ramon, with a slight smile. "Your heart iswith your old order. You are an aristocrat."
"Indeed I am not, mon ami; I am a mere trooper."
"Now! Well, keep your history as you have always done, if you will. Whatmy friend was matters nothing; I know well what he is, and how true afriend. As for Milady, she will be best out of your path, Victor. Women!God!--they are so fatal!"
"Does not our folly make their fatality?"
"Not always; not often. The madness may be ours, but they sow it. Ah! dothey not know how to rouse and enrage it; how to fan, to burn, to lull,to pierce, to slake, to inflame, to entice, to sting? Heavens! so wellthey know--that their beauty must come, one thinks, out of hell itself!"
His great eyes gleamed like fire, his hollow chest panted for breath,the sweat stood out on his temples. Cecil sought to soothe him, but hiswords rushed on with the impetuous course of the passionate memoriesthat arose in him.
"Do you know what brought me here? No! As little as I know what broughtyou, though we have been close comrades all these years. Well, it wasshe! I was an artist. I had no money, I had few friends; but I hadyouth, I had ambition, I had, I think, genius, till she killed it. Iloved my art with a great love, and I was happy. Even in Paris onecan be so happy without wealth, while one is young. The mirth of theBarriere--the grotesques of the Halles--the wooden booths on New Year'sDay--the bright midnight crowds under the gaslights--the bursts of musicfrom the gay cafes--the gray little nuns flitting through the snow--theMardi Gras and the Old-World fooleries--the summer Sundays under theleaves while we laughed like children--the silent dreams through thelength of the Louvre--dreams that went home with us and made our garretbright with their visions--one was happy in them--happy, happy!"
His eyes were still fastened on the blank, white wall before him whilehe spoke, as though the things that his words sketched so faintly werepainted in all their vivid colors on the dull, blank surface. And so intruth they were, as remembrance pictured all the thousand perished hoursof his youth.
"Happy--until she looked at me," he pursued, while his voice flew infeverish h
aste over the words. "Why would she not let me be? Shehad them all in her golden nets: nobles, and princes, and poets, andsoldiers--she swept them in far and wide. She had her empire; why mustshe seek out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those?Women are so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, theywould not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of them! Itwas the first year I touched triumph that I saw her. They began for thefirst time to speak of me; it was the little painting of Cigarette, asa child of the army, that did it. Ah, God! I thought myself already sofamous! Well, she sent for me to take her picture, and I went. I wentand I painted her as Cleopatra--by her wish. Ah! it was a face forCleopatra--the eyes that burn your youth dead, the lips that kiss yourhonor blind! A face--my God! how beautiful! She had set herself to gainmy soul; and as the picture grew, and grew, and grew, so my life grewinto hers till I lived only by her breath. Why did she want my life?she had so many! She had rich lives, great lives, grand lives at herbidding; and yet she knew no rest till she had leaned down from hercruel height and had seized mine, that had nothing on earth but the joysof the sun and the dew, and the falling of night, and the dawning ofday, that are given to the birds of the fields."
His chest heaved with the spasms that with each throe seemed to tear hisframe asunder; still he conquered them, and his words went on; his eyesfastened on the burning white glare of the wall as though all the beautyof this woman glowed afresh there to his sight.
"She was great; no matter her name--she lives still. She was vile; aye,but not in my sight till too late. Why is it that the heart which ispure never makes ours beat upon it with the rapture sin gives? Throughmonth on month my picture grew, and my passion grew with it, fanned byher hand. She knew that never would a man paint her beauty like one whogave his soul for the price of success. I had my paradise; I was drunk;and I painted as never the colors of mortals painted a woman. I thinkeven she was content; even she, who in her superb arrogance thought shewas matchless and deathless. Then came my reward; when the picture wasdone, her fancy had changed! A light scorn, a careless laugh, a touch ofher fan on my cheek; could I not understand? Was I still such a child?Must I be broken more harshly in to learn to give place? That was all!And at last her lackey pushed me back with his wand from her gates! Whatwould you? I had not known what a great lady's illicit caprices meant;I was still but a boy! She had killed me; she had struck my genius dead;she had made earth my hell--what of that? She had her beauty eternal inthe picture she needed, and the whole city rang with her loveliness asthey looked on my work. I have never painted again. I came here. What ofthat? An artist the less then, the world did not care; a life the lesssoon, she will not care either!"
Then, as the words ended, a great wave of blood beat back his breath andburst from the pent-up torture of his striving lungs, and stainedred the dark and silken masses of his beard. His comrade had seen thehemorrhage many times; yet now he knew, as he had never known before,that that was death.
As he held him upward in his arms, and shouted loud for help, the greatluminous eyes of the French soldier looked up at him through their mistwith the deep, fond gratitude that beams in the eyes of a dog as itdrops down to die, knowing one touch and one voice to the last.
"You do not forsake," he murmured brokenly, while his voice ebbedfaintly away as the stream of his life flowed faster and faster out."It is over now--so best! If only I could have seen France once more.France----"
He stretched his arms outward as he spoke, with the vain longing ofa hopeless love. Then a deep sigh quivered through his lips; his handstrove to close on the hand of his comrade, and his head fell, restingon the flushed blossoms of the rose-buds of Provence.
He was dead.