CHAPTER XXXI.
"JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE."
Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. The hurricane neverabated, and the blinding dust rose around him in great waves. The horsefell lame; he had to dismount, and move slowly and painfully over theloose, heavy soil on foot, raising the drooping head of the lifelessrider. It was bitter, weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labor, ofan intolerable pain.
Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment allconsciousness; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield and leavethe vultures, hovering aloft, their prey. He was still somewhat weakenedby the wounds of Zaraila; he had been bruised and exhausted by theskirmish of the past night; he was weary and heart-broken; but he didnot yield to his longing to sink down on the sands, and let his lifeebb out; he held patiently onward through the infinite misery ofthe passage. At last he drew near the caravanserai where he had beendirected to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway in the distancethat he had to traverse, and almost alone when the face of the countrychanged, and was more full of color, and more broken into rocky andirregular surfaces.
As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward its shelter,as its irregular corner towers became dimly perceptible to him throughthe dizzy mists that had obscured his sight. By sheer instinct he foundhis route straight toward the open arch of its entrance-way, and intothe square courtyard thronged with mules and camels and horses; for thecaravanserai stood on the only road that led through that district tothe south, and was the only house of call for drovers, or shelter fortravelers and artists of Europe who might pass that way. The groups inthe court paused in their converse and in their occupations, and lookedin awe at the gray charger with its strange burden, and the FrenchChasseur who came so blindly forward like a man feeling his passagethrough the dark. There was something in the sight that had a vagueterror for them before they clearly saw what this thing was which wasthus brought into their presence. Cecil moved slowly on into theirmidst, his hand on the horse's rein; then a great darkness covered hissight; he swayed to and fro, and fell senseless on the gray stone of thepaved court, while the muleteer and the camel-drivers, the Kabyls andthe French, who were mingled there, crowded around him in fear and inwonder. When consciousness returned to him he was lying on a stone benchin the shadow of the wall, and a throng of lean, bronzed, eager facesabout him in the midday sunlight which had broken through the windstorm.
Instantly he remembered all.
"Where is he?" he asked.
They knew he meant the dead man, and answered him in a hushed murmur ofmany voices. They had placed the body gently down within, in a darkenedchamber.
A shiver passed over him; he stretched his hand out for water that theyheld to him.
"Saddle me a fresh horse; I have my work to do."
He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or self-pitymight a soldier pause by the wayside while his errand was still undone,his duty unfulfilled.
He drank the water thirstily; then, reeling slightly still, from theweakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting their offers ofaid. "Take me to him," he said simply. They understood him; there wereFrench soldiers among them, and they took him, without question orcomment, across the court to the little square stone cell within one ofthe towers, where they had laid the corpse, with nothing to break thequiet and the solitude except the low, soft cooing of some doves thathad their homes in its dark corners, and flew in and out at pleasurethrough the oval aperture that served as window.
He motioned them all back with his hand, and went into the gloom of thechamber alone. Not one among them followed.
When he came forth again the reckless and riotous soldiers of Franceturned silently and reverentially away, so that they should not lookupon his face. For it was well known throughout the army that no commontie had bound together the exiles of England, and the fealty of comradeto comrade was sacred in their sight.
The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. He crossedthe court, moving still like a man without sense of what he did; hehad the instinct to carry out the mission trusted to him, instantly andaccurately, but he had no distinct perception or memory of aught else,save of those long-familiar features of which, ere he could return, thecruel sun of Africa would not have spared one trace.
He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch--a shadow black andintense against the golden light which, with the ceasing of the storm,flooded the land in the full morning. There were movement, noise,changes, haste in the entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachmentof the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of sometravelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of thehumble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that someof the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke throughhis stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman whom, howevermadly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utterhopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him:
"You are of the Princesse Corona's suite? What does she do here?"
"Madame travels to see the country and the war."
"The war? This is no place for her. The land is alive with danger--rifewith death."
"Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother. Milady does not know whatfear is."
"But----"
The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloomof the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a faceunseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing andcareless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale withthe pallor of an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, andaltered with a wholly different emotion--emotion that was, above all, ofan intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood motionlessand speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint,Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with theimpassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger,and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.
He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped thathis brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who boreresemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead andgone. The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, movedhim now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sinof his mother's darling as his own.
Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came tohim as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay betweenhim and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from theknowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness andthe bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier'sgrave.