CHAPTER XXXV.
ORDEAL BY FIRE.
Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned throughout thecamp as the men surrendered themselves to the enjoyment of the largessesof food and of wine allotted to them by their Marshal's command incommemoration of Zaraila, one alone remained apart; silent and powerlessto rouse himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endurance,of their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him well, and they alsoloved him too well to press such participation on him. They knew thatit was no lack of sympathy with them that made him so grave amid theirmirth, so mute amid their volubility. Some thought that he was sorelywounded by the delay of the honors promised him. Others, who knew himbetter, thought that it was the loss of his brother-exile which weighedon him, and made all the scene around him full of pain. None approachedhim; but while they feasted in their tents, making the celebration ofZaraila equal to the Jour de Mazagran, he sat alone over a picket-fireon the far outskirts of the camp.
His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to risk with everymoment that ordeal of recognition which he so utterly dreaded; and toflee 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 anddegradation of a traitor's and deserter's memory. The latter course wasimpossible to him; the only alternative was to trust that the vastnessof that great concrete body, of which he was one unit, would sufficeto hide him from the discovery of the friend whose love he feared as hefeared the hatred of no foe. He had not been seen as he had passed theflag-staff; there was little fear that in the few remaining hours anychance could bring the illustrious guest of a Marshal to the outpost ofthe scattered camp.
Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pinewood; she wasso near, and he could not behold her!--though he might never see herface again; though they must pass out of Africa, home to the land thathe desired as only exiles can desire, while he still remained silent,knowing that, until death should release him, there could be no otherfate for him, save only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncompanioned,unpitied, unrewarded life. But to break his word as the price of hisfreedom was not possible to his nature or in his creed. This fate was,in chief, of his own making; he accepted it without rebellion, becauserebellion 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 onlycourse left to a man who, in losing the position, had not abandoned theinstincts 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 musicwere subdued into one confused murmur by distance; there was nothingnear him except a few tethered horses, and far way the mounted figureof the guard who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encampment. Thefire 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 satmotionless, sunk in thought, with his head drooped upon his breast. Thevoice 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 noticethat the tone of the greeting was rough and curt; he did not notice thatthere was a stormy darkness, a repressed bitterness, stern and scornful,on the Little One's face; he only thought that the very dogs were leftsometimes 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 shutin 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 fullof fatigue his movements. Her silence recalled him to the memory of thepast day.
"Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sympathy in allyour honors," he said gently, as he laid his hand on her shoulder."Believe me, it was unintentional. No one knows better than I how richlyyou deserved them; no one rejoices more that you should have receivedthem."
The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion; she shookherself roughly out of his hold.
"Point de phrases! All the army is at my back; do you think I cannot dowithout 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 Iwould send you to her. You can use your dainty sentences with her; sheis of your Order!"
"What! she wishes--"
"Go!" reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot. "You know thegreat tent where she is throned in honor--Morbleu!--as if the oldest andugliest hag that washes out my soldiers' linen were not of more use andmore deserved such lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never doneaught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She waitsfor you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, I tell you. She is ofyour 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. Hepaused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick uponhim; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through theevening shadows.
Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very evil, almostsavage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, that ached sohotly in her, and was chained down by that pride which was as intense inthe Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court.Reckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex wouldhave deemed, and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had itbeen returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the People was assensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest and chastest amongwomen could have been; she dreaded above every other thing that heshould ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired his love.
Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural instinct to dothe thing that was right, even to her foes, any one of the unstudied andunanalyzed qualities in her had made her serve him even at her rival'sbidding. But it had cost her none the less hardly because so manfullydone; none the less did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid,childlike fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combatin her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty whichhad subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self-sacrificewhich grew side by side with the baser impulses of passion.
As she crouched down by the side of the fire all the gracious, spirituallight that had been upon her face was gone; there was something of thegoaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity of a brave animal hard-pressed andover-driven.
Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her love forhim, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, and the desire ofvengeance that reigned in her. Carried away by the first, she had, forthe hour, risen above the last, and allowed the nobler wish to serve andrescue him to prevail over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was everpremeditated; all was the offspring of the caprices of the impulseof the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed; she was onlysensible of the burning envy that consumed her of this woman who seemedto her more than mortal in her wonderful, fair loveliness, in hermarvelous difference from everything of their sex that the camp and thebarrack ever showed.
"And I have sent him to her when I should have fired my pistol into herbreast!" she thought, as she sat by the dying embers. And she rememberedonce more the story of the Marseilles fisherwoman. She understood thatterrible vengeance under the hot, southern sun, beside the ruthless,southern seas.