Under Two Flags

  Outside her tent there was a peculiar mingling of light and shadow; ofdarkness from the moonless and now cloud-covered sky, of reddened warmthfrom the tall, burning pine-boughs thrust into the soil in lieu of otherillumination. The atmosphere was hot from the flames, and chilly withthe breath of the night winds; it was oppressively still, though fromafar off the sounds of laughter in the camp still echoed, and nearat hand the dull and steady tramp of the sentinels fell on the hard,parched soil. Into that blended heat and cold, dead blackness andburning glare, he reeled out from her presence; drunk with pain asdeliriously 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'sobedience were killed in him.

  "Who goes there?" the challenge rang again.

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

  "Halt, or I fire!" The sentinel brought the weapon to his shoulder andtook a calm, close, sure aim. He did not speak; the password he hadforgotten 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; hewas mounted on his gray horse and wrapped in his military cloak, aboutto go the round of the cavalry camp. Their eyes met in the waveringlight like the glow from a furnace-mouth: in a glance they knew eachother.

  "It is one of my men," said the chief carelessly to the sentinel. "Leaveme 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 areyou here?"

  There was again no answer.

  Chateauroy's teeth ground out a furious oath; yet a flash of brutaldelight glittered in his eyes. At last he had hounded down this man, solong 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 distinctlyuttered, 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. Butfirst listen here, beau sire! I know as well as though you had confessedto 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 loversout of my blackguards, and take her midnight intrigues like a campcourtesan!"

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

  "You lie! And you know that you lie. Breathe her name once more, and, byGod, 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 hadblasphemed against her.

  It was broken asunder at last--all the long and bitter patience, allthe calm and resolute endurance, all the undeviating serenity beneathprovocation, which had never yielded through twelve long years,but which had borne with infamy and with tyranny with such absolutesubmission for sake of those around him, who would revolt at his signand be slaughtered for his cause. The promise he had given to endure allthings for their sakes--the sakes of his soldiery, of his comrades--wasat last forgotten. All he remembered was the vileness that dared touchher name, the shame that through him was breathed on her. Rank, duty,bondage, consequence, all were forgotten in that one instant of insultthat mocked in its odious lie at her purity. He was no longer thesoldier bound in obedience to submit to the indignities that his chiefchose to heap on him; he was a gentleman who defended a woman's honor, aman who avenged a slur on the life that he loved.

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

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

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

  He did not fire; it was the only time in which any trait of abstinencefrom cruelty had been ever seen in him. He signed to the soldiers ofthe guard with one hand, while with the other he still covered withhis pistol the man whom martial law would have allowed him to have shotdown, 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 aneffort at the opposition which could have been but a futile, unavailingtrial of brute force. He dreaded lest there should be one sound thatshould reach her in that tent where the triad of standards drooped inthe dusky distance. He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke ofthat despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to wastedignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. He wascontent with what he had done--content to have met once, not as soldierto 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 theinnocence of the woman he had quitted, he had allowed a passionatetruth to force its way through the barriers of rank and the bonds ofsubservience. Insult to himself he had borne as the base prerogativeof his superior, but insult to her he had avenged with the vengeance ofequal 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 hisguards forever on his ear, there was peace rather than rebellion in hisheart--the peace of one heartsick with strife and with temptation, whobeholds in death a merciful ending to the ordeal of existence. "I shalldie in her cause at least," he thought. "I could be content if I wereonly sure that she would never know."

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

  The night rolled on, the army around him knew nothing of what hadhappened. Chateauroy, conscious of his own coarse guilt against theguest of his Marshal, kept the matter untold and undiscovered, underthe plea that he desired not to destroy the harmony of the generalrejoicing. The one or two field-officers with whom he took counselagreed to the wisdom of letting the night pass away undisturbed. Theaccused was the idol of his own squadron; there was no gauge what mightnot be done by troops heated with excitement and drunk with wine,if they knew that their favorite comrade had set the example ofinsubordination, and would be sentenced to suffer for it. Beyondthese, and the men employed in his arrest and guard, none knew what hadchanced; not the soldiery beneath that vast sea of canvas, many of whomwould have rushed headlong to mutiny and to destruction at his word; notthe woman who in the solitude of her wakeful hours was haunted by thememory of his love-words, and felt steal on her the unacknowledged sensethat, if his future were left to misery, happiness could never moretouch her own; not the friend of his early days, laughing and drinkingwith the officers of the staff.

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

  She had the Cross on her heart--the idol of her long desire, the starto which her longing eyes had looked up ever since her childhood throughthe reek of carnage and the smoke of battle; and she would have flung itaway 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 dieswiftly, but the knowledge of honor abides always. Love would have madeher youth sweet with an unutterable gladness, to glide from her andleave her weary, dissatisfied, forsaken. But that Cross, the gift of hercountry, the symbol of her heroism, would be with her always, and lighther forever with the honor of which it was the emblem; and if her lifeshould 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, asshe died, to hear the living watchers murmur: "That life had glory--thatlife was lived for France."

  She knew this; but she was young; she was a woman-child; she had theardor of passionate youth in her veins, she had the desolation ofabandoned 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 theeast. She stood a while, looking very earnestly across the wide, blackcity 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 riddenout of the camp without warning or farewell to any; she was as free tocome 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 womanwhom he loved--in ignorance.