Under Two Flags

O >> Ouida [Louise de la Ramee] >> Under Two Flags


"Come in, my pretty one!" entreated Tata, stretching out his brawn arms.
"You will die of laughing if you hear Gris-Gris to-night--such a song!"

"A pretty song, yes--for a pigsty!" said Cigarette, with a glance
into the chamber; and she shook his hand off her, and went on down the
street. A night or two before a new song from Gris-Gris, the best tenor
in the whole army, would have been paradise to her, and she would have
vaulted through the window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Now,
she did not know why, she found no charm in it.

And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her garret, and
curled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for the first time in her
young life sleep did not come readily to her, and when it did come, for
the first time found a restless sigh upon her laughing mouth.



CHAPTER XXII.

THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING.

"Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough; but here!" thought Cecil
as, earlier awake than those of his Chambree, he stood looking down the
lengthy, narrow room where the men lay asleep along the bare floor.

Tired as overworked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out,
homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed
himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives that
had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him
strength it had also given him sympathy.

They were of marvelously various types--these sleepers brought under one
roof by fates the most diverse. Close beside a huge and sinewy brute
of an Auvergnat, whose coarse, bestial features and massive bull's head
were fitter for a galley-slave than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite
limbs and the oval, delicate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone.
Beneath a canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his
own hands, was flung the torso of one of the splendid peasants of the
Sables d'Olonne; one steeped so long in blood and wine and alcohol that
he had forgotten the blue, bright waves that broke on the western shores
of his boyhood's home, save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of
the cool sea, as he was muttering now. Next him, curled, dog-like, with
its round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which every
muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned black as jet under
twenty years of African sun. The midnight streets of Paris had seen its
birth, the thieves' quarter had been its nest; it had no history, it had
almost no humanity; it was a perfect machine for slaughter, no more--who
had ever tried to make it more?

Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than
seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a child's,
whose uncovered chest was delicate as a girl's, and through whose
long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were stealing as his rosy mouth
murmured, "Mere! Mere! Pauvre mere!" He was a young conscript taken from
the glad vine-country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in
the rock beside the sunny, brimming river, and half-buried under its
grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the palace to its
heir. There were many others beside these; and Cecil looked at them with
those weary, speculative, meditative fancies which, very alien to his
temperament, stole on him occasionally in the privations and loneliness
of his existence here--loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most
painful of all solitude.

Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaigning, in
the excitement of warfare; there were times even when it yielded him
absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests more genuine and vivid
than any he had known in his former world. But, in the monotony and the
confinement of the barrack routine, his days were often intolerable to
him. Morning after morning he rose to the same weary round of duty, the
same series of petty irritations, of physical privations, of irksome
repetitions, to take a toss of black, rough coffee, and begin the day
knowing it would bring with it endless annoyances without one gleam
of hope. Rose to spend hours on the exercise-ground in the glare of a
burning sun, railed at if a trooper's accouterments were awry, or
an insubordinate scoundrel had pawned his regulation shirt; to be
incessantly witness of tyrannies and cruelties he was powerless to
prevent, and which he continually saw undo all he had done, and render
men desperate whom he had spent months in endeavoring to make contented;
to have as the only diversions for his few instants of leisure loathsome
pleasures that disgusted the senses they were meant to indulge, and
that brought him to scenes of low debauchery from which all the old,
fastidious instincts of his delicate, luxurious taste recoiled. With
such a life as this, he often wondered regretfully why, out of the many
Arab swords that had crossed his own, none had gone straight to his
heart; why, out of the many wounds that had kept him hovering on
the confines of the grave, none had ever brought him the end and the
oblivion of death.

Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hardships of his
present career, but had only owned the power to command, to pardon,
to lead, and to direct, as Alan Bertie before him had done with his
Irregular Cavalry in the Indian plains,--such a thought would never have
crossed him; he was far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not
only satisfied, but happy. What made his life in the barracks of Algiers
so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled obedience
to a bidding that he knew often capricious and unjust as it was cruel;
which were so unendurable to his natural pride, yet to which he had
hitherto rendered undeviating adhesion and submission, less for his own
sake than for that of the men around him, who, he knew, would back him
in revolt to the death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in
the fashion that the vivandiere's words had pictured with such terrible
force and truth.

"Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be the wiser way
to draw my own saber across my throat?" he thought, as the brutalized
companionship in which his life was spent struck on him all the more
darkly because, the night before, a woman's voice and a woman's face had
recalled memories buried for twelve long years.

But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a victory over
the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium-sleep from the world
that had grown so dark to him, it was not in him to give under now. In
his own way he had found a duty to do here, though he would have laughed
at anyone who should have used the word "duty" in connection with him.
In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have been blown from
the guns' mouths to serve him, he had made good the "Coeur vaillant se
fait Royaume" of his House. And he was, moreover, by this time, a French
soldier at heart and in habit, in almost all things--though the English
gentleman was not dead in him under the harness of a Chasseur d'Afrique.

This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that kindly
gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach their liking;
went through the customary routine of his past with that exactitude and
punctuality of which he was always careful to set the example; made his
breakfast off some wretched onion-soup and a roll of black bread; rode
fifty miles in the blazing heat of the African day at the head of a
score of his chasses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long
string of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, without
such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne off by some
predatory tribe; and returned, jaded, weary, parched with thirst,
scorched through with heat, and covered with white dust, to be kept
waiting in his saddle, by his Colonel's orders, outside the barrack for
three-quarters of an hour, whether to receive a command or a censure he
was left in ignorance.

When the three-quarters had passed, he was told M. le Commandant had
gone long ago, and did not require him!

Cecil said nothing.

Yet he reeled slightly as he threw himself out of saddle; a nausea and a
giddiness had come on him. To have passed nigh an hour motionless in his
stirrups, with the skies like brass above him, while he was already worn
with riding from sunrise well-nigh to sunset, with little to appease
hunger and less to slake thirst, made him, despite himself, stagger
dizzily under a certain sense of blindness and exhaustion as he
dismounted.

The Chasseur who had brought him the message caught his arm eagerly.

"Are you hurt, mon Caporal?"

Cecil shook his head. The speaker was one known in the regiment as Petit
Picpon, who had begun life as a gamin of Paris, and now bade fair to
make one of the most brilliant of the soldiers of Africa. Petit
Picpon had but one drawback to this military career--he was always in
insubordination; the old gamin dare-devilry was not dead in him, and
never would die; and Petit Picpon accordingly was perpetually a hero
in the field and a ragamuffin in the times of peace. Of course he was
always arrayed against authority, and now--being fond of his galonne
with that curious doglike, deathless attachment that these natures, all
reckless, wanton, destructive, and mischievous though they may be, so
commonly bestow--he muttered a terrible curse under his fiercely curled
mustaches.

"If the Black Hawk were nailed up in the sun like a kite on a barn-door,
I would drive twenty nails through his throat!"

Cecil turned rapidly on him.

"Silence, sir! or I must report you. Another speech like that, and you
shall have a turn at Beylick."

It went to his heart to rebuke the poor fellow for an outburst of
indignation which had its root in regard for himself, but he knew that
to encourage it by so much even as by an expression of gratitude for the
affection borne him, would be to sow further and deeper the poison-seeds
of that inclination to mutiny and that rebellious hatred against
their chief already only planted too strongly in the squadrons under
Chateauroy's command.

Petit Picpon looked as crestfallen as one of his fraternity could; he
knew well enough that what he had said could get him twenty blows of the
stick, if his corporal chose to give him up to judgment; but he had too
much of the Parisian in him still not to have his say, though he should
be shot for it.

"Send me to Beylick, if you like, Corporal," he said sturdily; "I was in
wrath for you--not for myself."

Cecil was infinitely more touched than he dared, for the sake of
discipline, for sake of the speaker himself, to show; but his glance
dwelt on Petit Picpon with a look that the quick, black, monkey-like
eyes of the rebel were swift to read.

"I know," he said gravely. "I do not misjudge you, but at the same time,
my name must never serve as a pretext for insubordination. Such men as
care to pleasure me will best do so in making my duty light by their own
self-control and obedience to the rules of their service."

He led his horse away, and Petit Picpon went on an errand he had been
sent to do in the streets for one of the officers. Picpon was unusually
thoughtful and sober in deportment for him, since he was usually given
to making his progress along a road, taken unobserved by those in
command over him, with hands and heels in the dexterous somersaults of
his early days.

Now he went along without any unprofessional antics, biting the tip of
a smoked-out cigar, which he had picked up off the pavement in sheer
instinct, retained from the old times when he had used to rush in,
the foremost of la queue, into the forsaken theaters of Bouffes or of
Varietes in search for those odds and ends which the departed audience
might have left behind them--one of the favorite modes of seeking a
livelihood with the Parisian night-birds.

"Dame! I will give it up then," resolved Picpon, half aloud, valorously.

Now Picpon had come forth on evil thoughts intent.

His officer--a careless and extravagant man, the richest man in
the regiment--had given him a rather small velvet bag, sealed, with
directions to take it to a certain notorious beauty of Algiers, whose
handsome Moresco eyes smiled--or, at least, he believed so--exclusively
for the time on the sender. Picpon was very quick, intelligent, and much
liked by his superiors, so that he was often employed on errands; and
the tricks he played in the execution thereof were so adroitly done
that they were never detected. Picpon had chuckled to himself over this
mission. It was but the work of an instant for the lithe, nimble fingers
of the ex-gamin to undo the bag without touching the seal; to see that
it contained a hundred Napoleons with a note; to slip the gold into the
folds of his ceinturon; to fill up the sack with date-stones; to make
it assume its original form so that none could have imagined it had been
touched, and to proceed with it thus to the Moorish lionne's dwelling.
The negro who always opened her door would take it in; Picpon would hint
to him to be careful, as it contained some rare and rich sweetmeats,
negro nature, he well knew, would impel him to search for the bonbons;
and the bag, under his clumsy treatment, would bear plain marks of
having been tampered with, and, as the African had a most thievish
reputation, he would never be believed if he swore himself guiltless.
Voila! Here was a neat trick! If it had a drawback, it was that it was
too simple, too little risque. A child might do it.

Still--a hundred Naps! What fat geese, what flagons of brandy, what
dozens of wine, what rich soups, what tavern banquets they would bring!
Picpon had chuckled again as he arranged the little bag so carefully,
with its date-stones, and pictured the rage of the beautiful Moor when
she should discover the contents and order the stick to her negro. Ah!
that was what Picpon called fun!

To appreciate the full force of such fun, it is necessary to have also
appreciated the gamin. To understand the legitimate aspect such a theft
bore, it is necessary to have also understood the unrecordable codes
that govern the genus pratique, into which the genus gamin, when at
maturity, develops.

Picpon was quite in love with his joke; it was only a good joke in his
sight; and, indeed, men need to live as hardly as an African soldier
lives, to estimate the full temptation that gold can have when you have
come to look on a cat as very good eating, and to have nothing to gnaw
but a bit of old shoe-leather through the whole of the long hours of a
burning day of fatigue-duty; and to estimate, as well, the full width
and depth of the renunciation that made him mutter now so valorously,
"Dame! I will give it up, then!"

Picpon did not know himself as he said it. Yet he turned down into a
lonely, narrow lane, under marble walls, overtopped with fig and palm
from some fine gardens; undid the bag for the second time; whisked out
the date-stones and threw them over the wall, so that they should be out
of his reach if he repented; put back the Napoleons, closed the little
sack, ran as hard as he could scamper to his destination, delivered his
charge into the fair lady's own hands, and relieved his feelings by a
score of somersaults along the pavement as fast as ever he could go.

"Ma cantche!" he thought, as he stood on his head, with his legs at an
acute angle in the air, in position very favored by him for moments of
reflection--he said his brain worked better upside down. "Ma cantche!
What a weakness, what a weakness! What remorse to have yielded to it!
Beneath you, Picpon--utterly beneath you. Just because that ci-devant
says such follies please him in us!"

Picpon (then in his gamin stage) had been enrolled in the Chasseurs
at the same time with the "ci-devant," as they called Bertie, and,
following his gamin nature, had exhausted all his resources
of impudence, maliciousness, and power of tormenting, on the
"aristocrat"--somewhat disappointed, however, that the utmost
ingenuities of his insolence and even his malignity never succeeded in
breaking the "aristocrat's" silence and contemptuous forbearance from
all reprisal. For the first two years the hell-on-earth--which life with
a Franco-Arab regiment seemed to Cecil--was a hundredfold embittered by
the brutalized jests and mosquito-like torments of this little odious
chimpanzee of Paris.

One day, however, it chanced that a detachment of Chasseurs, of which
Cecil was one, was cut to pieces by such an overwhelming mass of Arabs
that scarce a dozen of them could force their way through the Bedouins
with life; he was among those few, and a flight at full speed was the
sole chance of regaining their encampment. Just as he had shaken his
bridle free of the Arab's clutch, and had mowed himself a clear path
through their ranks, he caught sight of his young enemy, Picpon, on the
ground, with a lance broken off in his ribs; guarding his head, with
bleeding hands, as the horses trampled over him. To make a dash at the
boy, though to linger a moment was to risk certain death; to send his
steel through an Arab who came in his way; to lean down and catch hold
of the lad's sash; to swing him up into his saddle and throw him
across it in front of him, and to charge afresh through the storm of
musket-balls, and ride on thus burdened, was the work of ten seconds
with "Bel-a-faire-peur." And he brought the boy safe over a stretch of
six leagues in a flight for life, though the imp no more deserved the
compassion than a scorpion that has spent all its noxious day stinging
at every point of uncovered flesh would merit tenderness from the hand
it had poisoned.

When he was swung down from the saddle and laid in front of a fire,
sheltered from the bitter north wind that was then blowing cruelly, the
bright, black, ape-like eyes of the Parisian diablotin opened with a
strange gleam in them.

"Picpon s'en souviendra," he murmured.

And Picpon had kept his word; he had remembered often, he remembered
now; standing on his head and thinking of his hundred Napoleons
surrendered because thieving and lying in the regiment gave pain to
that oddly prejudiced "ci-devant." This was the sort of loyalty that the
Franco-Arabs rendered; this was the sort of influence that the English
Guardsman exercised among his Roumis.



Meantime, while Picpon made a human cone of himself, to the admiration
of the polyglot crowd of the Algerine street, Cecil himself, having
watered, fed, and littered down his tired horse, made his way to a
little cafe he commonly frequented, and spent the few sous he could
afford on an iced draught of lemon-flavored drink. Eat he could
not; overfatigue had given him a nausea for food, and the last hour,
motionless in the intense glow of the afternoon sun, had brought that
racking pain through his temples which assailed him rarely now, but
which in his first years in Africa had given him many hours of agony. He
could not stay in the cafe; it was the hour of dinner for many, and the
odors, joined with the noise, were insupportable to him.

A few doors farther in the street, which was chiefly of Jewish and
Moslem shops, there was a quaint place kept by an old Moor, who had some
of the rarest and most beautiful treasures of Algerian workmanship in
his long, dark, silent chambers. With this old man Cecil had something
of a friendship; he had protected him one day from the mockery and
outrage of some drunken Indigenes, and the Moor, warmly grateful, was
ever ready to give him a cup of coffee in the stillness of his dwelling.
Its resort was sometimes welcome to him as the one spot, quiet and
noiseless, to which he could escape out of the continuous turmoil of
street and of barrack, and he went thither now. He found the old
man sitting cross-legged behind the counter; a noble-looking, aged
Mussulman, with a long beard like white silk, with cashmeres and
broidered stuffs of peerless texture hanging above his head, and all
around him things of silver, of gold, of ivory, of amber, of feathers,
of bronze, of emeralds, of ruby, of beryl, whose rich colors glowed
through the darkness.

"No coffee, no sherbet; thanks, good father," said Cecil, in answer to
the Moor's hospitable entreaties. "Give me only license to sit in the
quiet here. I am very tired."

"Sit and be welcome, my son," said Ben Arsli. "Whom should this roof
shelter in honor, if not thee? Musjid shall bring thee the supreme
solace."

The supreme solace was a nargile, and its great bowl of rose-water was
soon set down by the little Moorish lad at Cecil's side. Whether fatigue
really weighted his eyes with slumber, or whether the soothing sedative
of the pipe had its influence, he had not sat long in the perfect
stillness of the Moor's shop before the narrow view of the street under
the awning without was lost to him, the luster and confusion of shadowy
hues swam a while before his eyes, the throbbing pain in his temples
grew duller, and he slept--the heavy, dreamless sleep of intense
exhaustion.

Ben Arsli glanced at him, and bade Musjid be very quiet. Half an hour or
more passed; none had entered the place. The grave old Moslem was half
slumbering himself, when there came a delicate odor of perfumed laces, a
delicate rustle of silk swept the floor; a lady's voice asked the
price of an ostrich-egg, superbly mounted in gold. Ben Arsli opened his
eyes--the Chasseur slept on; the newcomer was one of those great ladies
who now and then winter in Algeria.

Her carriage waited without; she was alone, making purchase of those
innumerable splendid trifles with which Algiers is rife, while she drove
through the town in the cooler hour before the sun sank into the western
sea.

The Moor rose instantly, with profound salaams, before her, and began to
spread before her the richest treasures of his stock. Under plea of the
light, he remained near the entrance with her; money was dear to
him, and must not be lost, but he would make it, if he could, without
awakening the tired soldier. Marvelous caskets of mother-of-pearl;
carpets soft as down with every brilliant hue melting one within
another; coffee equipages, of inimitable metal work; silver statuettes,
exquisitely chased and wrought; feather-fans, and screens of every
beauty of device, were spread before her, and many of them were bought
by her with that unerring grace of taste and lavishness of expenditure
which were her characteristics, but which are far from always found in
unison; and throughout her survey Ben Arsli kept her near the entrance,
and Cecil had slept on, unaroused by the low tones of their voices.

A roll of notes had passed from her hand to the Moslem's and she was
about to glide out to her carriage, when a lamp which hung at the
farther end caught her fancy. It was very singular; a mingling of
colored glass, silver, gold, and ivory being wrought in much beauty in
its formation.

"Is that for sale?" she inquired.

As he answered in the affirmative, she moved up the shop, and, her eyes
being lifted to the lamp, had drawn close to Cecil before she saw him.
When she did so, she paused near in astonishment.

"Is that soldier asleep?"

"He is, madame," softly answered the old man, in his slow, studied
French. "He comes here to rest sometimes out of the noise; he was very
tired to-day, and I think ill, would he have confessed it."

"Indeed!" Her eyes fell on him with compassion; he had fallen into an
attitude of much grace and of utter exhaustion; his head was uncovered
and rested on one arm, so that the face was turned upward. With a
woman's rapid, comprehensive glance, she saw that dark shadow, like a
bruise, under his closed, aching eyes; she saw the weary pain upon his
forehead; she saw the whiteness of his hands, the slenderness of his
wrists, the softness of his hair; she saw, as she had seen before, that
whatever he might be now, in some past time he had been a man of gentle
blood, of courtly bearing.

"He is a Chasseur d'Afrique?" she asked the Moslem.

"Yes, madame. I think--he must have been something very different some
day."

She did not answer; she stood with her thoughtful eyes gazing on the
worn-out soldier.

"He saved me once, madame, at much risk to himself, from the savagery
of some Turcos," the old man went on. "Of course, he is always welcome
under my roof. The companionship he has must be bitter to him, I fancy;
they do say he would have had his officer's grade, and the cross, too,
long before now, if it were not for his Colonel's hatred."

"Ah! I have seen him before now; he carves in ivory. I suppose he has a
good side for those things with you?"

The Moor looked up in amazement.

"In ivory, madame?--he? Allah--il-Allah! I never heard of it. It is
strange-----"

"Very strange. Doubtless you would have given him a good price for
them?"

"Surely I would; any price he should have wished. Do I not owe him my
life?"

At that moment little Musjid let fall a valuable coffee-tray, inlaid
with amber; his master, with muttered apology, hastened to the scene of
the accident; the noise startled Cecil, and his eyes unclosed to all
the dreamy, fantastic colors of the place, and met those bent on him in
musing pity--saw that lustrous, haughty, delicate head bending slightly
down through the many-colored shadows.