Under Two Flags

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


With his arm over the horse's neck, the exile, who had returned to his
birthright, stood silent a while, gazing out over the land on which
his eyes never wearied of resting; the glad, cool, green, dew-freshened
earth that was so sweet and full of peace, after the scorched and
blood-stained plains, whose sun was as flame, and whose breath was as
pestilence. Then his glance came back and dwelt upon the face beside
him, the proud and splendid woman's face that had learned its softness
and its passion from him alone.

"It was worth banishment to return," he murmured to her. "It was worth
the trials that I bore to learn the love that I have known----"

She, looking upward at him with those deep, lustrous, imperial eyes that
had first met his own in the glare of the African noon, passed her hand
over his lips with a gesture of tenderness far more eloquent from her
than from women less proud and less prone to weakness.

"Ah, hush! when I think of what her love was, how worthless looks my
own! How little worthy of the fate it finds! What have I done that every
joy should become mine, when she----"

Her mouth trembled, and the phrase died unfinished; strong as her love
had grown, it looked to her unproven and without desert, beside that
which had chose to perish for his sake. And where they stood with the
future as fair before them as the light of the day around them, he bowed
his head, as before some sacred thing, at the whisper of the child who
had died for him. The memories of both went back to a place in a desert
land where the folds of the Tricolor drooped over one little grave
turned westward toward the shores of France--a grave made where the
beat of drum, and the sound of moving squadrons, and the ring of the
trumpet-call, and the noise of the assembling battalions could be
heard by night and day; a grave where the troops, as they passed it by,
saluted and lowered their arms in tender reverence, in faithful, unasked
homage, because beneath the Flag they honored there was carved in the
white stone one name that spoke to every heart within the army she had
loved, one name on which the Arab sun streamed as with a martyr's glory:

"CIGARETTE,

"ENFANT DE L'ARMEE, SOLDAT DE LA FRANCE."