UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 BY 
 
 OUIDA 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'STRATHMORE ' * CHANDOS ' 'tRICOTEIN' 
 * TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES ' ETC. 
 
 A NEW IMPRESSION 
 
 LONDON 
 CHATTO & WINDUS 
 
 1912 
 
PRINTKD BY 
 
 SrOTTISWOODE AND CO. liTD., C0LCHE8TKH 
 
 LONDON AND ETON 
 
AVIS AU LECTEUR 
 
 This Story was originally written for a military periodical. 
 It has been fortunate enough to receive much commen- 
 dation from military men, and for them it is now 
 specially issued in its present form. For the general 
 public it may be as well to add that, where translations 
 are appended to the French phrases, those translations 
 usually follow the idiomatic and particular meaning 
 attached to those expressions in the argot of the Army 
 of Algeria, and not the correct or literal one given to 
 such words or sentences in ordinary grammatical 
 
 parlance. 
 
 OUIDA. 
 

 V 
 
 1^ 
 
 /2 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CBArraR 
 
 I. 'BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' 
 
 n. THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIB . 
 
 III. THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 
 
 IV. LOVE A LA MODE .... 
 
 V. UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE . 
 
 VI. THE END OF A RINGING RUN , 
 
 VII. AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER . 
 
 VIII. A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DB LA LUNB 
 
 IX. THE PAINTED BIT. . 
 
 X. ' PETITE REINE ' , . , . 
 
 XI. FOR A woman's SAKE . 
 
 XII. THE king's LAST SERVICE 
 
 XIII. IN THE GAF^ OF THE CHASSEURS . 
 
 XIV. ' DE PROFUNDIS ' BEFORE ' PLUNGING ' 
 
 XV. 'l'amie DU DRAPEAU' . 
 
 XVI. CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 
 
 XVII. UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 
 
 XVIII. CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 
 
 XIX. THE IVORY SQUADRONS . 
 
 XX. CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 
 
 XXI. CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 
 
 XXII. THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING . 
 
 XXni. THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE . 
 
 XXTV. 'MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS ' . 
 
 XX7. ' LE BON ZIG ' . . . 
 
 FAcn 
 
 1 
 
 14 
 
 25 
 
 46 
 
 59 
 
 68 
 
 78 
 
 99 
 
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 123 
 
 142 
 
 162 
 
 183 
 
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 199 
 
 218 
 
 234 
 
 256 
 
 276 
 
 286 
 
 810 
 
 822 
 
 842 
 
 865 
 
 884 
 
 2b2652 
 
Vlll 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHU>TER 
 
 XXVI. ZARAELA ....... 
 
 XXVn. THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON . . . i 
 
 XXVin. THE LEATHERN ZACKRI8T ...» 
 
 XXrX. BY THE BIVOUAC FIKE 
 
 XXX. SEUL AU MONDE ..... 
 
 XXXI. ' JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE ' . , . 
 
 XXXII. ' ■'.T.NETIA ' . .... , , 
 
 XXXin. THE GIFT OF THE CROSS . . . . 
 
 XXXrV. THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE BIRD 
 
 XXXV. ORDEAL BY FIRB 
 
 XXXVI. THE VENOEANOK OF THE LITTLE ONB , 
 
 XXXVn. IN THE MIDST OF HER AEilY , . . 
 
 THE LAST AT RK3T t » t * i s 
 
 PaOE 
 
 897 
 410 
 425 
 485 
 454 
 174 
 485 
 610 
 628 
 645 
 566 
 598 
 607 
 
UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 * BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES ' 
 
 ' I don't say but what he's difficult to please with his Tops,' 
 said Mr. Rake, factotum to the Hon. Bertie Cecil, of the 1st 
 Life Guards, with that article of hunting toggery suspended 
 in his right hand as he paused, before going upstairs, to deliver 
 his opinions with characteristic weight and vivacity to the 
 stud-groom — ' he is uncommon particular about 'em ; and if 
 his leathers ain't as white as snow he'll never touch 'em, tho' 
 as soon as the pack come nigh him at Royallieu, the leathers 
 might just as well never have been cleaned, them hounds 
 jump about him so ; old Champion's at his saddle before you 
 can say Davy Jones. Tops are trials, I ain't denying that, 
 specially when you've jacks, and moccasins, and moor boots, 
 and Russia-leather crickets, and turf hacks and Hythe boots, 
 and waterproofs, and all manner of varnish things for dress, 
 that none of the boys will do right unless you look after 'em 
 yourself. But is it likely that he should know what a worry 
 a Top's complexion is, and how hard it is to come right with 
 all the Fast Brown polishing in the world ? How should h& 
 guess what a piece of work it is to get 'em all of a colour, and 
 how like they are to come mottled, and how a'most sure 
 they'll ten to one go off dark just as they're growing yellow, 
 and put you to shame, let you do what you will to make 'em 
 cut a shine over the country ? How should M know ? / 
 don't complain of that ; bless you, he never thinks. It's " do 
 
 B 
 
8 un'DTO two flags 
 
 bhia, Halre/' " do fhat/'- a-hd he never remember 't isn't done 
 by magic. But he's a true gentleman, Mr. Cecil ; never 
 grudge a guinea, or a fiver to you ; never out of temper 
 neither, always have a kind word for you if you want — 
 thoro'brod every inch of him; see him bring down a 
 rockctter, or lift his horse over the Broad Water ! He's 
 \/ a gentleman— not like your snobs that have nothing sound 
 about 'em but their cash, and swept out their shops before 
 they bought their fine feathers 1— and I'll be d— d if I care 
 what I do for him.' 
 
 With which peroration to his born enemy the stud-groom, 
 with whom he waged a perpetual and most lively feud, 
 Rake flourished the tops that had been under discussion, and 
 tiiumphant, as he invariably was, ran up the back stairs of 
 his master's lodgmgs in Piccadilly, opposite the Green Park, 
 and with a rap on the panels entered his master's bedroom. 
 A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, rather more 
 luxuriously accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie 
 Cecil was never behind his fellows in anything ; besides, he 
 was one of the cracks of the Household, and women sent him 
 
 rf retty things enough to fill the Palais Royal. The dressing- 
 table was littered w4th Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered 
 k"'/ bottles, and all the perfumes of Araby represented by Brei- 
 denbach and Rimmel. The dressing-case was of silver, with 
 the name studded on the lid in turquoises ; the brushes, boot- 
 jacks, boot-trees, whip-stands, were of ivory and tortoiseshell ; 
 a couple of tiger-skins were on the hearth with a retriever and 
 blue greyhound in possession ; above the mantelpiece were 
 crossed swords in all the varieties of gilt, gold, silver, ivory, 
 aluminium, chiselled and embossed hilts ; and on the walls 
 were a few perfect French pictures, with the portraits of a 
 greyhound drawn by Tj.mdseer, of a steeplechaser by Harry 
 Hall, one or two of Herring's hunters, and two or three fair 
 women in crayons. The hangings of the room were silken 
 and rose-coloured, and a delicious confusion prevailed through 
 it pell-mell - box-Rpurs,hunting-stirrups, cartridge-cases, curb- 
 chains, muzzle-loaders, hunting-flasks, and white gauntlets 
 being mixed up with Paris novels, pink notes, point-lace ties, 
 bracelets, and bouquets to be dispatched to various destina- 
 tions, and velvet and silk bags for bank-not o, cigars, or 
 vosuviuns, embroidered by feminine fingers and as useless as 
 
 [those pretty fingers themselves. On the softest of sofas, hali 
 
'BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' 3 
 
 dressed, and having half an hour before plashed like a water- 
 dog out of the bath, as big as a small pond, in the dressing- 
 chamber beyond, was the Hon, Bertie himself, second son of 
 Viscount Royallieu, known generally in the Brigades aa 
 * Beauty.' The appellative, gained at Eton, was in no way 
 undeserved. When the smoke cleared away that was circling 
 round him out of a great meerschaum-bowl, it showed a face*l 
 of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman's, handsome, ^ 
 thoro'bred, languid, nonchalant, with a certain latent reck- 
 lessness under the impassive calm of habit, and a singular /■ 
 softness given to the large, dark hazel eyes by the unusual '\^ 
 length of the lashes over them. His features were exceedingly ^ 
 fair, fair as the fairest girl's; his hair was of the softest, <^^ 
 silkiest, brightest chestnut ; his mouth very beautifully shaped ; ^' 
 on the whole, with a certain gentle, mournful love-me look ?j^' 
 that his eyes had with them, it was no wonder that great -^v 
 ladies and gay lionnes alike gave him the palm as the hand-*^ w 
 somest man in all the Household Regiments—not evenS^ 
 excepting that splendid golden-haired Colossus, his oldest hJ^ 
 friend and closest comrade, known as ' the Seraph.' , J 
 
 He looked at the new tops that Rake swung in his hand, ^'^ 
 and shook his head. f\ 
 
 'Better, Rake; but not right yet. Can't you get that-^ 
 tawny colour in the tiger's skin there ? You go so much to '^ » 
 brown.' ^.'^ 
 
 Rake shook his head in turn, as he set down the incorri- L> 
 gible tops beside six pairs of their fellows, and six times six - j^ 
 of every other sort of boots that the covert side, the heather, '^ 
 the flat, or the ' sweet shady side of Pall Mall ' ever knew. 
 
 * Do my best, sir ; but Polish don't come nigh Nature, Mr. 
 Cecil.' 
 
 * Goes beyond it, the ladies say ; and to do them justice, 
 they favour it much the most,' laughed Cecil to himself, 
 floating fresh clouds of Turkish about him. ' Willon up ? ' 
 
 * Yes, sir. Come in this minute for orders.' 
 < How'd Forest King stand the train ? ' 
 
 * Bright as a bird, sir ; /le never mind nothing. Mother 0' 
 Pearl she worretted a little, he says ; she always do, along of 
 the engine noise ; but the King walked in and out just as if 
 the stations were his own stable-yard.' 
 
 * He gave them gruel and chilled water after the shaking 
 before he let them go to their corn ? ' 
 
 b2 
 
4 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' He says he did, sir.' 
 
 Rake would by no means take upon himgelf to warrant the 
 veracity of his sworn foe, the stud-groom ; unremitting feud 
 was between them ; Rake considered that he knew more about 
 horses than any other man Ihing, and the other functionary 
 proportionately resented back his knowledge and his inter- 
 ference, as utterly out of place in a body- servant. 
 
 ' Tell him I'll look in at the stable after duty and see the 
 screws are all right ; and that he's to be ready to go down 
 with thera by my train to-morrow — noon, you know. Send 
 that note there, and the bracelets, to St. John's Wood : and 
 that white bouquet to Mrs. Delamaine. Bid Willon get some 
 Banbury bits; I prefer the revolving mouths, and some of 
 Wood's double mouths and Nelson gags ; we want new ones. 
 Mind that lever-snap breechloader comes home in time. Look 
 in at the Commission stables, and if you see a likely black 
 charger as good as Black Douglas, tell me. W^rite about the 
 stud fox-terrier, and buy the blue Dandie Dinmont ; Lady 
 Guinevere wants him. I'll take him down with me. But 
 first put me into harness. Rake ; it's getting late.' 
 
 Murmuring which multiplicity of directions, for Rake to 
 catch as he could, in the softest and sleepiest of tones, Bertie 
 Cecil drank a glass of Cura9oa, put his tall, lithe limbs indo- 
 lently off his sofa, and surrendered himself to the martyrdom 
 of cuirass and gorget, standing six feet one without his spurred 
 jacks, but light-built and full of grace as a deer, or his weight 
 would not have been what it was in gentleman-rider races 
 from the Hunt steeplechase at La Marche to the Grand 
 National in the Shires. 
 
 • As if Parhament couldn't meet without dragging us 
 through the dust ! The idiots write about " the swells in the 
 -Guards," as if we had all fim and no work, and knew nothing 
 of the rough of the Service. I should like to learn what they 
 ! call sitting motionless in your saddle through half a day, 
 while a London mob goes mad round you, and lost dogs snap 
 at your charger's nose, and dirty Uttle beggars squeeze against 
 your legs, and the sun broils you, or the fog soaks you, and 
 you sit sentinel over a ginger-bread coach till you're deaf 
 with the noise, and blind with the dust, and sick with the 
 crowd, and half dead for want of sodas-and-brandies, and 
 from going a whole morning without one cigarette! not to 
 niention the inevitable apple-woman who invariably entangles 
 
» BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' 5 
 
 herself between your horse's legs, and the certainty of yoi:^: 
 riding down somebody and having a summons about it the 
 next day I If all that isn't the rough of the Service, I should 
 like to know what is. Why, the hottest day in the batteries^ 
 or the sharpest rush into Ghoorkahs or Bhoteahs, would be 
 light work compared 1 ' murmured Cecil with the most plain- 
 tive pity for the hardships of life in the Household, while 
 Rake, with the rapid proficiency of long habit, braced and 
 buckled and buttoned, knotted the sash v/ith the knack of 
 professional genius, girt on the brightest of all glittering 
 polished silver steel * Cut-and-Thrusts,' with its rich gilt 
 mountings, and .contemplated with flattering self-complacency 
 leathers white as snow, jacks brilliant as black varnish could 
 make them, and silver spurs of glittering radiance, until his 
 master stood full harnessed, at length, as gallant a Life 
 Guardsman as ever did duty at the Palace by making love to 
 the handsomest lady-in-waiting. 
 
 * To sit wedged in with one's troop for five hours, and in 
 a drizzle too ! Houses oughtn't to meet until the day's fine ; 
 I'm sure they are in no hurry,' said Cecil to himself, as he 
 pocketed a dainty, filmy handkerchief, all perfume, point, 
 and embroidery, with the interlaced B, C, and the crest on 
 the corner, while he looked hopelessly out of the window. 
 He was perfectly happy, drenched to the skin on the moors 
 after a royal, or in a fast thing with the Melton men from 
 Thorpe Trussels to Eanksborough ; but three drops of rain 
 when on duty were a totally different matter, to be resented 
 with any amount of dajidy'^ lamentations, and epicurean 
 diatribes. 
 
 ' Ah, young one, how are you ? Is the day very bad ? ' he 
 asked with languid wistfulness as the door opened. 
 
 But indifi.'erent and weary — on account of the weather — as 
 the tone was, his eyes rested with a kindly, cordial light on 
 the new-comer, a young fellow of scarcely twenty, like him- 
 self in feature, though much smaller and slighter in build, a 
 graceful boy enough, with no fault in his face, except a 
 certain weakness in the mouth, just shadowed only, as yet, 
 with down. 
 
 A celebrity, the Zu-Zu, the last coryphee whom Bertie had 
 translated from a sphere of garret bread-and-cheese to a 
 sphere of vdlla, champagne and chicken (and v/ho, of course, *\J 
 in proportion to the previous scarcity of her bread-and-chcese, 
 
 ycsii^^ 
 
 c>^V^''^^' 
 
6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 grew immediately intolerant of any wine less than 905. the 
 dozen), said that Cecil cared for nothing longer than a fort- 
 night, unless it were his horse, Forest King. It was very 
 ungrateful in the Zu-Zu, since he cared for her at the least a 
 whole quarter, paying for his fidelity to the tune of a hundred 
 a month ; and, also, it was not true, for besides Forest King, 
 . V ha^loYajJ his young brother Berkeley — which how^ever she 
 neither knew iior guessed. 
 
 * Beastly ! ' replied that young gentlemen, in reference to 
 the weather, which was indeed pretty tolerable for an Eng- 
 lish morning in February. * I say, Bertie — are you in a 
 hurry ? ' 
 
 * The very deuce of a hurry, little one : why ? ' Bertie 
 never was in a hurry, however, and he said this as lazily as 
 possible, shaking the white horsehair over his helmet, and 
 drawing in deep draughts of Turkish Latakia previous to 
 parting with his pipe for the whole of four or five hours. 
 
 * Because I am in a hole — no end of a hole — and I thought 
 you'd help me,' murmured the boy, half penitently, half 
 caressingly; he was very girlish in his face and his ways. 
 On which confession, Bake retired into the bath-room ; he 
 could hear just as well there, and a sense of decorum made 
 
 j. him withdraw, though his presence would have been wholly 
 ' -^forgotten by them. In something the same spirit as the 
 I French countess accounted for her employing her valet to 
 [ bring her her chocolate in bed — * Est-ce que vous appelez 
 cette chose-ld un homme?' — Bertie had on occasion, so 
 wholly regarded servants as necessary furniture, that he had 
 gone through a love scene, with that handsome coquette 
 Lady Regalia, totally oblivious of the presence of the groom 
 of the chambers, and the possibility of that person's appear- 
 ance in the witness-box of the Divorce Court. It was in no 
 way his passion that blinded him — he did not put the steam 
 on like that, and never went in for any disturbing emotion,— 
 I it was simply habit, and forgetfulness that those functionaries 
 \\v'ere not born mute, deaf, and sightless. 
 
 lie tossed some essence over his hands, and drew on his 
 gauntlets. 
 
 * What's up. Berk ? » 
 
 The boy hung his head, and played a little uneasily with 
 an ormolu terrior-pot, upsetting half the tobacco in it ; he 
 was trained to big brother's nouchulant impenetrable school, 
 
» BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' 7 
 
 and used to his brother's set, a cool, listless, reckless, thoro'- 
 bred, and impassive set, whose first canon was that you must 
 lose your last thousand in the world without giving a sign 
 that you winced, and must win half a million without show- 
 ing that you were gratified ; but he had something of girlish 
 weakness in his nature, and a reserve in his temperament 
 that was with difficulty conquered. 
 
 Bertie looked at him, and laid his hand gently on the young 
 one's shoulder. 
 
 * Come, my boy, out with it 1 It's nothing very bad, I'll be 
 bound ? ' 
 
 ' I want some more money ; a couple of ponies,' said the 
 boy a Httle huskily ; he did not meet his brother's eyes, that 
 were looking straight down on him. 
 
 Cecil gave a long low whistle, and drew a meditative whiff 
 from his meerschaum. 
 
 * Tres che3:^ou're always wanting money. So am I. So 
 is everybody. The normal state of man is to want money. 
 Two ponies ! What's it for ? ' 
 
 * I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it 
 me, and I told him I would send it him in the morning. The 
 ponies were gone before I thought of it, Bertie, and I haven't ,. 
 a notion where to get them to pay him again.' 0|^^ 
 
 * Heavy stakes, young one, for you,' murmured Cecil, while i^ 
 his hand dropped from the boy's shoulder, and a shadow of 
 gravity passed over his face ; money was very scarce with 
 himself. Berkeley gave him a hurried appealing glance. He 
 was used to shift all his anxieties on to his elder brother, 
 and to be helped by him under any difficulty. Cecil never 
 allotted two seconds' thought to his own embarrassments, 
 but he would multiply them tenfold by taking other people's 
 on him as well with an unremitting and thoughtless good- 
 nature. 
 
 * I couldn't help it,' pleaded the lad with coaxing and 
 almost piteous apology. * I backed Grosvenor's play, and 
 you know he's always the most wonderful luck in the world. 
 I couldn't tell he'd go a crowner and have such cards as he 
 had. How shall I get the money, Bertie ? I daren't ask the 
 governor; and besides I told Poulteney he should have it 
 this morning. What do you think if I sold the mare ? But 
 then I couldn't sell her in a minute * 
 
 Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes as they rested on the 
 
8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 lad'a young, fair, womanish face were very gentle under the 
 long shade of their lashes. 
 
 ' Sell the mare ! Nonsense I How should anybody live 
 without a hack? I can pull you through, I dare say. Ah I 
 by George, there's the quarters chiming. I shall be too late, 
 as I live.' 
 
 Not hurried still, however, by that near prospect, he 
 sauntered to his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty 
 velvet and gold-filigreed absurdities, and shook out all the 
 bank-notes there were in it. There were fives and tens enough 
 to count up 45Z. He reached over and caught up a five from 
 a little heap lying loo^e on a novel of Du Terrail'Sjand tossed 
 the whole across the room to the boy. 
 
 ' There you are, young one ! But don't borrow of any 
 but your own people again, Berk. We don't do that. No, 
 no 1 — no thanljs. Shut up all that. If ever you get in a hole, 
 I'll take you out if I can. Good-bye — will you go to the 
 Lords? Better not — nothing to see, and still less to hear. 
 All stale. That's the only comfort for us — we are outside ! * 
 he said, with something that almost approached hurry in the 
 utterance, so great was his terror of anything approaching a 
 scene, and so eager was he to escape his brother's gratitude. 
 The boy had taken the notes with delighted thanks indeed, 
 but with that tranquil and unprotesting readiness with which 
 spoiled childishness or unhesitating selfishness accepts gifts 
 and sacrifices from another's generosity, which have been so 
 general that they have ceased to have magnitude. As his 
 brother passed him, however, he caught his hand a second, 
 and looked up with a mist before his eyes, and a flush half of 
 shame, half of gratitude, on his face. 
 
 * What a trump you are I — how good you are, Bertie I ' 
 
 Cecil laughed and shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' First time I ever heard it, my dear boy,' be answered, 
 as he lounged down the staircase, his chains clashing and 
 jingling, while pressing his helmet on to his forehead and . 
 pulling the chin scale over his moustaches, he sauntered out 
 into the street where his charger was waiting. 
 
 ' The deuce I ' he thought, as he settled himself in his 
 stirrups, while the raw morning wind tossed his white plume 
 hither and thither. * I never remembered ! — I don't believe 
 I've left myself money enough to take Willon and Rake 
 and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I shouldn't 
 
•BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES* 9 
 
 have kept enough to take my own ticket with I — that would 
 be no end of a sell. On my word I don't know how much 
 there's left on the dressing-table. Well 1 I can't help it ; 
 Poulteney had to be paid ; I can't have Berk's name show in 
 anything that looks shady.' 
 
 The 50/, had been the last remnant of a bill, done under 
 great difficulties with a sagacious Jew, and Cecil had no more 
 certainty of possessing any more money until next pay-day 
 should come round than he had of possessing the moon ; lack of 
 ready money, moreover, is a serious inconvenience when you 
 belong to clubs where ' pounds and fives ' are the lowest 
 points, and live with men who take the odds on most events 
 in thousands ; but the thing was done ; he would not have 
 undone it at the boy's loss if he could ; and Cecil, who never 
 was worried by the loss of the most stupendous * crusher,' 
 and who made it a rule never to think of disagreeable inevi- 
 tabilities two minutes together, shook his charger's bridle and 
 cantered down Piccadilly towards the barracks, while Black 
 Douglas reared, curveted, made as if he would kick, and 
 finally ended by * passaging ' down half the length of the 
 road, to the prominent peril of all passers-by, and looking 
 eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and foam-flecked, while 
 he thus expressed his disapprobation of forming part of the 
 escort from Palace to Parhament. 
 
 ' Home Secretary should see about it ; it's abominable I 
 If we must come among them, they ought to be made a little 
 odoriferous first. A couple of fire-engines now, playing on 
 them continuously with rose-water and bouquet d'Ess, for an 
 hour before we come up, might do a little good. I'll get 
 some men to speak about it in the House ; call it " Bill for 
 the Purifying of the Unwashed, and Prevention of their 
 Suffocating Her Majesty's Brigades," ' murmured Cecil to 
 the Earl of Broceliande, next him, as they sat down in their 
 saddles with the rest of the * First Life,' in front of St. 
 Stephen's, with a hazy fog steaming round them, and a 
 London mob crushing against their chargers' flanks, while 
 Black Douglas stood like a rock, though a butcher's tray was 
 pressed against his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his 
 hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of Cecil's prophetic 
 horror, was wildly plmiging between his legs, as the hydra- 
 headed rushed down in insane headlong haste to stare at, and 
 crush on to, that superb body of Guards. 
 
10 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * I would give a kingdom for a soda-aud-brandy. Bah ! 
 ye gods 1 what a smell of fish and fustian I ' sighed Bertie, 
 with a yawn of utter famine for want of something to drink 
 and something to smoke, were it only a glass of brown sherry 
 and a little papelito, while he glanced down at the snow-white 
 and jet-black masterpieces of Rake's genius, all smirched, 
 and splashed, and smeared. 
 
 He had given fifty pounds away, and scarcely knew whether 
 he should have enough to take his ticket next day into the 
 Shires, and he owed fifty hundred, without having the 
 shghtest grounds for supposing he should ever be able to pay 
 it, and he cared no more about either of these things than he 
 cared about the Zu-Zu's throwing the half-guinea peaches 
 into the river after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit 
 dragon-flies with them ; but to be half a day without a cigar- 
 ette, and to have a disagreeable odour of apples and corduroys 
 wafted up to him, was a calamity that made him insupport 
 ably depressed and unhappy, 
 j^ Well, why not ? It is the trifles of life that are its bores 
 tT after all. Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or 
 } laugh when they lie in a ditch with their own knee-joint and 
 their hunter's spine broken over the double post and rails : it 
 is the mud that has choked up your horn just when you 
 wanted to rally the pack ; it's the county member who 
 catches you by the button in the lobby ; it's the whip who 
 carries you off to a division just when you've sat down 
 to your turbot ; it's the ten seconds by which you miss the 
 train ; it's the dust that gets in your eyes as you go down to 
 Epsom ; it's the pretty little rose note that went by accident 
 to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from 
 Madame ; it's the dog that always will run mid into the 
 birds ; it's the cook who always will season the white soup 
 
 L wrong — it is these that are the bores of life, and that try the 
 temper of your philosophy. 
 
 "^An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having 
 lost heavy sums through a swindler, with as placid an in- 
 difference as if he had lost a toothpick ; but he swore like a 
 trooper because a thief had stolen the steel-mounted hoof of a 
 dead pot hunter. 
 
 ' Insufferable ! ' murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn 
 behind his gauntlet ; * the Line's nothing half so bad as this ; 
 one day in a London mob boats a year's campaigning: what's 
 
BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' ii 
 
 charging a pah to charging an oyster-stall, or a parapet of 
 fascines to a bristling row of umbrellas ? ' 
 
 Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms 
 was a question of military interest never answered, as Cecil 
 scattered the umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the 
 Houses of Parliament full trot with the rest of the escort on 
 the return to the Palace, the afternoon sun breaking out with 
 a brightened gleam from the clouds, and flashing off the 
 drawn swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering breast- 
 plates, the gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers. 
 
 But a mere sun-gleam just when the thing was over, and 
 the escort was pacing back to Hyde Park barracks, could not 
 console Cecil for fog, wind, mud, oyster-vendors, bad odours, 
 and the uproar and riff-raff of the streets : specially when his 
 throat was as dry as a limekiln, and his longing for the sight 
 of a cheroot approaching desperation. Unlimited sodas, three 
 pipes smoked silently over I)elphine Demirep's last novels a 
 bath well dashed with eau de c6rogne7'aM ~some""gIasses of 
 Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him 
 a little ; but he was still weary and depressed into gentler 
 languor than ever through all the courses at a dinner party at 
 the Austrian Embassy, and did not recover his dejection at 
 a reception of the Duchess of Lydiard-Tregoze, where the 
 prettiest French Countess of her time asked him if anything 
 was the matter. 
 
 * Yes ! ' said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melan- 
 choly in what the woman called his handsome Spanish eyes, 
 * I have had a great misfortune ; we have been on duty all 
 da.y!' 
 
 He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless 
 though his temper was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition 
 of a villa, prescribed Creme de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in 
 succession, with a considerable amount of pine-apple-ice at 
 three o'clock in the morning, which restorative prescription 
 succeeded. 
 
 Indeed, it took something as tremendous as divorce from 
 all forms of smoking for five hours, to make an impression on 
 Bertie. He had the most serene insouciance that ever a man 
 was blessed with ; in worry he did not believe — he never let 
 it come near him ; and beyond a little difficulty sometimes in 
 separating too many entangled rose-chains caught round him 
 at the same time, and the annoyance of a miscalculation on 
 
12 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the flat, or the ridge-and-furrow, when a Maldon or Danebury 
 favourite came nowhere, or his book was wrong for the Grand 
 National, Cecil had no cares of any sort or description. 
 r True, the Eoyallieu Peerage, one of the most ancient and 
 '^ ', almost one of the most impoverished in the kingdom, could 
 ^ ' ill afibrd to maintain its sons in the expensive career on which 
 '^ it had launched them, and the chief there was to spare usually 
 p* went between the eldest son, a Secretary of Legation in that 
 jC^ costly and charming City of Vienna, and to the young one, 
 ^ Berkeley, through the old Viscount's partiality ; so that, had 
 Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position, he 
 would have probably confessed that it was, to say the least, 
 awkward ; but then he never did this, certainly never did it 
 thoroughly. Sometimes he felt himself near the wind when 
 settling-day came, or the Jews appeared utterly impracticable ; 
 but as a rule things had always trimmed somehow, and though 
 his debts were considerable, and he was literally as pennilesa 
 as a man can be to stay in the Guards at all, he had never in 
 any shape realised the want of money. He might not be able 
 to raise a guinea to go towards that long- standing account, his 
 army tailor's bill, and post obits had long ago forestalled the 
 few hundreds a year that, under his mother's settlements, 
 would come to him at the Viscount's death ; but Cecil had 
 ■ never known in his life what it was not to have a first-rate 
 , stud, not to live as luxuriously as a duke, not to order the 
 ' costliest dinners at the clubs, and be among the first to lead 
 all the splendid entertainments and extravagances of the 
 Household; he had never been without his Highland shooting, 
 his Baden gaming, his prize-winning schooner among the 
 K. V. Y. Squadron, his September battues, his Pytchley 
 hunting, his pretty expensive Zu-Zus and other toys, his drag 
 for Epsom, and his trap and hack for the Park, his crowd of 
 engagements through the season, and his bevy of fair leaders 
 of the fashion to smile on him, and shower their invitation- 
 cards on him, like a rain of rose-leaves, as one of their * best 
 men.' 
 rT .' 'Best,' that is, in the sense of fashion, flirting, waltzing, 
 I and general social distinction; in no other sense, for the 
 '» newest of d6butantes knew well that * Beauty,' though the 
 j most perfect of flirts, would never be ' serious,' and had 
 . nothing to be serious with, on which understanding he waa 
 : allowed by the sex to have the run of their boudoirs and 
 
 ^y^^'^ 
 
'BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES' 13 
 
 drawing-rooms, much as if he were a little lion- dog ; they 
 counted him quite * safe ; ' he made love to the married 
 women, to be sure, but he was quite certain not to run away 
 with the marriageable daughters. 
 
 Hence, Bertie had never felt the want of all that is bought^ 
 by and represents money, and imbibed a vague, indistinct 
 impression that all these things that made life pleasant came 
 by Nature, and were the natural inheritance and concomitant ^ 
 of anybody born in a decent station, and endowed with a / 
 tolerable tact ; such a matter-of-fact difficulty as not having-' 
 gold enough to pay for his own and his stud's transit to the 
 Shires had very rarely stared him in the face, and when it 
 did he trusted to chance to lift him safely over such ?, social 
 *yawner,' and rarely trusted in vain. 
 
 According to all the canons of his Order he was never 
 excited, never disappointed, never exhilarated, never dis- 
 turbed, and also of course never by any chance embarrassed. 
 * Votre imperturhahiliU,' as the Prince de Ligne used to de- 
 signate La Grande Catherine, would have been an admirable 
 designation for Cecil — he was imperturbable under every- 
 thing; even when an heiress, with feet as colossal as her 
 fortune, made him a proposal of marriage, and he had to 
 retreat from all the offered honours and threatened horrors, 
 he courteously, but steadily declined them. Nor in more 
 interesting adventures was he less happy in his coolness. When 
 my Lord Regalia, who never knew v^hen he was not wanted, 
 came in inopportunely in a very tender scene of the young 
 Guardsman's (then but a Cornet) with his handsome Countess, 
 Cecil lifted his long lashes lazily, turning to him a face of the 
 most plait-il ? and innocent demureness — or consummate 
 impudence, whichever you like. * We're playing Solitaire. 
 Interesting game. Queer fix, though, the ball's in that's left 
 all alone in the middle, don't yon think ? ' Lord Eegalia felt 
 his own similarity to the * ball in a fix * too keenly to appre- 
 ciate the interesting character of the amusement, or the 
 coolness of the chief performer in it ; but ' Beauty's Solitaire ' 
 became a synonym thenceforth among the Household to 
 typify any very tender passages * sotto qtiattr' occhi.' 
 
 This made his reputation on the town ; the ladies called it 
 very wicked, but were charmed by the Richelieu-like im- 
 pudence all the same, and petted the sinner ; and from then 
 till now he had held his own with them ; dashing through life 
 
14 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 very fast, as became the first riding man in the Brigades, but 
 enjoying it very fully, smoothly and softly, liking the world 
 and being liked by it. 
 
 To be sure, in the background there was always that ogre 
 of money, and the beast had a knack of gnawing bigger and 
 darker every year ; but then, on the other hand, Cecil never 
 looked at him— never thought about him — knew, too, that 
 he stood just as much behind the chairs of men whom the 
 world accredited as millionaires, and whenever the ogre 
 gave him a cold grip, that there was for the moment no 
 escaping, washed away the touch of it in a warm fresh draft 
 of pleasure. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 
 
 • Hovv long before the French can come up ? ' asked Wellington, 
 hearing of the pursuit that was thundering close on his rear 
 in the most critical hours of the short, sultry Spanish night. 
 ' Half an hour at least,' was the answer. ' Very well, then, 
 I will turn in and get some sleep,' said the Commander-in- 
 Chief, rolling himself in a cloak, and lying down in a ditch 
 to rest as soundly for the single half-hour as any tired 
 drummer-boy. 
 
 Serenely as Wellington, another hero slept profoundly, on 
 the eve of a great event — of a great contest to be met when 
 the day should break — of a critical victory, depending on him 
 alone to save the Guards of England from defeat and shame ; 
 their honour and their hopes rested on his solitary head ; by 
 him they would be lost or saved ; but unharassed by the 
 magnitude of the stake at issue, unhaunted by the past, un- 
 fretted by the future, he slumbered the slumber of the just. 
 
 Not Sir Tristram, Sir Caledore, Sir Launcelot — no, nor 
 Arthur himself, was ever truer knight, was ever gentler, 
 braver, bolder, more staunch of heart, more loyal of soul, 
 than he to whom the glory of the Brigades was trusted now ; 
 never was there spirit more dauntless and fiery in the field ; 
 never temper kindlier and more generous with friends and 
 foes. Miles of the ridge and furrow, stiflf fences of terrible 
 
THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 15 
 
 blackthorn, double posts and rails, yawners and croppers both, 
 tough as Shh*e and Stewards could make them, awaited him 
 on the morrow ; on his beautiful lean head capfuls of money 
 were piled by the Service and the Talent ; and in his stride 
 all the fame of the Household would be centred on the 
 morrow ; but he took his rest like the cracker he was — stand- 
 ing as though he were on guard, and steady as a rock, a hero 
 every inch of him. For he was Forest King, the great 
 steeplechaser, on whom the Guards had laid all their money 
 for the Grand Military — the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon. 
 
 His quarters were a loose box, his camp-bed a litter of 
 straw, fresh shaken down, his clothing a very handsome rug, 
 hood, and quarter-piece buckled on and marked * B. C. ; ' 
 above the manger and the door was lettered his own name in 
 gold, * Forest King ; ' and in the panels of the latter were 
 miniatures of his sire and of his dam : Lord of the Isles, one 
 of the greatest hunters that the grass countries ever saw sent 
 across them ; and Bayadere, a wild-pigeon-blue mare of Cir- 
 cassia. How, furthermore, he stretched up to his long line 
 of ancestry by the Sovereign, out of Queen of Roses ; by 
 Belted Earl, out of Fallen Star ; by Marmion, out of Court 
 Coquette, and straight up to the White Cockade blood, &c., 
 &c., &c., is it not written in the mighty and immortal 
 chronicle, precious as the Koran, patrician as the Peerage, 
 known and beloved to mortals as the ' Sfcud Book ' ? 
 
 Not an immensely large, or unusually powerful horse, but 
 with race in every line of him ; steel-grey in colour, darkening 
 well at all points, shining and soft as satin, with the firm 
 muscles quivering beneath at the first touch of excitement to 
 the high mettle and finely strung organisation ; the head 
 small, lean, racer-like, * blood ' all over ; with the delicate 
 taper ears, almost transparent in full light ; well ribbed-up, 
 fine shoulders, admirable girth and loins ; legs clean, slender, 
 firm, promising splendid knee ^i^ction ; sixteen hands high, 
 and up to thirteen stone ; clever enough for anything, trained 
 to close and open country, a perfect brook jumper, a clipper 
 at fencing, taking a great deal of riding, as any one could 
 tell by the set-on of his neck, but docile as a child to a well- 
 known hand — such was Forest King with his English and 
 Eastern strains, winner at Chertsey, Croydon, the National, 
 the Granby, the Belvoir Castle, the Curragh, and all the 
 gentleman-rider steeplechases and military sweepstakes in 
 
i6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the kingdom, and entered now, with tremendous bets on bim. 
 for the Gilt Vase. 
 
 It was a crisp, cold night outside, starry, and wintry, but 
 open weather, and clear ; the ground would be just right on 
 the morrow, neither hard as the slate of a billiard- table, nor 
 wet as the slush of a quagmire. Forest King slept steadily 
 on in his warm and spacious box, dreaming doubtless of days 
 of victory, cub-hunting in the reedy October woods and 
 pastures, of the ringing notes of the horn, and the sweet 
 music of the pack, and the glorious quick burst up-wind, 
 breasting the icy cold water, and showing the way over fence 
 and bullfinch. Dozing and dreaming pleasantly, but alert 
 for all that ; for he awoke suddenly, shook himself, had an 
 hilarious roll in the straw, and stood ' at attention,* 
 
 Awake only, could you tell the generous and gallant pro- 
 mise of his perfect temper ; for there are no eyes that speak 
 more truly, none on earth that are so beautiful, as the eyes of 
 a horse. Forest King's were dark as a gazelle's, soft as a 
 woman's, brilliant as stars, a little dreamy and mournful, and 
 as infinitely caressing when he looked at what he loved, as 
 they could blaze full of light and fire when danger was near 
 and rivalry against him. How loyally such eyes have looked 
 at me over the paddock fence, as a wild happy gallop was 
 suddenly broken for a gentle head to be softly pushed against 
 my hand with the gentlest of welcomes ! They sadly put to 
 shame the million human eyes that so fast learn the lie of 
 the world, and utter it as falsely as the lips. 
 
 The steeplechaser stood alert, every fibre of his body 
 strung to pleasurable excitation ; the door opened, a hand 
 held him some sugar, and the voice he loved best said fondly, 
 ' All right, old boy ? ' 
 
 Forest King devoured the beloved dainty with true equine 
 unction, rubbed his forehead against his master's shoulder, 
 and pushed his nose into the nearest pocket in search for 
 more of his sweetmeat. 
 
 * You'd eat a sugar-loaf, you dear old rascal 1 Put the 
 gas up, George,' said his owner, while he turned up the 
 body clothing to feel the firm, cool skin, loosened one of 
 the bandages, passed his hand from thigh to fetlock, and 
 glanced round the box to be sure the horse had been well 
 suppered and littered down. 
 
 ' Think we shall win, Hake ? ' 
 
TPIE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 17 
 
 Rake, with a stable lantern in his hand and a forage cap 
 on one side of his head, standing a little in advance of a 
 group of grooms and helpers, took a bit of straw out of his 
 mouth, and smiled a smile of sublime scorn and security. 
 * Win, sir ? I should be glad to know as when was that ere 
 King ever beat yet, or you either, sir, for that matter ? ' 
 
 Bertie Cecil laughed a little languidly. 
 
 'Well, we take a good deal of beating, I think, and there 
 are not very many who can give it us ; are there, old fellow ? ' 
 he said to the horse, as he passed his palm over the withers ; 
 ' but there are some crushers in the lot to-morrow ; you'll 
 have to do all you know.' 
 
 Forest King caught the manger with his teeth, and kicked 
 in a bit of play and ate some more sugar, with much licking 
 of his lips to express the nonchalance with which he viewed 
 his share in the contest, and his tranquil certainty of being 
 first past the flags. His master looked at him once more and 
 sauntered out of the box. 
 
 * He's in first-rate form. Rake, and right as a trivet.' 
 
 ' In course he is, sir ; nobody ever laid leg over such 
 cattle as all that White Cockade blood, and he's the very best 
 of the strain,' said Rake, as he held up his lantern across the 
 stable-yard, that looked doubly dark in the February night 
 after the bright gas glare of the box. 
 
 * So he need be,' thought Cecil, as a buil-terrier, three or 
 four Gordon setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyea 
 dashed at their chains, giving tongue in frantic delight at the 
 sound of his step, while the hounds echoed the welcome from 
 their more distant kennels, and he went slowly across the 
 great stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot glimmering 
 through the gloom. * So he need be to pull me through. 
 The Ducal and the October let me in for it enough ; I never 
 was closer in my life. The deuce if I don't do the distance 
 to-morrow I shan't have sovereigns enough to play pound- 
 points at night I I don't know what a man's to do ; if he's 
 put into this life he must go the pace of it. Why did Royal 
 send me into the Guards, if he meant to keep the screw on iii 
 this way ? He'd better have drafted me into a marching regi- 
 ment at once, if he wanted me to live upon nothing.' 
 
 Nothing meant anything under 6,000/. a year with Cecil, as 
 the minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look 
 01 genuine annoyance and trouble, most unusual, there was ob 
 
 c 
 
18 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 his face, the picture of carelessness and gentle indiffercnoe 
 habitually, though shadowed now as ho crossed the courtyard 
 after his after-midnight visit to his steeplechaser. He had 
 backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or lose a cracker 
 on his own riding on the morrow ; and, though he had found 
 suflicient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough 
 lying on his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to 
 pay his groom's book, or a notion where to get more, if the 
 King should find his match, over the ridge and furrow in the 
 morning ! 
 
 It was not pleasant : a cynical, savage, world-disgusied 
 Timon derives on the whole a good amount of satisfaction 
 from his breakdown in the fine philippics against his con- 
 temporaries that it is certain to afford, and the magnificent 
 grievances with which it furnishes him ; but when life is 
 very pleasant to a man, and the world very fond of him ; 
 when existence is perfectly smooth — bar that single pressure 
 of money — and is an incessantly changing kaleidoscope of 
 London seasons, Paris winters, ducal houses in the hunting 
 months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs, dinners at the Star 
 and Garter, dinners irreproachable everywhere, cottage for 
 Ascot week, yachting with the R. Y. Y. Club, Derby handicaps 
 at Hornsey, pretty chorus singers set up in Bijou villas, 
 dashing rosieres taken over to Baden, warm corners in Belvoir, 
 Savernake, and Longleat battues, and all the rest of the 
 general programme, with no drawback to it, except the duties 
 at the Palace, the heat of a review, or the extravagance of a 
 pampered lionne — theii to be pulled up in that easy swinging 
 gallop for sheer want of a golden shoe, as one may say, is 
 abominably bitter, and requires far more philosophy to endure 
 than Timon would ever manage to muster. It is a bore, an 
 unmitigated bore, a harsh, hateful, unrelieved martyrdom 
 that the world does not see, and that the world would not 
 pity if it did. 
 
 'Never mind I Things will come right. Forest King 
 never failed me yet; he is as full of running as a Derby 
 winner, and he'll go over the yawners like a bird,' thought 
 Cecil, who never confronted his troubles with more than 
 sixty seconds' thought, and who was of that Hght, impassible, 
 half-levity, half-languor of temperament that both throws off 
 worry easily, and shirks it persistently. * SulTicient for the 
 day,' Ac, was the essence of bis creed, and if he had 
 
THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 19 
 
 enough to lay a fiver at night on the rubber, he was quite 
 able to forget for the time that he wanted five hundred for 
 settHng-day in the morning, and had not an idea how to get 
 it. There waa not a trace of anxiety on him, when he 
 opened a low arched door, passed down a corridor, and 
 entered the warm, full light of that chamber of liberty, that 
 sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple of refuge, thrice 
 blessed in all its forms throughout the land, that consecrated 
 Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the meerschaum, 
 and tiie paradise of the narghile — the smoking-room. 
 
 A spacious easy chamber, too, lined with the laziest of 
 divans, seen just now through a fog of sraolie, and tenanted 
 by nearly a score of mca in every imaginable loose velvet 
 costume, and with faces as well known in the Park at six 
 o'clock in May, and on the Heath in October, in Paris in 
 January, and on the Solent in August, in Pratt's of a sum- 
 mer's night, and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as 
 though they were features that came round as regularly as 
 the • July ' or the Waterloo Cup. Some were pulfing away 
 in calm meditative comfort, in silence that they would not 
 have broken for any earthly consideration ; others were talking 
 hard and fast, and through the air heavily weighted with the 
 varieties of tobacco, from tiny cigarettes to giant cheroots, 
 from rough bowls full of cavendish to sybaritic rose-water 
 hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose together : ' Gave him too 
 much riding, the idiot.' ' Take the field, bar one.* ' Nothing 
 so good for the mare as a little nitre and antim-ony in her 
 mash.' * Not at all ! the Regent and Rake cross in the old 
 strain, always was black-tan with a white frill.* * The 
 EarFs as good a fellow as Lady Flora, always give you a 
 mount.* ' Nothing like a Kate Terry, though, on a bright 
 day for salmon.' 'Faster thing I never knew; found at 
 twenty minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown 
 Water at ten to twelve.' All these various phrases were 
 rushing in among each other, and tossed across the eddies of 
 smoke in the conflict of tongues loosened in the tabagie 
 and made eloquent, though slightly inarticulate, by pipe- 
 stems ; while a tall, fair man, with the limbs of a Hercules, 
 the chest of a prize fighter, and the face of a Raphael Angel, 
 known in the Household as Seraph, was in the full flood of a 
 story of whist played under difliculties in the Doncaster 
 
 express. 
 
 02 
 
20 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' 1 wanted a monkey ; I wanted monkeys awfally,' he 
 was stating as Forest King's owner came into the smoking- 
 room. 
 
 * Did you, Seraph ? The *' Zoo" or the Clubs could supply 
 you with apes fully developed to any amount,* said Bertie, as 
 he threw himself down. 
 
 ' You be hanged I ' laughed the Seraph, known to the 
 rest of the world as the Marquis of Rockingham, son of the 
 Duke of Lyonnesse. * I wished monkeys, but the others 
 wished ponies and hundreds, so I gave in ; Vandebur and I 
 won two rubbers, and we'd just begun the third when the 
 train stoppea^-with a crash ; none of us dropped the cards 
 though, but the tricks and the scores all went down with the 
 shaking. " Can't play in that row," said Charlie, for the 
 women were shrieking like mad, and the engine was roaring 
 like my mare Philippa — I'm afraid she'll never be cured, poor 
 thing ! — so I put my head out and asked what was up ? We'd 
 run into a cattle train. Anybody hurt ? No, nobody hurt ; 
 but we were to get out. "I'll be shot if I get out," I told 
 'em, " till I've finished the rubber." " But you must get out," 
 said the guard ; ** carriages must be moved." " Nobody says 
 * must * to him," said Van (he'd drank more Perles du Ehin 
 than was good for him at Doncaster) ; " don't you know the 
 Seraph?" Man stared. " Yes, sir, — know the Seraph, sir? 
 leastways did, sir, afore he died ; see him once at Moulsey 
 Mill, sir ; his * one two ' was amazin'. Waters soon threw 
 up the sponge." We were all dying with laughter, and I tossed 
 him a tenner. ** There, my good fellow," said I, " shunt the 
 carriage and let us finish the game. If another train come up, 
 give it Lord Rockingham's compliments and say he'll thank 
 it to stop, because collisions shake his trumps together." 
 Man thought us mad, took tenner though, shunted us to one 
 side out of the noise, and we played two rubbers more 
 before they'd repaired the damage and sent us on to town.' 
 
 And the Seraph took a long-drawn whiff from his silver 
 meerschaum, and then a deep draught of soda and brandy to 
 refresh himself after the narrative — biggest, best tempered, 
 and wildest of men in or out of the Service, despite the angelic 
 character of his fair-haired head, and blue eyes that looked as 
 clear and as innocent as those of a six-year-old child. 
 
 * Not the first time by a good many that you've " shunted 
 off the straight," Seraph?' laughed Cecil, substituting an 
 
THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 21 
 
 amber mouthpiece for his half-finished cheroot. ' I've been 
 having a good-night look at the King. He'll stay.' 
 
 * Of course he will,' chorused half a dozen voices. 
 
 ' With all our pots on him,* added the Seraph. ' He's toe 
 much of a gentleman to put us all up a tree ; he knows he 
 carries the honour of the Household.* 
 
 ' There are some good mounts, there's no denying that,' 
 said Chesterfield of the Blues (who was called Tom for no 
 other reason than that it was entirely unUke his real name of 
 Adolphus), where he was curled up almost invisible, except 
 for the movement of the jasmine stick of his chibouque. 
 
 • That brute. Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook 
 jumper, it would be hard to beat Wild Gera,nium, though 
 her shoulders are not quite what they ought to be. Monta- 
 cute, too, can ride a good thing, and he's got one in Pas de 
 Charge.* 
 
 ' I'm not much afraid of Monti, he makes too wild a burst 
 first ; he never saves one atom,' yawned Cecil, with the coils 
 of his hookah bubbling among the rose-water ; * the man I'n: 
 afraid of is that fellow from the Tenth ; he's as light as a 
 feather and as hard as steel. I watched him yesterday going 
 over the water, and the horse he'll ride for Trelawney is good 
 enough to beat even the King if he's properly piloted.' 
 
 ' You haven't kept yourself in condition. Beauty,' growled 
 
 * Tom,' with the chibouque in his mouth, ' else nothing could 
 give you the go-by. It's tempting Providence to go in for 
 the Gilt Vase after such a December and January as you spent 
 in Paris. Even the week you've been in the Shires you 
 haven't trained a bit ; you've been waltzing or playing bacca- 
 rat till five in the morning, and taking no end of sodas after 
 to bring you right for the meet at nine. If a man will drink 
 champagnes and burgundies as you do, and spend his time 
 after women, I should like to know how he's to be in hard- 
 riding condition, unless he expects a miracle.' 
 
 With which Chesterfield, who weighed fourteen stone him- 
 self, and was, therefore, out of aU but welter-races, and wanted 
 a weight -carrier of tremendous power even for them, subsided 
 under a heap of velvet and cashmere, and Cecil laughed : 
 lying on a divan just under one of the gas branches, the light 
 fell full on his handsome face, with its fair hue and its gentle 
 languor on which there wag not a single trace of the autre- 
 cuidanoe attributed to him. Both he and the Seraph could 
 
22 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 • lead the wildest life of any men in Europe without looking 
 i one shadow more worn than the brightest beauty of the sea- 
 ; son, and could hold wassail in riotous rivalry till the sun rose, 
 \ and then throw themselves into saddle as fresh as if they had 
 jibeen sound asleep all night, to keep up with the pack the 
 jj whole day in a fast burst or on a cold scent, or in whatever 
 {■sport Fortune and the coverts gave them, till their second 
 ^horses wound their way homeward through muddy, leafless 
 J lanes, when the stars had risen. 
 
 •^ * Beauty don't believe in training. No more do I. Never 
 would train for anything,' said the Seraph, now, pulling the 
 long blonde moustaches that were not altogether in character 
 with his seraphic cognomen. ' If a man can ride, let him. 
 Jf he's born to the pigskin, he'll be in f i the distance safe 
 enough, whether he smoke or don't smoke, drink or don't 
 drink. As for training on raw chops, giving up wine, living 
 like the very deuce, and all as if you were in a monastery, 
 and changing yourself into a mere bag of bones — it's utter 
 bosh. You might as well be in purgatory ; besides, it's no 
 more credit to win then than if you were a professional.' 
 
 ' But you must have trained at Christ Church, Rock, for 
 the Eight ? ' asked another Guardsman, Sir Vere Bellingham, 
 ' Severe,' as he was christened, chiefly because he was the 
 easiest-going giant in existence. 
 
 ' Did 1 1 men came to me ; wanted me to join the Eight ; 
 coxswain came, awful strict little fellow, docked his men of 
 all their fun — took plenty himself though I Coxswain said I 
 must begin to train, do as all his crew did. I threw up my 
 <\ sleeve and showed him my arm ; ' and the Seraph stretched 
 ^ out an arm magnificent enough for a statue of Milo. * I 
 f said, " There, sir, I'll htlp you thrash Cambridge, if you like, 
 but train I won't for you or for all the University. I've been 
 \ Captain of the Eton Eight ; but I didn't keep my crew on 
 "lea and toast. I fattened 'em regularly three times a week 
 on venison and champagne at Christopher's. Very happy to 
 feed yours, too, if you like ; game comes down to me every 
 Friday from the Duke's moors ; they look uncommonly as if 
 they wanted it ! " You should have seen his face ! — fatten the 
 Eight I He didn't let me do tliat of course ; but he was very 
 glad of my oar in his rowlocks, and I helped him beat Cam- 
 bridge without training an hour myself, except so far as 
 rov/ing hard went.' 
 
THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE 23 
 
 And the Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the 
 recollection, dipped his fair moustaches into a foaming 
 seltzer. 
 
 ' Quite right, Seraph ! ' said Cecil, * when a man comes 
 up to the weights, looking like a homunculus after he's been 
 getting every atom of flesh off him like a jockey, he ought to 
 be struck out for the stakes to my mind. 'Tisn't a question 
 of riding, then, nor yet of pluck, or of management ; it's 
 nothing but a question of pounds, and of who can stand the 
 tamest life the longest.' 
 
 * Well, beneficial for one's morj.ls, at any rate,' suggested C- 
 Sir Vere. 
 
 * M^als be hanged,' said Bertie, very immorally. 'I'm 
 glad yoii remind us of them, Vere, you're such~a quintessence 
 of decorum and respectability yourself! I say — anybody 
 know anything of this fellow of the Tenth that's to ride 
 Trelawney's chestnut ? ' 
 
 * Jimmy Delmar ! Oh, yes ; I know Jimmy,' answered 
 Lord Cosmo Wentworth, of the Scots Fusileers, from the 
 far depths of an armchair. *Knew him at'Aldershot. Fine 
 rider ; give you a good bit of trouble, Beauty. Hasn't been 
 in England for years ; troop been such a while at Calcutta. 
 The Fancy take to him rather ; offering very freely on him 
 this morning in the Village : and he's got a rare good thing 
 in the chestnut.' 
 
 ' Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that 
 Irish mare D' Orleans Diamonds too.* 
 
 * Never mind ! Tenth won't beat us. The Household will 
 win safe enough, unless Forest King goes and breaks his 
 back over Brixworth — eh. Beauty ? ' said the Seraph, who 
 believed devoutly in his comrade, with all the loving loyalty 
 characteristic of the House of Lyonnesse, that to monarchs 
 and to friends had often cost it very dear. 
 
 ' You put your faith in the T\Tong quarter. Rock ; I may 
 fail you, he never will,' said Cecil, with ever so slight a dash 
 of sadness in his words ; the thought crossed him of how 
 boldly, how straightly, how gallantly the horse always 
 breasted and conquered his difficulties — did he himself deal 
 half so well with his own ? 
 
 * Well ! you both of you carry all our money and all our 
 credit ; so for the fair fame of the Household do " all you 
 know." I haven't hedged a shilling, not laid off a farthing, 
 
S4 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Bertie ; I stand on you and the King, and nothing else — s©e 
 what a sublime faith I have in you.' 
 
 * I don't think you're wise then, Seraph ; the field will 
 be very strong,' said Cecil, languidly. The answer was in- 
 different, and certainly thankless ; but under his drooped lids 
 a glance, frank and warm, rested for the moment on the 
 Seraph's leonine strength and Eaphaelesque head ; it was 
 not his way to say it, or to show it, or even much to think 
 it ; but in his heart he loved his old friend wonderfully well. 
 
 And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple- 
 chase of the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Par- 
 liament, while the great clouds of scented smoke circled 
 heavily round, making a halo of Turkish above the gold locks 
 of the Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield's velvets in strong 
 odours of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented mist 
 over Bertie's long lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough 
 to disdain * all training for the weights.' 
 
 * That's not the way to be in condition,' growled ' Tom,* 
 getting up with a great shake as the clock clanged the strokes 
 of five ; they had only returned from a ball three miles off, 
 when Cecil had paid his visit to the loose box. Bertie 
 laughed ; his laugh was like himself, rather languid but very 
 light-hearted, very silvery, very engaging. 
 
 ' Sit and smoke till breakfast time if you like, Tom, it 
 won't make any difference to me.' 
 
 But the Smoke Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion 
 of tlie Household over the ridge and furrow, risking the 
 steadiness of his wrist and the keenness of his eye, by any 
 such additional tempting of Providence, and went off itself 
 in various directions, with good-night iced drinks, yawning 
 considerably, like most other parliaments after a sitting. 
 
 It was the old family place of the Royallieu House in 
 which he had congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service 
 for the groat event, and consequently the bachelor chambers 
 in it were of the utmost comfort and spaciousness, and when 
 Cecil sauntered into his old quarters, familiar from boyhood, 
 he could not have been better off in his own luxurious haunts 
 in Piccadilly. Moreover, the first thing that caught his eye 
 was a dainty scarlet silk riding jacket broidered in gold and 
 silver, with the mo.tto. of his house, ' Cceur Vaillant se fait 
 Royaume,' all circled with oak and laurel leAves on the 
 Dollar. 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 25 
 
 It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristocratic 
 hands, and he looked at it with a smile. ' Ah, my lady, my 
 lady I * he thought half aloud, * do you really love me ? Do 
 I really love you ? * 
 
 There was a laugh in his eyes as ho asked himself what 
 might be termed an interesting question ; then something 
 more earnest came over his face, and he stood a second with 
 the pretty costly embroideries in his hand, with a smile that 
 was almost tender, though it was still much more amused. 
 ' I suppose we do,' he concluded at last, * at least quite as 
 much as is ever worth while. Passions don't do for the - 
 drawing-room, as somebody says in ** Coningsby ; " besides — \ ^ 
 I would not feel a strong emotion for the universe. Bad style 
 always, and more detrimental to "condition," as Tom would, 
 £ay, than three bottles of brandy ! * 
 
 He was so little near what he dreaded, at present at least, 
 that the scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him 
 no dreams of its fair and titled embroideress. He looked out, 
 the last thing, at some ominous clouds drifting heavily up 
 before the dawn, and the state of the weather, and the chance 
 of its being rainy, filled his thoughts, to the utter exclusion 
 of the donor of that bright gold-laden dainty gift. * I hope 
 to goodness there won't be any drenching shower. Forest 
 King can stand ground as hard as a slate, but if there's one 
 thing he's weak in it's slush i ' was Bertie's last conscious^ 
 thought, as he stretched his limbs out and fell sound asleep. 
 
 CHAPTER in 
 
 THE SOLDIEES' BLUE RIBBOK 
 
 'Take the Field bar one.' 'Two to one on Forest King.* 
 
 * Two to one on^Bay Regent.' * Fourteen to seven on Wild 
 Geranium.' * Seven to two against Brother to Fairy.* 
 
 * Three to five on Pas de Charge.' ' Nineteen to six on Day 
 Star.' * Take the Field bar one ' — rose above the hoarse 
 tumultuous roar of the Ring on the clear, crisp, sunny 
 morning that was shining on the Shires on the day of the 
 famous steeplechase. 
 
26 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 The talent Lad come in great muster from London ; the 
 great bookmakers were there with their stentor lungs and 
 their quiet, quick entry of thousands ; and the din and the 
 turmoil, at the tiptop of their height, were more like a 
 gathering on the Heath or before the Red House than the 
 local throngs that usually mark steeplechase meetings, even 
 when they be the Grand Military or the Grand National. 
 There were keen excitement and heavy stakes on the present 
 event ; the betting had never stood still a second in Town or 
 the Shires ; and even the * knowing ones,' the worshippers of 
 the * fiat ' alone, the professionals who ran down gentlemen 
 races, and the hypercritios who affirmed that there is not such 
 a thing as a steeplechaser to be found on earth (since, to 
 be a fencer, a water-jumper, and a racer, were to attain an 
 equine perfection impossible on earth, whatever it may be in 
 ' the happy hunting ground ' of immortality), even these, one 
 and all of them, came eager to see the running for the Gilt 
 Vase. 
 
 For it was known very well that the Guards had backed 
 their horse tremendously, and the county laid most of its 
 money on him, and the bookmakers were shy of laying olf 
 much against one of the first cross-country riders of the 
 Service, who had landed his mount at the Grand National 
 Handicap, the Billesdon Coplow, the Ealing, the Curragh, the 
 Prix du Donjon, the Rastatt, and almost every other for which 
 he had entered. Yet, despite this, the * Fancy ' took most to 
 Bay Regent ; they thought he would cut the work out ; his 
 sire had won the Champagne Stakes at Doncaster, and the 
 Drawing-room at ' glorious Goodwood,' and that racing strain 
 through the \yhifce Lily blood, coupled with a magnificent 
 reputation which he brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, 
 found him chief favour among the fraternity. 
 
 His jockey, Jimmy Delmar, too, with his bionzed, mus- 
 cular, sinewy frame, his low stature, his light weight, his 
 Bunburnt, acute face, and a way of carrying his hands as he 
 rode that was precisely like Aldcroft's, looked a hundred 
 times more professional than the brilliance of * Beauty,' and 
 the reckless dash of his well-known way of ' sending the horse 
 along with all he had in him,' which was undeniably much 
 more like a fast kill over the Melton country than hke a 
 weight-for-age race anyv/here. * You see the Service in his 
 stirrups,* said an old nobbier who had watched many a trial 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 27 
 
 spin, lying hidden in a ditch or a drain ; and indisputably 
 yoii did : Bertie's riding was superb, but it was still the 
 riding of a cavalry man, not of a jockey. The mere turn of 
 the foot in the stirrups told it, as the old man had the shrewd- 
 ness to know. 
 
 So the King went down at one time two points m the 
 morning betting. 
 
 'Know them flash cracks of the Household,* said Tim 
 Varnet,, as sharp a little Leg as ever ' got on ' a dark thing, 
 and * went halves ' with a . joek- who consented to rope a 
 favourite at the Ducal, "them swells, ye see, they give^-^ 
 any money for blood. They just "go by Godolphin heads, and 
 little feet, and winners' strains, and all the rest of it ; and so 
 long as they get pedigree never look at substance ; and their 
 bone comes no bigger than a deer's. Now, it's force as well 
 as pace that tells over a bit of plow ; a critter that would win 
 the Derby on the flat would knock up over the first spin 
 over the clods ; a-nd that King's legs are too light for my 
 fancy, 'andsome as *t is ondeniable he looks — for a little 'un, 
 as one may say.' 
 
 And Tim Varnet exactly expressed the dominant mistrust 
 of the talent ; despite all his race and ail his exploits, ih.& 
 King was not popular in the Eing, because he was like 
 his backers — * a^-^yelL' They thought him ' showy — very 
 showy,' 'a picture to frame,' *a lustre to look at;' but 
 they disbelieved in him, almost to a man, as a stayer^ and 
 they trusted him scarcely at all with their money. 
 
 'It's plain that he's "meant," though,' thought little 
 Tim, who was so used to the ' shady ' in stable matters, 
 that he could hardly persuade himself that even the Grand 
 MiUtary could be run fair, and would have thought a Guards- 
 man or a Hussar only exercised his just privilege as a jockey 
 in 'roping' after selling the race, if so it suited his book. 
 
 ' He's " meant," that's clear, 'cause the swells have put all 
 their pots on him — but if the pots don't bile over, strike me 
 a loser ! ' a contingency he knew he might very well invoke, 
 his investments being invariably so matchlessly arranged, 
 that let what would be ' bowled over,' Tim Varnet never 
 could be. 
 
 Whatever the King might prove, however, the Guards, the 
 Flower of the Service, must stand or fall by him ; they had not 
 another horse entered^ so complete was the trust that, like the 
 
as UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Seraph, they put in ' Beauty ' and his grey. But there was 
 no doubt as to the tremendousness of the struggle lying 
 before him. The running ground covered four miles and a 
 half, and had forty-two jumps in it, exclusive of the famous 
 Brixworth : half was grassland, and half ridge and furrow ; 
 a lane with very awkward double fences laced in and in with 
 the memorable blackthorn, a laid hedge with thick growers 
 in it, and many another * teaser,' coupled with the yawning 
 water, made the course a severe one ; "while thirty-two 
 starters of unusual excellence gave a good field and promised 
 a close race. Every fine bit of steejjJechase blood that was to be 
 fomid in their studs, the Service had brought together for the 
 great event ; and if the question could ever be solved, whether 
 it'is possible to find a strain that shall combine pace over the 
 flat, with the heart to stay over an inclosed country, the 
 speed to race, with the bottom to fence and the force to clear 
 water, it seemed likely to be settled now. The Service and 
 the Stable had done their uttermost to reach its solution. 
 
 The clock of the course pointed to half -past one ; the 
 saddling bell would ring at a quarter to two, for the days 
 were short and darkened early ; the Stewards were all arrived, 
 except the Marquis of Rockingham, and the Ring was in the 
 full rush of excitement, some * getting on ' hurriedly to 
 make up for lost time, some * peppering ' one or other of the 
 favourites hotly, some laying off their moneys in a cold fit of 
 caution, some putting capfuls on the King, or Bay Regent, 
 or Pas de Charge, without hedging a shilling. The London 
 talent, the agents from the great commission stables, the 
 local betting men, the shrewd wiseacres from the Ridings, 
 all the rest of the brotherhood of the Turf were crowding 
 together with the deafening shouting common to them which 
 sounds so tumultuous, so insane, and so unintelligible to 
 outsiders. Amid them half the titled heads of England, all 
 the great names known on the flat, and men in the Guards, 
 men in the Rifles, men in the Light Cavalry, men in the 
 Heavies, men in the Scots Greys, men in the Horse Artillery, 
 men in all the Arms and all the Regiments that had sent their 
 first riders to try for the Blue Ribbon, were backing their 
 horses with crackers, and jotting down figure after figure, with 
 jewelled pencils, in dainty books, taking long odds with the 
 fielders. Carriages were standing in long lines along the course, 
 the stands were filled with almost as bright a bevy of fashion- 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 29 
 
 able loveliness as the Ducal brings together under the park trees 
 of Goodwood ; the horses were being led into the inclosure 
 for saddling, a brilliant sun shone for the nonce on the freshest 
 of February noons ; beautiful women were fluttering out of 
 their barouches in furs and velvets, wearing the colours of the 
 jockey they favoured, and more predominant than any were 
 Cecil's scarlet and white, only rivalled in prominence by the 
 azure of the Heavy Cavalry champion. Sir Eyre Montacute. 
 A drag with four bays — with fine hunting points about them 
 — had dashed up, late of course ; the Seraph had swung him- 
 self from the roller- bolt into the saddle of his hack (one of 
 those few rare hacks that are jperfecty and combine every 
 excellence of pace, bone, and action, under their modest 
 appellative), and had cantered off to join the Stewards, while 
 Cecil had gone up to a group of ladies in the Grand Stand, as 
 if he had no more to do w4th the morning's business than 
 they. Eight in front of that Stand was an artificial bullfinch 
 that promised to treat most of the field to a * purler,' a deep 
 ditch dug and filled with water, with two towering black- 
 thorn fences on either side of it, as awkward a leap as the 
 most cramped country ever showed ; some were complaining 
 of it ; it was too severe, it was unfair, it would break the 
 back of every horse sent at it. The other Stewards were not 
 unwilHng to have it tamed down a little, but the Seraph, 
 generally the easiest of all sweet-tempered creatures, refused 
 resolutely to let it be touched. 
 
 'Look here,' said he confidentially, as he wheeled his 
 hack round to the Stand and beckoned Cecil down, ' look 
 here. Beauty, they're w-anting to alter that teaser, make it 
 less awkward you know, but I wouldn't because I thought 
 it would look as if I lessened it for you, you know. Still 
 it is a cracker and no mistake ; Brix worth itself is nothing 
 to it, and if you'd like it toned down I'll let them do 
 it ? ' 
 
 ' My dear Seraph, not for worlds ! You were quite right 
 not to have a thorn taken out. Why thaVs where I shall 
 thrash Bay P.egent,' said Bertie serenely, as if the winning 
 of the stakes had been forecast in his horoscope. 
 
 The Seraph whistled, stroking his moustaches. * Between 
 ourselves, Cecil, that fellow is going up no end. The Talent 
 fancy him so * 
 
 ' Let them,* said Cecil placidly, with a great cheroot in his 
 
30 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 mouth, lounging into the centre of the Ring to hear how the 
 betting went on his own mount, perfectly regardless that he 
 would keep them waiting at the weights while he dressed. 
 Everybody there knew him by name and sight ; and eager 
 glances followed the tall form of the Guards' Champion as he 
 moved through the press, in a loose brown sealskin coat, with 
 a little strip of scarlet ribbon round his throat, nodding to 
 this peer, taking evens with that, exchanging a whisper with 
 a Duke, and squaring his book with a Jew. Murmurs fol- 
 lowed about him as if he were the horse himself — * looks in 
 racing form ' — * looks used up to me ' — * too httle hands surely 
 to hold in long in a spin ' — ' too much length in the limbs 
 for a light weight, bone's always awfully heavy ' — ' dark under 
 the eye, been going too fast for trainin' ' — * a swell all over, 
 but rides no end,' with other innumerable contradictory 
 phrases, according as the speaker was ' on ' him or against 
 him, buzzed about him from the rilT-raff of the Ring, in no 
 way disturbing his serene equanimity. 
 
 One man, a big fellow^ * ossy ' all over, with the genuine 
 sporting cut-away coat, and a superabundance of showy 
 necktie and bad jewellery, eyed him curiously, and slightly 
 turned so that his back was towards Bertie, as the latter was 
 entering a bet with another Guardsman well known on the 
 turf, and he himself was taking long odds v/ith little Berk Cecil, 
 the boy having betted on his brother's riding, as though he 
 had the Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the 
 lad had the hereditary RoyalUeu instinct of extravagance, 
 and, with a half-thoughtless, half-wilful improvidence, piled 
 debts and difficulties on his rather brainless and boyish head, 
 he hnd much more to depend on than his elder : old Lord 
 Royaii'eu doted on him, spoilt him, and denied him nothing, 
 though himself a stern, austere, passionate man, made irascible 
 by ill-health, and, in his fits of anger, a very terrible per- 
 sonage indeed, no more to be conciliated by persuasion than 
 iron is to be bent by the hand ; so terrible, that even his pet 
 dreaded him mortally, and came to Bertie to get his impru- 
 dences and peccadilloes covered from the Viscount's sight. 
 
 Glancing round at this moment as he stood in the Ring, 
 Cecil saw the betting man with whom Berkeley was taking 
 long odds on the race ; he raised his eyebrows, and his face 
 darkened for a second, though resuming his habitual listless 
 serenity almost immediately. 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 31 
 
 * You remember that case of welshing after the Ebor 
 St. Leger, Con ? ' he said in a low tone to the Earl of Con- 
 stantia, with whom he was talking. The Earl nodded assent ; 
 everyone had heard of it, and a very flagrant case it was. 
 
 * There's the fellow,' said Cecil, laconically, and strode 
 towards him with his long, lounging cavalry swung. The 
 man turned pallid under his florid skin, and tried to edge 
 imperceptibly away ; but the density of the throng prevented 
 his moving quickly enough to evade Cecil, who stooped his 
 head, and said a word in his ear. It was briefly : 
 
 'Leave the ring.' 
 
 The rascal, half bully, half coward, rallied from the 
 startled fear into w^hich his first recognition by the Guards- 
 man (who had been the chief witness against him in a very 
 scandalous matter at York, and who had warned him that if 
 he ever saw him again in the Eing, he would have him turned 
 out of it) had thrown him, and, relying on insolence and the 
 numbers of his fraternity to back him out of it, stood his 
 ground. 
 
 * I've as much right here as you swells,' he said, with a 
 hoarse laugh. * Are you the whole Jockey Club, that you 
 come it to a honest gentleman like that ? ' 
 
 Cecil looked down on him slightly amused, immeasurably 
 disgusted. Of all earth's terrors, there was not one so great 
 for him as a scene, and the eager bloodshot eyes of the Ring 
 were turning on them by the thousand, and the loud shouting 
 of the bookmakers was thundering out, ' What's up ? ' 
 
 'My ''honest gentleman," ' he said, wearily, 'leave thiB, I 
 tell you ; do you hear ? ' 
 
 ' Make me I ' retorted the * Welshei-/ defiant in his stout-\ 
 built square strength, and ready to brazen the matter out. \ 
 * Make me, my cock 0' fine feathers 1 Put me out of the ' 
 ring if you can, Mr. Dainty Limbs ! I've as much business / 
 here as you.* 
 
 The words were hardly out of his mouth, before, light as a'\ 
 deer and close as steel, Cecil's hand w^as on his collar, and - 
 without any seeming effort, without the slightest passion, he •■i' 
 calmly lifted him off the ground, as though he were a terrier, 
 and thrust him through the throng ; Ben Davis, as the 
 Welsher was named, meantime being so amazed at such un- 
 looked-for might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most 
 gracefully made, and indolently tempered of his born foes and 
 
32 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 prey, 'the swells,' that he let himself be forced along back« 
 I ward iiTsheei-'passive paralysis of astonishment, while Bertie, 
 profoundly insensible to the tumult that began to rise and 
 ^ roar about him, from those who were not too absorbed in the 
 'business of the morning to note what took place, thrust him 
 Blong in the single clasp of his right hand outward to where 
 the running ground swept past the Stand, and threw him 
 lightly, easily, just as one may throw a lapdog to take his 
 path, into the artificial ditch filled with water that the Seraph 
 Jiad pointed out as ' a teaser.' The man fell unhurt, un- 
 bruised, so gently was he dropped on his back among the 
 muddy, chilly water, and the overhanging brambles ; and, as 
 he rose from the ducking, a shower of ferocious and filthy 
 oaths poured from his lips, increased tenfold by the uproarious 
 laughter of the crowd, who knew him as * a Welsher,* and 
 thought him only too well served. 
 
 Policemen rushed in at all points, rural and metropolitan, 
 breathless, austere, and, of course, too late. Bertie turned to 
 them, with a slight wave of his hand, to sign them away. 
 
 ' Don't trouble yourselves ! It's nothing you could inter- 
 fere in ; take care that person does not come into the betting 
 ring again, that's all.' 
 
 The Seraph, Lord Constantia, Wentworth, and many others 
 of his set, catching sight of the turmoil and of ' Beauty,' 
 with the great square-set figure of Ben Davis pressed before 
 him through the mob, forced their way up as quickly as 
 they could ; but before they reached the spot Cecil was 
 sauntering back to meet them, cool and listless, and a little 
 bored with so much exertion, his cheroot in his mouth, and 
 his ear serenely deaf to the clamour about the ditch. 
 
 He looked apologetically at the Seraph and the others ; he 
 felt some apology was required for having so far wandered 
 from all the canons of his Order as to have approached ' a 
 row,' and run the risk of a scene. 
 
 ' Turf vmst be cleared of these scamps, you see,' he said, 
 with a half sigh. ' Law can't do anything. Fellow was 
 trying to ** get on " with the young one, too. Don't bet with 
 those rilT-rafif, Berk. The great bookmakers will make you 
 dead money, and the little Legs will do worse to you.' 
 
 The boy hung his head, but looked sulky rather than 
 thankful fo\* hie brother's interference with himself and the 
 Weigher. 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 33 
 
 • You have done the Turf a service, Beauty — a very great 
 service ; there's no doubt about that,* said the Seraph. 
 ' Law can't do anything, as you say ; opinion must clear the 
 Ring of such rascals ; a Welsher ought not to dare to show hia 
 face here ; but, at the same time, you oughtn't to have gone 
 unsteadying your muscle, and risking the firmness of your 
 hand at such a minute as this, with pitching that fellow 
 over. Why couldn't you wait till afterwards ? or have let me 
 do it ? ' 
 
 'My dear Seraph,' murmured Bertie, languidly, 'I've 
 gone in to-day for exertion ; a little more or less is nothing. 
 Besides, Welshers are slippery dogs, you know.* 
 
 He did not add that it was having seen Ben Davis taking 
 odds with his young brother which had spurred him to such 
 instantaneous action with that disreputable personage, who, 
 beyond doubt, only received a tithe part of his deserts, and 
 merited to be double-thonged off every course in the kingdom. 
 
 Rake at that instant darted panting like a hot retriever out 
 of the throng. ' Mr. Cecil, sir, will you please come to the 
 weights ? — the saddling bell's a-going to ring, and ' 
 
 ' Tell them to wait for me ; I shall only be twenty minutes 
 dressing,' said Cecil, quietly, regardless that the time at 
 which the horses should have been at the starting-post was 
 then clanging from the clock within the Grand Stand. Did 
 you ever go to a gentleman -rider race where the jocks were 
 not at least an hour behind time, and considered themselves, 
 on the whole, very tolerably punctual ? At last, however, he 
 sauntered into the dressing-shed, and was aided by Rake into 
 tops that had at length achieved a spotless triumph, and the 
 scarlet gold-broidered jacket of his fair friend*s art with white 
 hoops, and the ' Cceur Vaillant se fait Royaume * on the 
 collar, and the white gleaming sash to be worn across it fringed 
 by the same fair hands with silver. 
 
 Meanwhile, the 'Welcher,' driven off the course by a 
 hooting and indignant crowd, shaking the water from hia 
 clothes, with bitter oaths, and livid with a deadly passion at 
 his exile from the harvest-field of his lawless gleanings, went 
 his way, with a savage vow of vengeance against the ' d — d 
 dandy,' the * Guards' swell,' who had shown him up before 
 the world as the scoundrel he was. 
 
 The bell was clanging and clashing passionately, as Cecil 
 at last went down to the weights, all his friends of the House- 
 
 o 
 
34 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 hold about him, and all standing ♦ crushers ' on t.heir cham- 
 pion, for their stringent esprit du corps was involved, and the 
 Guards are never backward in putting their gold down, as all 
 the world knows. In the inclosure, the cynosure of devouring 
 eyes, stood the King, with the sangfroid of a superb gentle- 
 man, amid the clamour raging round him, one delicate ear laid 
 back now and then, but otherwise indifferent to the din, with 
 his coat glistening like satin, the beautiful tracery of vein 
 and muscle, like the veins of vine-leaves, standing out on the 
 glossy, clear- carved neck that had the arch of Circassia, and 
 his dark, antelope eyes gazing with a gentle, pensive earnest- 
 ness on the shouting crowd. 
 
 His rivals, too, were beyond par in fitness and in condition, 
 and there were magnificent animals among them. Bay Regent 
 was a huge raking chestnut, upwards of sixteen hands, and 
 enormously powerful, with very fine shoulders, and an all- 
 over-like-going head ; he belonged to a Colonel in the Rifles, 
 but was to be ridden by Jimmy Delmar of the 10th Lancers, 
 whose colours were violet with orange hoops. Montacute's 
 horse, Pas de Charge, which carried all the money of the 
 Heavy Cavalry, Montacute himself being in the Dragoon 
 Guards, was of much the same order, a black hunter with 
 racing blood in him, loins and withers that assured any 
 amount of force, and no fault but that of a rather coarse head, 
 traceable to a slur on his 'scutcheon on the distaff side from a 
 plebeian great-grandmother, who had been a cart mare, the 
 only stain in his otherwise faultless pedigree. However, she 
 had given him her massive shoulders, so that he was in some 
 sense a gainer by her after all. Wild Geranium was a beauti- 
 ful creature enough, a bright bay Irish mare, with that rich 
 red gloss that is like the glow of a horse chestnut, very perfect 
 in shape, though a trifle light perhaps, and with not quite 
 strength enough in neck or barrel ; she would jump the 
 fences of her own paddock half a dozen times a day for sheer 
 amusement, and was game to anything.' She was entered 
 by Cartouche of the Enniskillens, to be ridden by * Baby 
 Grafton,' of the same corps, a feather weight, and quite a 
 boy, but with plenty of science in him. These were the 
 
 • The portrait of this lady is that of a very esteemed young Irish beauty 
 of my acquaintance; she this season did seventy-six miles on a warm June 
 day, and ate her corn and tares afterwards as if nothing happened. She is 
 Siic yesra old« 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 35 
 
 i/hreo favourites ; Day Star ran them close, the property of 
 Durham Vavassour, of tho Scots Greys, and to be ridden by 
 his owner — a handsome, flea-bitten, grey sixteen-hander, with 
 ragged hips, and action that looked a trifle stringhalty, but 
 noble shoulders, and great force in the loins and withers ; 
 the rest of the field, though unusually excellent, did not find 
 BO many * sweet voices ' for them, and were not so much to 
 be feared : each starter was of course much backed by his 
 party, but tlie betting was tolerably even on these four — all 
 famous steeplechasers — the King at one time, and Bay 
 Regent at another, slightly leadmg in the Ring. 
 
 Thirty-two starters were hoisted up on the telegraph-board, 
 and as the field got at last under weigh, uncommonly hand- 
 some they looked, while the silk jackets of all the colours of 
 the rainbow glittered in the bright noon-sun. As Forest 
 King closed in, perfectly tranquil still, but, beginning to glow 
 and quiver all over with excitement, knowing as well as his 
 rider the work that was before him, and longing for it in 
 every muscle and every limb, while his eyes flashed fire as he 
 pulled at the curb and tossed his head aloft, there went up 
 a general shout of * Favourite ! ' His beauty told on the 
 populace, and even somewhat on the professionals, though the 
 legs kept a strong business prejudice against the working 
 powers of ' the Guards* crack.' The ladies began to lay 
 dozens in gloves on him ; not altogether for his points, which, 
 perhaps, they hardly appreciated, but for his owner and rider, 
 who, in the scarlet and gold, with the w^hite sash across his 
 chest, and a look of serene iiidifference on his face, they con- 
 sidered the handsomest man of the field. The Household is 
 usually safe to win the suffrages of the sex. 
 
 In the throng on the course Rake instantly bonneted an 
 audacious dealer who had ventured to consider that Forest 
 King was ' light and curby in the 'ock.' * You're a wise 
 un, you are ! * retorted the wrathful and ever-eloquent 
 Rake, * there's more strength in his clean flat legs, bless him, 
 than in all the round, thick, mill-posts of your half-breds, that 
 have no more tendon than a bit of wood, and are just as flabby 
 as a sponge ! ' Which hit the dealer home just as his hat was 
 hit over his eyes ; Rake's arguments being unquestionable in 
 their force. 
 
 The tnoroughbreds pulled and fretted, and swerved in their 
 impatience ; one or two over-contumacious bolted incontinently, 
 
 d2 
 
56 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 others put their heads between their knees in the endeavour to 
 draw their riders over their withers ; Wild Geranium reared 
 straight upright, fidgeted all over with longing to be off, pas- 
 saged with the prettiest, wickedest grace in the world, and 
 would have given the world to neigh if she had dared, but she 
 knew it would be very bad style, so, like an aristocrat as she 
 was, restrained herself ; Bay Regent almost sawed Jimmy Del- 
 mar's arms off, looking like a Titan Bucephalus ; while Forest 
 King, with his nostrils dilated till the scarlet tinge on them 
 glowed in the sun, his muscles quivering with excitement as 
 intense as the little Irish mare's, and all his Eastern and 
 English blood on fire for the fray, stood steady as a statue for 
 all that, under the curb of a hand light as a woman's, but firm 
 as iron to control, and used to guide him by the slightest 
 touch. 
 
 All eyes were on that throng of the first mounts in the 
 Service; brilliant glances by the hundred gleamed down 
 behind hot-house bouquets of their chosen colour, eager ones 
 by the thousand stared thirstily from the crowded course, the 
 roar of the Ring subsided for a second, a breathless attention 
 and suspense succeeded it ; the Guardsmen sat on their drags, 
 or lounged near the ladies with their race-glasses ready, and 
 their habitual expression of gentle and resigned weariness in 
 nowise altered, because the Household, all in all, had from 
 sixty to seventy thousand on the event, and the Seraph mur- 
 mured mournfully to his cheroot, * that chestnut's no end j^iJ,' 
 Btroug as his faith was in the champion of the Brigades. 
 
 A moment's good start was caught — the flag dropped — off 
 they went sweeping out for the first second like a line of 
 Cavalry about to charge. 
 
 Another moment, and they were scattered over the first 
 field. Forest King, Wild Geranium, and Bay Regent leading 
 for two lengths, when Montacute, with his habitual ' fast 
 burst,' sent Pas de Charge past them like lightnicg. The 
 Irish mare gave a rush and got alongside of him ; the King 
 would have done the same, but Cecil checked him and kept 
 him in that cool swinging canter which covered the grassland 
 BO lightly ; Bay Regent's vast thundering stride was Olympian, 
 but Jimmy Delmar saw his worst foe in the * Guards' crack,' 
 and waited on him warily, riding superbly himself. 
 
 The first fence disposed of half the field, they crossed the 
 second in the same order, Wild Geranium raoing neck to neck 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 37 
 
 v^'ith Pas de Charge ; the King was all athirst to join the 
 duello, but his owner kept him gently back, saving his pace 
 and lifting him over the jumps as easily as a lapwing. The 
 second fence proved a cropper to several, some awkward falls 
 took place over it, and tailing commenced ; after the third 
 field, which was heavy plow, all knocked off but eight, and 
 the real struggle began in sharp earnest : a good dozen who 
 had shown a splendid stride over the grass being done up by 
 the terrible work on the clods. 
 
 The five favourites had it all to themselves ; Day Star 
 pounding onward at tremendous speed. Pas de Charge giving 
 slight symptoms of distress owing to the madness of his first 
 burst, the Irish mare literally flying ahead of him, Forest 
 King and the chestnut waiting on one another. 
 
 In the Grand Stand the Seraph's eyes strained after the 
 Scarlet and White, and he muttered in his moustaches, * Ye 
 Gods, what's up ! The world's coming to an end ! — Beauty's 
 turned cautious ! ' 
 
 Cautious, indeed — with that giant of Pytchley fame running 
 neck to neck by him; cautious — with two -thirds of the 
 course unrun, and all the yawners yet to come ; cautious — 
 with the blood of Forest King lashing to boiling heat, and the 
 wondrous greyhound stride stretching out faster and faster 
 beneath him, ready at a touch to break away and take the 
 lead : but he would be reckless enough by-and-by ; reckless, 
 as his nature was, under the indolent serenity of habit. 
 
 Two more fences came, laced high and stiff with the Shire 
 thorn, and with scarce twenty feet between them, the heavy 
 plowed land leading to them, clotted, and black, and hard, 
 with the fresh earthy scent steaming up as the hoofs struck 
 the clods with a dull thunder. Pas de Charge rose to the 
 first : distressed too early, his hind feet caught in a thorn, 
 and he came down rolling clear of his rider ; Montacute picked 
 him up with true science, but the day was lost to the Heavy 
 Cavalry men. Forest King went in and out over both like a 
 bird and led for the first time ; the chestnut was not to be 
 beat at fencing, and ran even with him ; Wild Geranium flew 
 still as fleet as a deer ; true to her sex, she would not bear 
 rivalry ; but little Grafton, though he rode fike a professional, 
 was but a young one, and went too wildly ; her spirit wanted 
 cooler curb. 
 
 And now only, CqcII looaened the King to bis full will 
 
58 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and his full speed. Now only, the beautiful Arab head was 
 stretched Hke a racer's in the run-in for the Derby, and the 
 grand stride swept out till the hoofs seemed never to touch 
 the dark earth they skimmed over ; neither whip nor spur 
 was needed ; Bertie had only to leave the gallant temper and 
 the generous fire that were roused in their might to go their 
 way, and hold their own. His hands were low ; his head a 
 little back ; his face very calm, the eyes only had a darmg, 
 eager, resolute will lighting in them ; Brixworth lay before 
 him. He knew well what Forest King could do ; but he did 
 not know how great the chestnut Regent's powers might be. 
 
 The water gleamed before them brown and swollen, and 
 deepened wdth the meltings of winter snows a month before ; 
 the brook that has brought so many to grief over its famous 
 banks, since cavaliers leapt it with their falcon on their wrist, 
 or the mellow note of the horn rang over the woods in the 
 hunting days of Stuart reigns. They knew it well, that long 
 dark line, shimmering there in the sunlight, the test that all 
 must pass who go in for the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon. Forest 
 King scented water, and went on with his ears pointed, and 
 his greyhound stride lengthening, quickening, gathering up 
 all its force and its impetus for the leap that was before — 
 then like the rise and the swoop of a heron he spanned the 
 water, and, landing clear, launched forward with the lunge 
 of a spear darted through air. Brixworth was passed — the 
 Scarlet and AVhite, a mere gleam of bright colour, a mere 
 speck iu the landscape, to the breathless crowds Id the stand, 
 sped on over the brown and level grassland ; two and a 
 quarter miles done in four minutes and twenty seconds. Bay 
 Regent was scarcely behind him ; the chestnut abhorred the 
 water, but a finer-trained hunter was never sent over the 
 Shires, and Jimmy Delmar rode like Grimshaw himself. The 
 giant took the leap in magnificent style, and thundered on 
 neck and neck with the ' Guards' crack.' The Irish mare 
 followed, and with miraculous gameness landed safely ; but 
 her hind legs slipped on the bank, a moment was lost, and 
 * Baby ' Graftop scarce knew enough to recover it, though 
 he scoured on nothing daunted. 
 
 Pas de Charge, much behind, refused the yawner, his 
 strength was not more than his courage, but both had been 
 strained too severely at first. Montacute struck the spurs 
 into him with a savage blow over the head ; the madness was 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 39 
 
 its own punishment ; the poor brute rose blindly to the jump, 
 and missed the bank with a reel and a crash ; Sir Eyre was 
 hurled out into the brook, and the hope of the Heavies lay 
 there with his breast and forelegs resting on the ground, his 
 hind quarters in the water, and his back broken. Pas de 
 Charge would never again see the starting-flag waved, or hear 
 the music of the hounds, or feel the gallant life throb and 
 glow through him at the rallying notes of the horn. His 
 race was run. 
 
 Not knowing, or looking, or heeding what happened behind, 
 the trio tore on over the meadow and the plowed ; the two 
 favourites neck by neck, the game little mare hopelessly be- 
 hind through that one fatal moment over Brixworth. The 
 turning-flags were passed ; from the crowds on the course a 
 great hoarse roar came louder and louder, and the shouts 
 rang, changing every second, ' Forest King wins,' ' Bay 
 Regent wins,' * Scarlet and White's ahead,' * Violet's up with 
 him,' 'Violet's past him,' * Scarlet recovers,' * Scarlet beats,* 
 * A cracker on the King,' * Ten to one on the Regent,' * Guards 
 are over the fence first,' * Guards are winning,' ' Guards are 
 losing.' * Guards are beat ! ! ' 
 
 Were they ? 
 
 As the shout rose, Cecil's left stirrup leather snapped and 
 gave way ; at the pace they were going most men, ay, and 
 good riders too, would have been hurled out of their saddle 
 by the shock ; he scarcely swerved ; a moment to ease the 
 King and to recover his equilibrium, then he took the pace 
 up again as though nothing had chanced. And his comrades 
 of the Household, when they saw this through their race- 
 glasses, broke through their serenity and burst into a cheer 
 that echoed over the grasslands and the coppices like a clarion, 
 the grand rich voice of the Seraph leading foremost and 
 loudest — a cheer that rolled mellow and triumphant down the 
 cold bright air like the blast of trumpets, and thrilled on 
 Bertie's ear where ho came down the course a mile away. It 
 made his heart beat quicker with a victorious headlong delight, 
 as his knees pressed closer into Forest King's flanks, and, half 
 stirrupless hke the Arabs, he thundered forward to the greatest 
 riding feat of his life. His face was very calm still, but his 
 blood was in tumult, the delirium of pace has got on him, a 
 minute of life like this was worth a year, and he knew that 
 he would win or die for it, as the land seemed to fly like a 
 
40 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 black sheet under him, and in that killing speed, fence and 
 hedge and double and water all went by him like a dream, 
 whirling underneath him as the grey stretches, stomach to 
 earth, over the level, and rose to leap after leap. 
 
 For that instant's pause, when the stirrup broke, threatened 
 to lose him the race. 
 
 He was more than a length behind the Regent, whose hoofs 
 as they dashed the ground up sounded like thunder, and for 
 whose herculean strength the plow has no terrors ; it was 
 more than the lead to keep now ; there was ground to cover, 
 and the King was losing like Wild Geranium. Cecil felt 
 drunk with that strong, keen, west wind that blew so strongly 
 in his teeth, a passionate excitation was in him, every breath 
 of winter air that rushed in its bracing currents round him 
 seemed to lash him like a stripe — the Household to look on 
 and see him beaten ! 
 
 Certain wild blood that lay latent in Cecil under the tran- 
 quil gentleness of temper and of custom, woke, and had the 
 mastery ; he set his teeth hard, and his hands clinched like 
 steel on the bridle. ' Oh I my beauty, my beauty,' he cried, all 
 unconsciously half aloud as they clear the thirty-sixth fence. 
 * Kill me if you like, but don't fail me ! ' 
 
 As though Forest King heard the prayer and answered it 
 with all his hero's heart, the splendid form launched faster 
 out, the stretching stride stretched farther yet with lightning 
 spontaneity, every fibre strained, every nerve struggled ; with 
 a magnificent bound like an antelope the grey recovered the 
 ground he had lost, and passed Bay Regent by a quarter- 
 length. It was a neck-to-neck race once more, across the 
 three meadows with the last and lower fences that were 
 between them and the final leap of all ; that ditch of artificial 
 water with the towering double hedge of oak rails and of 
 blackthorn that was reared black and grim and well nigh 
 hopeless just in front of the Grand Stand. A roar like the 
 roar of the sea broke up from the thronged course as the 
 crowd hung breathless on the even race ; ten thousand shouts 
 rang as thrice ten thousand eyes watched the closing contest, 
 as superb a sight as the Shires ever saw while the two ran 
 together, the gigantic Chestnut, with every massive sinew 
 swelled and strained to tension, side by side with the mar- 
 vellous grace, the shining flanks, and the Arabian -like head 
 of the Guards* horse. 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 41 
 
 Louder and wilder the shrieked tumult rose : * The Chest- 
 nut beats 1 ' ' The Grey beats 1 ' * Scarlet's ahead ! ' ' Bay 
 Regent's caught him ! ' * Violet's winning, Violet's winning ! ' 
 * The King's neck by neck ! * * The King's beating 1 * ' The 
 Guards will get it ! ' ' The Guards' crack has it ! ' * Not yet, 
 not yet! ' 'Violet will thrash him at the jump!' ' Now for 
 it I * * The Guards, the Guards, the Guards I ' ' Scarlet will 
 win ! * * The King has the finish ! ' * No, no, no, no I ' 
 
 Sent along at a pace that Epsom flat never eclipsed, 
 sweeping by the Grand Stand like the flash of electric flame, 
 they ran side to side one moment more, their foam flung on 
 each other's withers, their breath hot in each other's nostrils, 
 while the dark earth flew beneath their stride. The black- 
 thorn was in front behind five bars of solid oak, the water 
 yawning on its farther side, black and deep, and fenced, twelve 
 feet wide if it were an inch, with the same thorn wall beyond 
 it; a leap no horse should have been given, no Steward 
 should have set. Cecil pressed his knees closer and closer, 
 and worked the gallant hero for the test ; the surging roar of 
 the throng, though so close, was dull on his ear ; he heard 
 nothing, knew nothing, saw nothing but that lean chestnut 
 head beside him, the dull thud on the turf of the flying gallop, 
 and the black wall that reared in his face. Forest King 
 had done so much — could he have stay and strength for 
 this? 
 
 Cecil's hands clinched unconsciously on the bridle, and his 
 face was very pale — pale with excitation — as his foot where 
 the stirrup was broken crushed closer and harder against the 
 Grey's flanks. 
 
 * Oh, my darling, my beauty — now I ' 
 
 One touch of the spur — the first — and Forest King rose at 
 the leap, all the life and power there were in him gathered 
 for one superhuman and crowning effort ; a flash of time, not 
 half a second in duration, and he was lifted in the air higher, 
 and higher, and higher in the cold, fresh, wild winter wind ; 
 stakes and rails, and thorn and water lay beneath him black 
 and gaunt and shapeless, yawning like a grave ; one bound, 
 even in mid air, one last convulsive impulse of the gathered 
 limbs, and Forest King was over ! 
 
 And as he galloped up the straight run-in, he was alone. 
 
 Bay Regent had refused the leap. 
 
 As the Grey swept to the Judge's chair, the air was rent 
 
42 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 "" ^^ with deafening cheers that seemed to reel like drunken shonta 
 
 ^^'" from the multitude. * The Guards win ! the Guards win 1 * 
 
 and when his rider pulled up at the distance with the full 
 
 / sun shining on the scarlet and white, with the gold glisten of 
 
 / / the embroidered 'Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume,' Forest 
 
 j King stood in all his glory, winner of the Soldiers' Blue 
 
 \ Ribbon, by a feat without its parallel in all the annals of the 
 
 1 Gold Vase. 
 
 But as the crowd surged about him, and the mad cheering 
 crowned his victory, and the Household in the splendour of 
 their triumph and the fulness of their gratitude rushed from 
 the drags and the stands to cluster to his saddle, Bertie 
 looked as serenely and listlessly nonchalant as of old, while 
 he nodded to the Seraph with a gentle smile. 
 
 * Rather a close finish, eh ? Have you any Moselle cup 
 going there ? I'm a little thirsty.* 
 
 Outsiders would much sooner have thought him defeated 
 
 ■ than triumphant ; no one, who had not known him, could 
 ; possibly have imagined that he had been successful ; an ordi- 
 1 nary spectator would have concluded that, judging by the 
 
 ■ resigned weariness of his features, he had won the race 
 
 ■ greatly against his own will, and to his own infinite _£n.nui. 
 j No one could have dreamt that he was thinking in his heart 
 ; of hearts how passionately he loved the gallant beast that had 
 
 been victor with him, and that, if he had followed out the 
 momentary impulse in him, he could have put his arms round 
 the noble bowed neck and kissed the horse like a woman I 
 
 The Moselle cup was brought to refresh the tired champion, 
 and before he drank it Bertie glanced at a certain place in 
 the Grand Stand and bent his head as the cup touched his 
 lips ; it was a dedication of his victory to the Queen of 
 Beauty. Then he threw himself hghtly out of saddle, and, 
 as Forest King was led away for the after ceremony of 
 bottling, rubbing, and clothing, his rider, regardless of the 
 roar and hubbub of the course, and of the tumultuous cheers 
 that welcomed both him and his horse from the men who 
 pressed round him, into whose pockets he had put thousands 
 on thousands, and whose ringing hurrahs greeted the * Guards' 
 crack,' passed straight up toward Jimmy Delmar and held 
 out his hand. 
 
 • You gave me a close thing. Major Delmar. The Vase 
 
THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 43 
 
 is as much yours as mine ; if your Chestnut bad been as good 
 a water-jumper as he is a fencer, we should have been neck 
 to neck at the finish.' 
 
 The browned Indian-sunned face of the Lancer broke up 
 into a cordial smile, and he shook the hand held out to him 
 warmly ; defeat and disappointment had cut him to the core, 
 for Jimmy was the first riding man of the Light Cavalry ; but 
 he would not have been the frank campaigner that he was if 
 he had not responded to the graceful and generous overture of 
 his rival and conqueror. 
 
 * Oh, I can take a beating,' he said, good-humouredly ; 
 *at any rate, I am beat by the Guards, and it is very little 
 humiliation to lose against such riding as yours and such a 
 magnificent brute as your King. I congratulate you most 
 heartily, most sincerely.* 
 
 And he meant it, too. Jimmy never canted, nor did he 
 ever throw the blame, with paltry savage vindictiveness, on 
 the horse he had ridden. Some men there are — their name 
 is legion — who never allow that it is their fault when they 
 are ' nowhere ' — oh, no ! it is the * cursed screw ' always, 
 according to them. But a very good rider will not tell you 
 that. 
 
 Cecil, while he talked, was glancing up at the Grand 
 Sta^nd, and when the others dispersed to look over the horses, 
 and he had put himself out of his shell into his sealskin in 
 the dressing-shed, he went up thither without a moment's 
 loss of time. 
 
 He knew them all ; those dainty beauties with their deli- 
 cate cheeks just brightened by the western winterly wind, 
 and their rich furs and laces glowing among the colours ofu-^ 
 their respective heroes; he .j^as — tha--p^-^_them aU..'"^ 
 'Beauty' had the suffrages- -xxf- the sex without exception; 
 he was received with bright smiles and graceful congratula- 
 tions, even from those who had espoused Eyre Montacute's 
 cause, and still fluttered their losing azure, though the poor 
 hunter lay dead, with his back broken, and a pistol- ball 
 mercifully sent through his brains — the martyr to a man's 
 hot haste, as the dumb things have ever been since creation 
 began. 
 
 Cecil passed them as rapidly as he could for one so well 
 received by them, and made his way to the centre of the 
 
44 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Stand, to the same spot at which he had glanced when he had 
 drunk the Moselle, 
 
 A lady turned to him ; she looked like a rose camellia in 
 her floating scarlet and white, just toned down and made 
 perfect by a shower of Spanish lace; a beautiful brujiette, 
 dashing, yet delicate ; a little fast, yet intensely thorough- 
 bred; a .coquette who would smoke a cigarette, yet a peeresa 
 who.'^guld never lose her dignity. 
 
 * Au coszir vaillant rien d' impossible I ' she said, with an 
 envoi of her lorgnon, and a smile that should have intoxicated 
 him — a smile that might have rewarded a Richepanse for 
 a Hohenlinden. * Superbly ridden ; I absolutely trembled 
 for you as you lifted the King to that last leap. It was 
 terrible I * 
 
 It was terrible ; and a woman, to say nothing of a woman 
 who was in love with him, might well have felt a heartsick 
 fear at sight of that yawning water, and those towering walls 
 of blackthorn, where one touch of the hoofs on the topmost 
 bough, one spring too short of the gathered limbs, must have 
 been death to both horse and rider. But, as she said it, she 
 was smiling, radiant, full of easy calm and racing interest, as 
 became her ladyship who had had ' bets at even ' before now 
 on Goodwood fillies, and could lead the first flight over the 
 Belvoir and the Quorn Countries. It was possible that her 
 ladyship was too thoroughbred not to see a man killed over 
 the oak-rails without deviating into unseemly emotion, or 
 being capable of such bad style as to be agitated. 
 
 Bertie, however, in answer, threw the tenderest eloquence 
 into his eyes ; very learned in such eloquence. 
 
 ' If I could not have been victorious while yon looked on, 
 I would at least not have lived to meet you here ! ' 
 
 She laughed a little, so did he ; they were used to ex- 
 change these passages in an admirably artistic masquerade, 
 but it was always a little droll to each of them to see the 
 other wear the domino of sentiment, and neither had much 
 credence in the other. 
 
 ' What a preux chevalier 1 * cried his Queen of Beauty. 
 * You would have died in a ditch out of homage to me. Who 
 shall say that chivalry is past ? Tell me, Bertie, is it so very 
 delightful that desperate efibrt to break your neck ? It lookg 
 pleasant, to judge by its effects. It is the only thing in the 
 world that amuses you 1 ' 
 
V'.^^ 
 
 THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON 45 
 
 *Well — there is a great deal to be said for it,' replied 
 Bertie, musingly. 'You see, until one has broken one's 
 neck, the excitement of the thing isn't totally -worn out ; 
 can't be, naturally, because the — what-do-you-call-it ? — con- 
 summation isn't attained till then. The worst of it is, it's 
 getting commonplace, gatting vulgar, such a number break 
 their necks, doing Alps and that sort of thing, that we shall 
 have nothing at all left to ourselves soon.* 
 
 * Not even the monopoly of sporting suicide ! Very hard,' 
 said her ladyship, with the lowest, most languid laugh in the 
 world, very like * Beauty's ' own, save that it had a con- 
 siderable inflection of studied affectation, of which he, how- 
 ever much of a dandy he was, was wholly guiltless. * Well ! 
 you won magnificently; that little black man, who is he? 
 Lancers, somebody said ? — ran you so fearfully close. I 
 really thought at one time that the Guards had lost.' 
 
 ' Do you suppose that a man happy enough to wear Ladji ,^, 
 Guenevere's colours could lose ? An embroidered scarf giveni^ 
 by such hands has been a gage of victory ever since the! 
 days of tournaments ! * murmured Cecil with the softest 1 
 tenderness, but just enough laziness in the tone and laughter \ 
 in the eye to make it highly doubtful whether he was not ) 
 laughing both at her and at himself, and was wondering why ' 
 the deuce a fellow had to talk such nonsense. Yet she was-^ 
 Lad^Lfiii£iLa3^.re, with whom he had been in love ever since 
 they stayed together at Belvoir for the Croxton Park week 
 the autumn previous ; and who was beautiful enough to make 
 their * friendship ' as enchanting as a page out of the * Deca- 
 merone.' And while he bent over her, flirting in the fashion 
 that made him the darling of the drawing-rooms, and looking 
 down into her superb Velasquez eyes, he did not know, and 
 if he had known would have been careless of it, that afar off, 
 white with rage, and with his gaze straining on to the course 
 through his race- glass, Ben Davis, * the Welsher,' who had 
 watched the finish — watched the * Guards' crack ' landed 
 at the distance — muttered, with a mastiff's savage growl : 
 
 * He wins, does he ? Curse him 1 The d — d Bw ell— be 
 shan't win long ! ' ^^^-^x^ 
 
46 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 LOVE k LA MODE 
 
 Life was very pleasant at Royallieu. 
 
 It lay in the Melton coiinfeyT^^^'^s^^s equally well placed 
 for Pytcbley, Quorn, and Belvoir, besides possessing its own 
 smaU but very perfect pack of ' little ladies,' or the * de- 
 moiselles,' as they were severally nicknamed ; the game was 
 closely preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian corn till 
 they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little 
 winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first- 
 rate shots, with two loading-men to each, could find flock and 
 feather to amuse them till dinner, with rocketers and warm 
 corners enough to content the most insatiate of knicker- 
 bcckered gunners. The stud was superb ; the cook, a French 
 artist of consummate genius, who had a brougham to his own 
 use, and wore diamonds of the firct water ; in the broad 
 beech- studded grassy lands no lesser thing than doe and deer 
 ever swept through the thick ferns in the sunlight and the 
 shadow ; a retinue of powdered servants filled the old halls, 
 and guests of highest degree dined m its stately banqueting- 
 room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its Vernets 
 ) ^and yet — there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it 
 W all. Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the 
 M yv^uture, and the parasite of extravagance was constantly sap- 
 V ping, unseen, the gallant old Norman-planted oak of the 
 I _family-tree. But then, who thought of that? Nobody. It 
 was the way of the Hou«e never to take count of the morrow. 
 True, any one of them would have died a hundred deaths 
 rather than have had one acre of the beautiful green diadem 
 of woods felled by the axe of the timber contractor, or passed 
 to the hands of a stranger ; but no one among them ever 
 thought that this was the inevitable end to which they surely 
 drifted with blind and unthinking improvidence. The old 
 Viscount, haughtiest of haughty nobles, would never abatr^ one 
 jot of his accustomed magnificence ; and his sons had but 
 imbibed the teaching of all that surrounded them : they did 
 but do in manhood what they had been unconsciously moulded 
 to do in boyhood when they were sent to Eton at ten with 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 47 
 
 gold dressing-boxes to grace their Dame's tables, embryo 
 Dukes for their co-fags, and tastes that already knew to a 
 nicety the worth of the champagnes at the Christopher. The 
 ojd, old- atoryrr-how it repeats itself 1 Boys grow up amid, 
 profuse prodigality, and are launched into a world wherej 
 they can no more arrest themselves, than the feather-weight \ 
 can pull in the lightning stride of the two-year old, who defies \ 
 all check, and takes the flat as he chooses. They are brought \ 
 up like young Dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to 1 
 float as best they can — on nothing. Then, on the lives and 
 deaths that follow ; on the graves where a dishonoured alien | 
 lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lake- side, or under the / /' 
 monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt ; where a / 
 red cross chills the lonely traveller in the virgin solitudes 
 of Amazonian forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of y, 
 Australia trail over a nameless mound above the trackless ^"^ 
 stretch of sun-warmed waters — then at them the world ' shoots "^ 
 out its lips with scorn.* Not on them lies the blame. v^ 
 
 A wintry, watery sun was shining on the terraces as Lord S> 
 Royallieu paced up and down the morning after the Grand 
 Military ; his step and limbs excessively enfeebled, but the 
 carriage of his head and the flash of his dark hawk's eyes as 
 proud and untamable as in his earliest years. He never left 
 his own apartments ; and no one, save his favourite * little 
 Berk,' ever went to him without his desire. He was too 
 sensitive a man to thrust his age and ailing health in among 
 the young leaders of fashion, the wild men of pleasure, the 
 good wits and the good shots of his son's set ; he knew very 
 well that his own day was past ; thai they would have listened 
 to him out of the patience of courtesy, but that they would 
 have wished him away as * no end of a bore.' He was too 
 shrewd not to know this ; but he was too quickly galled ever 
 to bear to have it recalled to him. 
 
 He looked up suddenly and sharply : coming towards him 
 he saw the figure of the Guardsman. For ' Beauty ' the 
 Viscount had no love ; indeed, wellnigh a hatred, for a reason 
 never guessed by others, and never betrayed by him. 
 
 Bertie was not like the Royallieu race ; he resembled his 
 mother's family. She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom 
 her second son had loved, for th« first years of his life, as he 
 would have thought it now impossible that he could love any 
 one, had married the Viscount, with no affection towards him. 
 
48 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 \\ hile he had adored her with a fierce and jealous passion that 
 
 her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married life, 
 
 however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness 
 
 towards a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling 
 
 arid reluctant ; of his wife's fidelity he could not entertain a 
 
 doubt, though that he had never won her heart he could not 
 
 choose but know. He knew more, too ; for she had told it 
 
 him with a noble candour before he wedded her ; knew that the 
 
 man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who 
 
 had made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes 
 
 . of Northern India. This cousin, Alan Bertie — a^ fearless and 
 
 \^ chiv^r-ous soldier, fitter for the days of knighthood than for 
 
 these— had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice, some three years 
 
 after her marriage; accident had thrown them across each 
 
 other's path ; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had 
 
 ever been, had made him linger in her presence — had made 
 
 her shrink from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last 
 
 had united their names together ; Alan Bertie had left the 
 
 woman he idolised lest slander should touch her through him, 
 
 and fallen two years later under the dark dank forests on the 
 
 desolate moorside of the hills of Hindostan, where long before 
 
 he had rendered * Bertie's Horse ' the most famous of all the 
 
 /"wild Irregulars of the East. 
 
 V>*' After her death. Lord Royallieu found Alan's miniature 
 
 p among her papers, and recalled those winter months by the 
 
 cj Mediterranean till he cherished, with the fierce, eager, self- 
 
 x^:' torture of a jealous nature, doubts and suspicions that, during 
 
 ^ . her life, one glance from her eyes would have disarmed and 
 
 t •' abashed. Her second and favourite child bore her family name 
 
 l^ I — her late lover's name ; and in resembling her race, re- 
 
 1 sembled the dead soldier. It was sufficient to make him hate 
 
 ' Bertie with a cruel and savage detestation, which he strove 
 
 ■ indeed to temper, for he was by nature a just man, and, in his 
 
 ' better moments, knew that his doubis wronged both the living 
 
 and the dead; but which coloured, too strongly to be dis- 
 
 " sembled, all his feelings and his actions towards his son, and 
 
 might both have soured and wounded any temperament less 
 
 nonchalantly gentle and supremely careless than Cecil's. 
 
 As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father's 
 dislike to him, but never thought much about it, and attri- 
 buted it, when he did think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannoui 
 old man. To be jealous of the favour shown to his boyish 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 49 
 
 brother could never for a moment have come into his imagina- 
 tion. Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the little' 
 fellow, a child of three years old, to the affection and the care! 
 of Bertie — himself then a boy of twelve or fourteen — and! 
 little as he thought of such things now, the trust of his dying! , 
 mother had never been wholly forgotten. w J 
 
 A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount's still hand- 
 some aquiline, saturnine face, as his second son approached 
 up the terrace ; Bertie was too like the cavalry soldier whose 
 form he had last seen standing against the rose light of a 
 Mediterranean sunset. The soldier had been dead eight- and- 
 twenty years ; but the jealous hate was not dead yet. 
 
 Cecil took off his hunting-cap with a courtesy that sat very 
 well on his habitual languid nonchalance ; he never called his 
 father anything but * Royal ; ' rarely saw, still less rarely con- 
 sulted him, and cared not a straw for his censure or opinion ; 
 but he was too thoroughbred by nature to be able to follow 
 the underbred indecorum of the day which makes disrespect to 
 old age the fashion. * You sent for me ? ' he asked, taking the 
 cigar out of his mouth. 
 
 *No, sir,' answered the old lord, curtly, 'I sent for your 
 brother. The fools can't take even a message right now, it 
 seems.' 
 
 ' Shouldn't have named us so near alike ; it's often a bore I ' 
 said Bertie. 
 
 ' I didn't name you, sir ; your mother named you,* 
 answered his father, sharply ; the subject irritated him. 
 
 * It's of no consequence which ! ' murmured Cecil, with 
 an expostulatory wave of his cigar. * We're not even asked 
 whether we like to come into the world ; we can't expect to 
 be asked what we like to be called in it. Good day to you, 
 sir.' 
 
 He turned to move away to the house ; but his father stopped 
 him ; he knew that he had been discourteous — a far worse 
 crime in Lord Eoyallieu's eyes than to be heartless. 
 
 * So you won the Vase yesterday ? ' he asked, pausing in his 
 walk with his back bowed, but his stem, silver-haired head 
 firect 
 
 '7 didn't ; the King did.' 
 
 ' That's absurd, sir,' said the Viscount, in his resonant and 
 yet melodious voice. * The finest horse in the world may have 
 his back broke by bad riding, and a screw has won before no^f 
 
 E 
 
50 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 when it's been finely handled. The finish was tight, wasn't 
 it?' 
 
 * Well — rather. I have ridden closer spins, though. The 
 fallows were light.' 
 
 Lord Royallieu smiled grimly. 
 
 *I know what the Shire ''plow " is like,' he said, with a 
 flash of his falcon eyes over the landscape, where, in the 
 days of his youth, he had led the first flight so often, George 
 Rex, and Waterford, and the Berkeieys, and the rest follow- 
 ing the rally of his hunting-horn. ' You won much in bets ? * 
 
 * Very fair. Thanks.' 
 
 * And won't be a shilling richer for it this day next week 1 ' 
 retorted the Viscount, with a rasping, grating irony ; he could 
 not help darting savage thrusts at this man who looked at him 
 with eyes so cruelly like Alan Bertie's. ' You play 51. points, 
 and lay 600Z. on the odd trick, I've heard, at your whist in the 
 Clubs — pretty prices for a younger son ! ' 
 
 f , * Never bet on the odd trick : spoils the game ; makes you 
 C^sacrifice play to the trick. We always bet on the game,' said 
 I Cecil, with gentle weariness ; the sweetness of his temper was 
 ^proof against his father's attacks upon his patience. 
 
 * No matter what you bet, sir ; you live as if you were a 
 Rothschild, while you are a beggar ! ' 
 
 * Wish I were a beggar : fellows always have no end in stock, 
 they say ; and your tailor can't worry you very much when 
 all you have to think about is an artistic arrangement of 
 tatters 1 ' murmured Bertie, whose impenetrable serenity was 
 never to be rufiled by his father's bitterness. 
 
 * You will soon have your wish, then,' retorted the Viscount, 
 with the unprovoked and reasonless passion which he vented 
 on every one, but on none so much as the son he hated. 
 * You are on a royal road to it. I live out of the world, but I 
 hear from it, sir. I hear that there is not a man in the 
 Guards — not even Lord Rockingham — who lives at the rate of 
 imprudence you do ; that there is not a man who drives such 
 costly horses, keeps such costly mistresses, games to such 
 desperation, fools gold away with such idiocy as you do. You 
 conduct yourself as if you were a millionaire, sir, and what are 
 you ? A pauper on my bounty, and on your brother Montagu's 
 after me — a pauper with a tinsel fashion, a gilded beggary, 
 » Queen's commission to cover a sold-out poverty, a dandy's 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 51 
 
 reputation to stave off a defaulter's future! A pauper, sir — 
 and a Guardsman ! ' 
 
 Tiie coarse and cruel irony flashed out with wicked scorch- 
 ing malignity, lashing and upbraiding the man who was the 
 victim of his own unwisdom and extravagance. 
 
 A slight tinge of colour came on his son's face as he heard, 
 but he gave no sign that he was moved, no sign of impatience 
 or anger. He lifted his cap again, not in irony, but with a 
 grave respect in his action that was totally contrary to his 
 whole temperament. 
 
 * This sort of talk is very exhausting — very bad style,' he 
 said, with his accustomed gentle murmur. * I will bid you 
 good morning, my lord.' 
 
 And he went without another word. Crossing the length of 
 the old-fashioned Elizabethan terrace, little Berk passed him ; 
 he motioned the lad towards the Viscount. * Royal wants to 
 see you, young one.' 
 
 The boy nodded and went onward ; and as Bertie turned to 
 enter the low door that led out to the stables, he saw his father 
 meet the lad — meet him with a smile that changed the whole 
 character of his face, and pleasant kindly words of affectionate 
 welcome, drawing his arm about Berkeley's shoulder, and 
 looking with pride upon his bright and gracious youth. 
 
 More than an old man's preference would be thus won by 
 the young one ; a considerable portion of their mother's for- 
 tune, so left that it could not be dissipated, yet could be willed 
 to which son the Viscount chose, would go to his brother by, < 
 this passionate partiality ; but there was not a tinge of jealousy 5 
 in Cecil. Whatever else his faults, he had no mean ones, and l 
 the boy was dear to him, by a quite unconscious yet unvary-J 
 ing obedience to his dead mother's wish. 
 
 * Royal hates me as game-birds hate a red dog. Why the 
 deuce, I wonder ? ' he thought, with a certain slight touch of 
 pain, despite his idle philosoj)hies and devil-may-care indiffer- 
 ence. * Weli^iowL gPP4 ^or nothing, I suppose. Certainly 
 I am not good for much, unless it. Vnding and making love.* 
 
 With which summary of his merits, ' Beauty,' who felt him- 
 self to be a master in those two arts, but thought himself a 
 bad fellow out of them, sauntered away to join the Seraph and 
 the rest of his guests, his father's words pursuing him a 
 little despite his carelessness, for they had borne an unwelcome 
 measure of truth. 
 
 e2 
 
52 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Royal can hit hard,' his thoughts contiuued. 'A pauper 
 and a Guardsman ! By Jove ; it's true enough ; but he made 
 me so. They brought me up as if I had a miUion coming to 
 me, and turned me out among the cracks to take my running 
 with the best of them — and they give me iust about what 
 pays my groom's book ! Then they wonder that a fellow goes 
 to the Jews. Where the deuce else can he go ? ' 
 
 And Bertie — whom his gains the day before had not much 
 benefited, since his play-debts, his young brother's needs, and 
 the Zu-Zu's insatiate little hands were all stretched ready to 
 devour them without leaving a sovereign for more serious 
 liabilities — went, for it was quite early morning, to act the 
 M.F.H.in his father's stead at the meet on the great lawns before 
 the house, for the Royallieu ' lady pack ' were very famous in 
 the Shires, and hunted over the same country alternate days 
 with the Quorn. They moved off ere long to draw the Holt 
 Wood, in as open a morning, and as strong a scenting wind as 
 ever favoured Melton Pink. 
 
 A whimper and * gone away ! ' soon echoed from Beebyside, 
 and the pack, not letting the fox hang a second, dashed after 
 hhn, making straight for Scraptoft. One of the fastest things 
 up-wind that hounds ever ran took them straight through the 
 Spinnies, past Hamilton Farm, away beyond Burkby village, 
 and down into the valley of the Wreake without a check, where 
 he broke away, was headed, tried earths, and was pulled down 
 Bcarce forty minutes from the find. The pack then drew 
 Hungerton foxholes blank, drew Carver's spinnies without a 
 whimper; and lastly, drawing the old familiar Billesdon Coplow, 
 had a short quick burst with a brace of cubs, and returning, 
 settled themselves to a fine dog-fox that was raced an hour- 
 and-half, hunted slowly for fifty minutes, raced again another 
 hour-and-quarter, sending all the field to their * second horses ; ' 
 and after a clipping chase through the cream of the grass 
 country, nearly saved his brush in the twilight when scent was 
 lost in a rushing hailstorm, but had the ' little ladies ' laid on 
 again like wildfire, and was killed with the * who-whoop ! ' ring- 
 ing far and away over Glenn Gorse, after a glorious run — 
 thirty miles in and out — with pace that tried the best of them. 
 
 A better day's sport even the Quorn had never had in all 
 its brilliant annals, and faster things the Melton men them- 
 Bclvos had never wanted : both those who love the * quickest 
 ihing you ever kiiew — thirty minutes without a cheok —such 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 53 
 
 a pace I * and care little whether the finale be ' killed * or 
 'broke away,' and those of older fashion, who prefer 'long 
 day, you know, steady as old time, the beauties stuck like 
 wax through fourteen parishes as I live ; six hours if it were a 
 minute ; horses dead beat ; positively walked, you know, no end 
 of a day I ' but must have the fatal * who-whoop ' as conclusion 
 — bothof these, the Vnew style and the old,' could not but be con- 
 tent with the doings of the * Demoiselles ' from start to finish^.^ 
 
 Was it likely that Cecil remembered the caustic lash of his ' 
 father's ironies while he was lifting Mother of Pearl over 
 the posts and rails, and sweeping on, with the halloo ringing 
 down the wintry wind as the grasslands flew beneath him V 
 Was it likely that he recollected the difficulties that hung 
 above him while he was dashing down the Gorse happy as a 
 king, with the wild hail driving in his face, and a break of 
 stormy sunshine just welcoming the gallant few who were 
 landed at the death, as twilight fell ? Was it likely that he 
 could unlearn all the lessons of his life, and realise in how 
 near a neighbourhood he stood to ruin when he was drinking 
 Regency sherry out of his gold flask as he crossed the saddle 
 of his second horse, or, smoking, rode slowly homeward, Cf 
 chatting with the Seraph through the leafless muddy lanes in / 
 the gloaming ? . . -i? * 
 
 Scarcely. It is very easy to remember our difficulties "v ' 
 when we are eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad ^ 
 soups, and worse wines in continental impecuniosity — sleeping > 
 on them as rough x\ustralian shakedowns, or wearmg theiii ^ ^ 
 perpetually in Californian rags and tatters, it were impossible j 
 very well to escape from them then ; but it is very hard to v 
 remember them when every touch paid shape of life is pleasant 
 to us — when everything about us is symbolical and redolent 
 of wealth and ease — when the art of enjoyment is the only 
 one we are called on to study, and the science of pleasure all 
 we are asked to explore. 
 
 It is wellnigh impossible to believe yourself a beggar while 
 you never want sovereigns for whist : and it would be beyond 
 the powers of human nature to conceive your ruin irrevocable, 
 while you still eat turbot and terrapin with a powdered giant 
 behind your chair daily. Up in his garret a poor wretch 
 Imows very well what he is, and realises in stern fact the 
 extremities of the last sou, the last shirt, and the last hope : 
 but in these devil-may-care pleasures — in this pleasant, reck- 
 
54 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 less, velvet-soft rush down-hill — in this club-palace, with 
 every luxury that the heart of man can devise and desire, 
 yours to command at your will — it is hard work, then, to 
 grasp the truth that the crossing-sweeper yonder, in the dust 
 of Pall Mall, is really not more utterly in the toils of poverty 
 than you are ! 
 
 * Beauty ' was never, in the whole course of his days, 
 virtually or physically, or even metaphorically, reminded that 
 he was not a millionaire ; much less still was he ever re- 
 mmded so painfully. 
 r Life petted him, pampered him, caressed him, gifted him, 
 though of half his gifts he never made use ; lodged him like 
 a prince, dined him like a king, and never recalled to him by 
 a single privation or a single sensation that he was not as rich 
 a man as his brother-in-arms, the Seraph, future Duke of 
 Lyonnesse. How could he then bring himself to understand, 
 as nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his father 
 \ had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase — * A Pauper 
 \ and a Guardsman ' ? If he had ever been near a compre- 
 liension of it, which he never was, he must have ceased to 
 realise it when — pressed to dine with Lord Guenevere, near 
 whose house the last fox had been killed, while a groom 
 dashed over to Hoyallieu for his change of clothes — he caught 
 a glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking 
 their preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enclianting 
 group of lace and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, 
 of blonde cheeks and brunette tresses, of dark velvets and 
 gossamer tissue ; and when he had changed the scarlet for 
 dinner- dress, went down among them to be the darling of 
 that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by 
 those soft, languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous 
 eyes of his chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women 
 will spoil the privileged pet of their drawing-rooms whom 
 they have made * free of the guild,' and endowed with a 
 flirting commission, and acquitted of anything ' serious.' 
 
 He was the recognised darling, and permitted property, of 
 the young married beauties ; the unwedded knew he was 
 hopeless for them, and tacitly left him to the more attractive 
 conquerors, who hardly prized the Seraph so much as they 
 did Bertie, to sit in their barouches and opera-boxes, ride and 
 drive, and yacht with them, conduct a Boccaccio intrigue 
 through the height of the season, and make them really be- 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 55 
 
 lieve themselves actually in love V7hile they were at the moors 
 or down the Nile, and would have given their diamonds to get 
 a new distraction. 
 
 Lady Guenevere was the last of these, his titled and 
 wedded captors ; and perhaps the most resistless of all of 
 them. Neither of them believed very much in their attach- / 
 ment, but both of them wore the masquerade dress to per-V 
 fection. He had fallen in love with her as much as he ever 
 fell in love, which was just sufficient to amuse him, and never 
 enough to disturb him. He let himself be fascinated, not 
 exerting himself either to resist or advance the affair till he 
 was, perhaps, a little more entangled with her than it was 
 according to his canons expedient to be ; and they had the 
 most enchanting — friendship. 
 
 Nobody was ever so indiscreet as to call it anything else ; 
 and my Lord was too deeply absorbed in the Alderney 
 beauties that stood knee-deep in the yellow straw of his farm- 
 yard, and the triumphant conquests that he gained over his .v^ 
 brother peers' Shorthorns and Suffoliis, to trouble his head ^jj^ 
 about Cecil's attendance on his beautiful Countess. -4y 
 
 They corresponded in Spanish; they had a thousand _^,,^ 
 charming ciphers ; they made the columns of the Times andv'' 
 the Post play the unconscious role of medium to appoint- 
 ments ; they eclipsed all the pages of Calderon's or Congreve's 
 comedies in the ingenuities with which they met, wrote, got 
 invitations together to the same houses, and arranged signals 
 for mute communication ; but there was not the slightest 
 occasion for it all. It passed the time, however, and wentj 
 far to persuade them that they really were in love, and had a' 
 mountain of difficulties and dangers to contend with ; it 
 added the ' spice to the sauce,' and gave them the * relish of 
 being forbidden.' Besides, an open scandal would have been 
 very shocking to her brilliant ladyship, and there was 
 nothing on earth, perhaps, of wbich he would have had a 
 more lively dread than a ' scene ; ' but his present * friendship ' 
 was delightful, and presented no such dangers, while his fair 
 ' friend ' was one of the greatest beauties and the greatest 
 coquettes of her time. Her smile was honour ; her fan was 
 a sceptre ; her face was perfect ; and her heart never troubled 
 herself or her lovers : if she had a fault, she was a trifle 
 exacting, but that was not to be wondered at in one so omni- 
 potent, and her chains after all were made of roses. 
 
56 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 As she sat in the deep ruddy glow of the library fire, with 
 the light flickering on her white brow and her violet velvets ; 
 as she floated to the head of her table, with opals shining 
 among her priceless point laces, and some tropical flower with 
 leaves of glistening gold crowning Hei'^ bronze hair ; as she 
 glided down'ih'a waltz along the polished floor, or bent her 
 proud head over ecart^ in a musing grace that made her 
 opponent utterly forget to mark the king or even play his 
 cards at all ; as she talked in the low music of her voice jof 
 European imbroglio and consols and coupons, for she was a 
 politician and a speculator, or lapsed into a beautifully tinted 
 study of la femw,e incomprisef when time and scene suited, 
 when the sbars were very clear above the terraces without, 
 and the conservatory very solitary, and a touch of Musset or 
 Owen Meredith chimed in well with the light and shade of 
 the oleanders and the brown lustre of her own eloquent 
 glance — in all these how superb she was i 
 
 And if in truth her bosom only fell with the falling of 
 Shares, and rose with the rising of Bonds ; if her soft shadows 
 were only taken up like the purple tinting under her lashes 
 to embellish her beauty ; if in her heart of hearts she thought 
 Musset a fool, and wondered why Lucille was not written in 
 prose, in her soul far preferring Le Follet ; why — it did not 
 matter that I can see. All great ladies gamble in stock now- 
 I adays under the rose, and women are for the most part as 
 1 cold, clear, hard, and practical as their adorers believe them 
 Ithe contrary ; and a femme incomprise is so charming when 
 she avows herself comprehended by you, that you would 
 never risk spoiling the confidence by hinting a doubt of its 
 truth. If she and Bertie only played at love ; if neither 
 believed much in the other ; if each trifled with a pretty 
 gossamer soufflet of passion much as they trifled with their 
 soufQets at dinner ; if both tried it to trifle away ennui much 
 as they tried staking a Friederich d'Or at Baden, this light 
 surface fashionable philosophic form of a passion they both 
 laughed at in its hot and serious follies, suited them admi- 
 rably. Had it ever mingled a grain of bitterness in her 
 ladyship's Souchong before dinner, or given an aroma of bit- 
 \ terness to her lover's Naples punch in the smoking-room, it 
 I would have been out of all keeping with themselves and their 
 I world. 
 
 Nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in bve ; 
 
LOVE A LA MODE 57 
 
 nothing on earth so destructive as being too much so ; and a3 
 Cecil in the idle enjoyment dT the former gentle luxury 
 flirted with his liege lady that night, lying back in the softest 
 of lounging-chairs, with his dark, dreamy, handsome eyes 
 looking all the eloquence in the world, and his head drooped 
 till his moustaches were almost touching her laces, his Queen 
 of Beauty listened with charmed interest, and to look at him 
 he might have been praying after the poet — 
 
 How is it under our control 
 To love or not to love ? 
 
 In real truth he was gently murmuring — 
 
 * Such a pity that you missed to-day ! Hounds found 
 directly ; three of the fastest things I ever knew, one after 
 another ; you should have seen the "Uttle ladies " head him 
 just above the Gorse ! Three hares crossed us and a fresh 
 fox ; some of the pack broke away after the new scent, but 
 old Bluebell, your pet, held on like death, and most of them 
 kept after her — you had your doubts about Silver Trumpet's 
 shoulders ; they're not the thing, perhaps, but she ran beau- 
 tifully all day, and didn't show a symptom of rioting.' 
 
 Cecil could, when needed, do the Musset and Meredith 
 style of thing to perfection, but on the whole he preferred 
 love d la mode ; it is so much easier and less exhausting to 
 tell your mistress of a ringing run, or a close finish, than to 
 turn perpetual periods on the lustre of her eyes, and the 
 eternity of your devotion. 
 
 Nor di^ it -at all interfere with the sincerity of his worship 
 that the /Zu-Zu was at the prettiest little box in the world, 
 in the neighbourhood of Market Harborough, which he had 
 taken for her, and had been at the meet that day in her little 
 toy trap with its pair of snowy ponies and its bright blue 
 liveries that drove so desperately through his finances, and 
 had ridden his hunter Maraschino with immense dash and 
 spirit for a youiig^JMy, J\vliQ„liad never done anything but "^ 
 pirouette tilTlhe last six months, and a total and headlong ■ 
 disregard of * purlers,' very reckless in a white-skinned, 
 bright-eyed, illiterate, avaricious Httle beauty, whose face 
 was her fortune, and who most assuredly would have been 
 adored no single moment longer had she scarred her fair 
 tinted cheek with the blackthorn, or started as a heroine with 
 a broken nose like Fielding's cherished Ameha. The Zu-Zu 
 
58 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 rarght rage, might sulk, might pout, might even swear all 
 \^ sorts of naughty Mabille oaths, most villanously pronounced, 
 at the ascendency of her haughty unapproachable patrician 
 rival — she did do all these things — but Bertie would not 
 have been the consummate tactician, the perfect flirt, the 
 skilled and steeled campaigner in the boudoirs that he was, 
 if he had not been equal to the delicate task of managing 
 both the peeress and the ballet-dancer with inimitable ability, 
 even when they placed him in the seemingly difficult dilemma 
 of meeting them both with twenty yards between them on 
 the neutral ground of the gathering to see the Pytchley or the 
 Tailby throw off — a task he had achieved with victorious 
 brilliance more than once already this season. 
 
 • You drive a team, Beauty — never drive a team,' the 
 Seraph had said on occasion over a confidential ' sherry-peg ' 
 in the mornings, meaning by the metaphor of a team Lady 
 Guenevere, the Zu-Zu, and various other contemporaries in 
 Bertie's affections. ' Nothing on earth so dangerous ; your 
 leader will bolt, or your off- wheeler will turn sulky, or your 
 young one will passage and make the very deuce of a row ; 
 they'll never go quiet to the end, however clever your hand 
 is on the ribbons. Now, I'll drive six-in-hand as soon as 
 any man — drove a ten-hander last year in the Bois — when 
 the team comes out of the stables ; but I'm hanged if I'd risk 
 my neck with managing even a pair of women. Have one 
 clean out of the shafts before you trot out another ! ' 
 
 To which salutary advice Cecil only gave a laugh, going on 
 his own ways with the * team ' as before, to the despair of 
 his fidus Achates ; the Seraph, being a quarry so incessantly 
 pursued by dowager-beaters, chaperon-keepers, and the 
 whole hunt of the Matrimonial Pack, with those clever 
 hounds Belle and Fashion ever leading in full cry after him, 
 that he dreaded tlie sight of a ball-room meet ; and, shunning 
 the rich preserves of the Salons, ran to earth persistently in 
 the shady Wood of St. John's, and got — at some little cost 
 and some risk of trapping, it is true, but still efficiently — 
 preserved from all other hunters or poachers by the lawless 
 Robin Hoods aux yeux noirs of those welcome and familiar 
 coverts. 
 
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE §9 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE 
 
 * You're a lad 0' wax, my beauty I ' cried Mr. Rake 
 enthusiastically, surveying the hero of the Grand Military 
 with adoring eyes as that celebrity, without a hair turned or 
 a muscle swollen from his exploit, was having a dressing 
 down after a gentle exercise, * You've pulled it off, haven't 
 you ? You've cut the work out for 'em ! You've shown 'em 
 what a luster is ! Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is 
 in blood ! The littlest pippin that ever threw a leg across the 
 pigskin knows that in the stables : then why the dickens do 
 the world run against such a plain fact owi of it ? ' 
 
 And Rake gazed with worship at the symmetrical limbs of 
 the champion of the 'First Life/ and_ plunged into_.specu- 
 latioH-On the democratic tendencies of the age as clearly con- 
 tradicted by all the evidences of the flat and furrow, while. 
 Forest King drank a dozen go-downs of water, and was 
 rewarded for the patience with which he had subdued his 
 inclination to kick, fret, spring, and break away throughout 
 the dressing by a full feed thrown into his crib, which 
 Rake watched him with adoring gaze eat to the very last 
 grain. 
 
 ' You precious one 1 ' soliloquised that philosopher, who 
 loved the horse with a sort of passion since his victory over 
 the Shires. * What a lot o' enemies you've been and gone 
 and made 1 — that's where it is, my boy ; nobody can't never 
 forgive Success. All them fielders have lost such a sight of 
 money by you ; them bookmakers have had such a lot of pots 
 upset by you ; bless you I if you were on the flat you'd be 
 doctored or roped in no time. You've won for the gentlemen, 
 my lovely — for your own cracks, my boy — and that's just 
 what they'll never pardon you.* 
 
 And Rake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts (he 
 liked the * gentlemen * himself), went out of the box to get 
 into saddle and ride off on an errand of his master's to the 
 
6o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 A/ Zu-Zu at her tiny hunting-lodge, where the enow-white 
 y .. ponies made her stud, and where she gave enchanting little 
 S ( hunting-dinners, at which she sang equally enchanting little 
 ' hunting-songs, and arrayed herself in the Fontainebleau hunt- 
 ing costume, gold-hilted knife and all, and spent Cecil's 
 winnings for him with a rapidity that threatened to leave 
 ' very few of them for the London season. She was very 
 \ pretty — sweetly pretty — with that wanted no gold powder ; 
 ^ the clearest, sauciest eyes, and the handsomest mouth in the 
 world ; but of grammar she had not a notion, of her aspirates 
 she had never a recollection, of conversation she had not an 
 idea, of slang she had, to be sure, a rtptrtoire^ but to this was 
 her command of language limited. She dres§§d perfectly, 
 |x but„Bhe _was a v^gar- Uttle soul ; drank everything, from 
 ^-^.^ Bass's ale to rum-punch, and from cherry-brandy to absinthe ; 
 ^^^-^ thought it the height of wit to stifle you with cayenne slid 
 ' ,}(- into your vanille ice, and the climax of repartee to cram your 
 '^ hat full of peach stones and lobster shells ; was thoroughly 
 ^- avaricious, thoroughly insatiate, thoroughly heartless, pillaged 
 ^/y with both hands, and flien never had enough ; had a coarse 
 ^ I good nature when it cost her nothing, and was ' as jolly as a 
 j^ grig,' according to her phraseology, so long as she could stew 
 c"^ her pigeons in champagne, drink wines and liqueurs that 
 C^ were beyond price, take the most dashing trap in the Park 
 jj^^ up to Flirtation Corner, and laugh and sing and eat Rich- 
 , y^'' 'mond dinners, and show herself at the Opera with Bertie or 
 ^^.'S"bmG other * swell ' attached to her, in the very box next to 
 ^'^,c\ a Duchess. 
 
 ^-^l The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy ; and as for the pathetic 
 
 \ pictures that novelists and moralists draw, of vice sighing 
 
 ' amid turtle and truffles for childish innocence in the cottage 
 
 at home where honeysuckles blossomed and brown brooks 
 
 made melody, and passionately grieving on the purple cushions 
 
 of a barouche for the time of straw pallets and untroubled 
 
 sleep, why — the Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the 
 
 box-seat of a drag, and told you ' to stow all that trash ! ' 
 
 Her childish recollections were of a stifling lean-to with the 
 
 odour of pigsty and strawyard, pork for a feast once a week, 
 
 starvation all the other six days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and 
 
 a general atmosphere of beer and waslitubs ; she hated her 
 
 past, and loved her cigar on the drag. The Zu-Zu is fact 
 
 ir thejnoralists' jjictures are moonshine. 
 
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE 6i 
 
 The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, moreover^^J 
 daily becoming more prominent in the world, more brilliant, ^ 
 more frankly recognised, and more omnipotent. Whether 
 this will ultimately prove for the better or the worse, it would 
 be a bold man who should dare say ; there is at least one 
 thing left to desire in it — i.e. that the synonym of * Aspasia,' 
 which serves so often to designate in journalistic literature 
 these Free Lances of life, were more suitable in artistic and 
 intellectual similarity, and that when the Zu-Zu and her 
 sisterhood plunge their white arms elbow-deep into so many 
 fortunes, and rule the world right and left as they do, theyjf 
 could also sound their H's properly, and know a little ortho-j "* ^^ 
 graphy, if they could not be changed into such queens, of 
 grace, of intellect, of sovereign mind and splendid wit as were 
 their prototypes when she whose name they debase held her 
 rule in the City of the Violet Crown, and gathered about her 
 Phidias the divine, haughty and eloquent Antipho, the gay 
 Crates, the subtle Protagoras, Cratinus so acrid and yet soUi^t 
 jovial, Damon of the silver lyre, and the great poets who ^ 
 are poets for all time. Author and artist, noble and soldier,*^ 
 court the Zu-Zu order now as the Athenians courted their 
 brilliant kToXpo.i ; but it must be confessed that the Hellenic 
 idols were of a more exalted type than are the Hyde Park ' 
 goddesses ! 
 
 However, the Zu-Zu was the rage, and spent Bertie's 
 money, when he got any, just as her wilful sovereignty 
 fancied, and Rake rode on now with his master's note,-, 
 bearing no very good will to her ; for Rake had very strong i 
 prejudices, and none stronger than against these fair pillagers j 
 who went about seeking whom they should devour, and I ( 
 laughing at the wholesale ruin that they wrought while the j I 
 Bentimentalists babbled in * Social Science ' of ' pearls lost 'J \ 
 and * innocence betrayed.' ■• 
 
 * A girl that used to eat tripe and red herring in a six-pair 
 back, and dance for a shilling a night in gauze, coming it so 
 grand that she'll only eat asparagus in March, and drink the 
 best Brands with her truffles ! Why, she ain't worth sixpence 
 thrown away on her, unless it's worth while to hear how hard 
 she can swear at you I ' averred Rake, in his eloquence ; and 
 he was undoubtedly right for that matter : but then — the 
 Zu-Zu was the rage, and if ever she should be sold up, great 
 ladies would crowd to her sale and buy with eager curiosity 
 
62 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 at high prices her most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most 
 flimsy gew-gaws of marqueterie ! 
 
 Rake had seen a good deal of men and manners, and, in 
 his own opinion at least, was ' up to every dodge on the 
 cross* that this iniquitous world could unfold. A bright, 
 lithe, animated, vigorous, yellow-haired, and sturdy fellow, 
 seemingly with a dash of the Celt in him that made him 
 vivacious and peppery, Mr. Rake polished his wits quite 
 as much as he polished the tops, and considered himself a 
 philosopher. Whose son he was he had not the remotest 
 idea ; his earliest recollections were of the tender mercies of 
 the workhouse ; but even that chill fostermother, the parish, 
 had not damped the liveliness of his temper or the independ- 
 ence of his opinions, and as soon as he was fifteen Rake had 
 run away and joined a circus, distinguishing himself there by 
 his genius for standing on his head and tying his limbs into 
 a porter's knot. 
 
 From the circus he migrated successively into the shape of 
 a comic singer, a tapster, a navvy, a bill-sticker, a guacho in 
 Mexico (working his passage out), a fireman in New York, a 
 ventriloquist in Maryland, a vaquero in Spanish California, 
 a lemonade-seller in San Francisco, a revolutionist in the 
 Argentine (without the most distant idea what he fought for), 
 a boatman on the Bay of Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, 
 a trapper in the Wilderness, and finally, working his passage 
 home again, took the Queen's shilling in Dublin, and was 
 jdrafted into a light-cavalry regiment. With the — th he 
 served half a dozen years in India, a rough-rider, a splendid 
 fellow in a charge or a pursuit, with an astonishing power 
 over horses, and the clearest back-handed sweep of a sabre 
 that ever cut down a knot of nrtives ; hut — insubordinate. 
 Do his duty whenever fighting was in question, he did most 
 zealously ; but to kick over the traces at other times was a 
 temptation that at last became too strong for that lawless 
 lover of liberty. 
 
 From the moment that he joined the regiment, a certain 
 Corporal Warne and he had conceived an antipathy to one 
 another, which Rake had to control as he might, and which 
 the Corporal was not above indulging in every petty piece of 
 tyranny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active 
 service Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage 
 to ke(*p the curb on himself tolerably well, though he was 
 
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE 63 
 
 always regarded in his troop rather as a hound that will 
 ' riot ' is regarded in the pack ; but when the — th came 
 back to Brighton and to barracks, the evil spirit of rebellion 
 began to get a little hotter in him under the Corporal's 
 ' Idees Napol^oniennes * of justifiable persecution. Warne 
 indisputably provoked his man in a cold, iron, strictly lawful 
 sort of manner, moreover, all the more irritating to a temper 
 like Rake's. 
 
 * Hanged if I care how the officers come it over me ; 
 they're gentlemen, and it don't try a fellow,' would Rake say 
 in confidential moments over purl and a penn'orth of bird's- 
 eye, his experience in the Argentine RepubUc having left him 
 with stron^ljjiristocratic prejudices ; * but when it comes to 
 a duffer like that, that knows no better than me, what ai7i't a 
 bit better than me, and what is as clumsy a duffer about a 
 horse's plates as ever I knew, and would a'most let a young 
 'un buck him out of his saddle, why then I do cut up rough, 
 I ain't denying it, and I don't see what there is in his Stripes 
 to give him such a license to be aggravating.' 
 
 With which Rake would blow the froth off his pewter with 
 a puff of concentrated wrath, and an oath against his non- 
 commissioned officers that might have let some light in upon 
 the advocates for ' promotion from the ranks ' had they been 
 there to take the lesson. At last, in the leisure of Brighton, 
 the storm broke. Rake had a Scotch hound that was the 
 pride of his life, his beer-money often going instead to buy 
 dainties for the dog, who became one of the channels through 
 which Warne could annoy and thwart him. The dog did no 
 harm, being a fine, well-bred deerhound ; but it pleased the 
 Corporal to consider that it did, simply because it belonged 
 to Rake, whose popularity in the corps, ov/ing to his good 
 nature, his good spirits, and his innumerable tales of 
 American experiences and amorous adventures, increased 
 the jealous dislike which his knack Vv'ith an unbroken colt 
 and his abundant stable science had first raised in his 
 superior. 
 
 One day in the chargers* stables the hound ran out of a 
 loose box with a rush to get at Rake, and upset a pailful of 
 warm mash. The Corporal, who was standing by in harness, 
 hit him over the head with a heavy whip he had in his hand ; 
 infuriated by the pain, the dog flew at him, tearing his over- 
 alls with a fierce crunch of his teeth. * Take the brute off, 
 
64 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and string him up with a halter ; I've put up with him too 
 long ! ' cried AVarne to a couple of privates working near in 
 their stable dress. Before the words were out of his mouth 
 Rake threw himself on him with a bound Hke lightning, and, 
 wrenching the whip out of his hands, struck him a slashing 
 stinging blow across his face. 
 
 * Hang my hound, you cur 1 If you touch a hair of him 
 I'll double-thong you within an inch of your life ! * 
 
 And assuredly he would have kept his word had he not 
 been made a prisoner and marched off to the guard-room. 
 
 Rake learnt the stern necessity of the law, which, for the 
 sake of morale, must make the soldiers, whose blood is wanted 
 to be like fire on the field, patient, pulseless, and enduring of 
 every provocation, cruelty, and insolence in the camp and the 
 barrack, as though they were statues of stone — a needful 
 law, a wise law, an indispensable law, doubtless, but a very 
 hard law to be obeyed by a man full of life and all life's 
 passions. 
 
 At the court-martial on his mutinous conduct, which fol- 
 lowed, many witnesses bronglit evidence, on being pressed, 
 to the unpopularity of Warne in the regiment, and to his 
 harshness and his tyranny to Eake. Many men spoke out 
 what had been chained down in their thoughts for years ; 
 and, in consideration of the provocation received, the prisoner, 
 who was much liked by the officers, was condemned to six 
 months' imprisonment for his insubordination and blow to his 
 superior officer, without being tied up to the triangles. At 
 the court-martial, Cecil, who chanced to be in Brighton after 
 Goodwood, was present one day with some other Guardsmen, 
 and the look of Rake, with his cheerfulness under difficulties, 
 his love for the hound, and his bright, sunburnt, shrewd, 
 humorous countenance, took his fancy. 
 
 * Beauty ' was the essence of good nature. Indolent him- 
 self, he hated to see anything or anybody worried ; lazy, 
 gentle, wayward, and spoilt by his own world, he was still 
 never so selfish and philosophic as he pretended but what he 
 would do a kindness if one came in his way ; it is not a very 
 great virtue, perhaps, but it is a rare one. 
 
 ' Poor devil 1 struck the other because he wouldn't have 
 his dog hanged. Well, on my word I should have done the 
 same in his place, if I could have got up the pace for so much 
 exertion,' murmured Cecil to his cheroot, careless of the 
 
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE 65 
 
 demoralising tendency of his remarks for the army in general. 
 Had it occurred in the Guards, and he had * sat ' on the case, 
 Rake v\^ould have had one very lenient judge. 
 
 As it was, Bertie actually went the length of thinking 
 seriously about the matter ; he liked Eake's devotion to his 
 dumb friend, and he heard of his intense popularity in hia 
 troop ; he wished to save, if he could, so fine a fellow froin 
 the risks of his turbulent passion, and from the stern fetters 
 of a trying discipline ; hence, when Rake found himself con- 
 demned to his cell, he had a message sent him by Bertie's 
 groom that when his term of punishment should bs over, Mr. 
 Cecil would buy his discharge from the Service and engage 
 him as extra body-servant, having had a good account of his 
 capabilities ; he had taken the hound to his ov/n kennels. 
 
 Now, the fellow had been thoroughly devil-may-care through- 
 out the whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence 
 with sublime impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels wdth 
 an utterly reckless nonchalance ; but somehow or other, when .\..@^ 
 that message reached him, a vivid sense that he was a con- ^ ^,v 
 
 demned and disgraced man suddenly flooded in on him ; a V*^ 
 passionate gratitude seized him to the young aristocrat who i^^l 
 had thought of him in his destitution and condemnation, v/ho '. 
 
 had even thought of his dog ; and Rake, the philosophic and / ^ ^ 
 the undauntable, could have found it in his heart to kneel ^ ^v* 
 down in the dust and kiss the stirrup-leather when he held it y^ 
 for his new master, so strong was the loyalty he bore from that | 
 moment to Bertie. T»\^ \ 
 
 Martinets were scandalised at a Life Guardsman taking as ^ ^^^ 
 his private valet a man who had been guilty of such conduct '*' 
 in the Light Cavalry; but Cecil never troubled his head about 
 what people said ; and so invaluable did Rake speedily become 
 to him, that he had kept him about his person wherever he 
 went from then until now, t^vo years after. 
 
 Rake loved his master with a fidelity very rare in these 
 days ; he loved his horses, his dogs, everything that was his, 
 down to his very rifle and boots, slaved for him cheerfully, and 
 was as proud of the deer he stalked, of the brace he bagged, 
 of his winnings when the Household played the Zingari, of 
 his victory when his yacht won the Cherbourg Gup, as though 
 those successes had been Rake's own. 
 
 * My dear Seraph,' said Cecil himself once on this point to 
 the Marquis, 'if you want generosity, fidelity, and all the 
 
66 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 rest of the cardinal what-d'ye-call-ems — sins, ain't it 7 — go to 
 a noble-hearted Scamp ; he'll stick to you till he kills himself. 
 If you want to be cheated, get a Respectable Immaculate ; 
 he'll swindle you piously, and decamp with your Doncaster 
 Vase.' 
 
 And Rake, who assuredly had been an out-and-out scamp, 
 made good Bertie's creed ; he * stuck to him ' devotedly, and 
 no terrier was ever more alive to an otter than he was to the 
 Guardsman's interests. It was that very vigilance which 
 made him, as he rode back from the Zu-Zu's in the twilight, 
 notice what would have escaped any save one who had been 
 practised as a trapper in the red Canadian woods, namely, the 
 head of a man almost hidden among the heavy though leafless 
 brushwood and the yellow gorse of a spinney which lay on 
 his left in Roy allien Park. Rake's eyes were telescopic and 
 nicroscopic ; moreover, they had been trained to know such 
 little signs as a marsh from a hen harrier in full flight, by 
 the length of wing and tail, and a widgeon or a coot from a 
 mallard or a teal, by the depth each swam out of the water. 
 Grey and foggy as it was, and high as was the gorse, Rake 
 recognised his born-foe Willon. 
 
 ' What's he up to there ? ' thought Rake, surveying the 
 place, which was wild, solitary, and an unlikely place enough 
 for a head groom to be found in. ' If he ain't a rascal, I 
 never see one ; it's my belief he cheats the stable thick and 
 thin, and gets on Mr. Cecil's mounts to a good tune — ay, and 
 would nobble 'em as soon as not, if it just suited his book ; 
 that blessed King hatas the man ; how he lashes his heels at 
 him ! ' 
 
 It was certainly possible that Willon might be passing an 
 idle hour in potting rabbits, or be otherwise innocently en- 
 gaged enough ; but tb<^ sight of him there among the gorse 
 was a sight of suspicion to Rake. Instantaneous thoughts 
 darted through his mind of tethering his horse, and making a 
 reconnaissance safely and unseen with the science at stalking 
 brute or man tliat he had learnt of his friends the Sioux. But 
 second thoughts showed him this was impossible. The horse 
 he was on was a mere colt just breaking in, who had barely 
 had so much as a * dumb jockey ' on his back, and stand for a 
 second the colt would not. 
 
 * At any rate, I'll unearth him,' thought Rake, with hia 
 latent animosity to the head groom, and his vigilant loyalty 
 
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE 67 
 
 to Cecil overruling any scruple as to his right to overlook his 
 
 foe's movements : and with a gallop that was muffled on the 
 heather'd turf he dashed straight at the covert unperceived 
 till he was within ten paces. Willon started and looked up 
 hastily ; he was talking to a square-built man very quietly 
 dressed in shepherd's plaid, chiefly remarkable by a red-hued 
 beard and whiskers. 
 
 The groom turned pale, and laughed nervously as Eake 
 pulled up with a jerk. 
 
 * You on that young 'un again ? Take care you don't get 
 bucked out o' saddle in the shape of a cocked hat.' 
 
 ' I ain't afraid of going to grass, if you are ! ' retorted Eake, 
 scornfully ; boldness was not his enemy's strong point. ' Who's 
 your pal, old fellow ? ' 
 
 * A cousin o' mine, out o' Yorkshire,* vouchsafed Mr. Willon, 
 looking anything but easy, while the cousin aforesaid nodded 
 sulkily on the introduction. 
 
 ' Ah I looks like a Yorkshire tyke,' muttered Rake, with a 
 volume of meaning condensed in these innocent words. ' A 
 nice, dry, cheerful sort of place to meet your cousin in, too ; 
 uncommon lively ; hope it'll raise his spirits to see all his 
 cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don't seem much in sorts 
 now,' continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a glance at the 
 * keeper's tree ' by which they stood, in the middle of dank 
 undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, 
 curs, owls, kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens. To what 
 issue the passage of arms might have come it is impossible to 
 say, for at that moment the colt took matters into his own 
 hands, and bolted with a rush, that even Rake could not pull 
 in till he had had a mile-long * pipe-opener.* 
 
 ' Something up there,' thought that sagacious rough-rider ; 
 ' if that red-haired chap ain't a rum lot, I'll eat him. I've 
 seen his face, too, somewhere ; where the deuce was it ? 
 Cousin ; yes, cousins in Queer Street, I dare say ! Why 
 should he go and meet his "cousin" out in the fog there, 
 when if you took twenty cousins home to the servants' hall 
 nobody'd ever say anything ! If that Willon ain't as deep as 
 Old Harry- 
 
 And Rake rode into the stable-yard, thoughtful and in 
 
 5e: 
 in 
 
 tensoly suspicious of the rendezvous under the keeper's trea^ 
 in the outlying coverts. He would have been more so had "7 
 he guessed that Ben Davis's red beard and demure attire, / 
 
 V2 
 
 T/v^r' 
 
68 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 I with other as efficient disguises, had prevented even his own 
 I keen eyes from penetrating the identity of Willon's * cousin ' 
 I with the Welsher he had seen thrust off the course the day 
 before by his master.* 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 *^ THE END OP A RINGING RUN 
 
 Tally-ho 1 is the word, clap spurs and let's follow, 
 The world has no charm like a rattling view-halloa I 
 
 Is hardly to be denied by anybody in this land of fast bursts 
 and gallant M.F.H.'s, whether they * ride to hunt,' or 
 * hunt to ride,* in the immortal distinction of Assheton 
 Smith's old whip : the latter class, by the bye, becoming far 
 and away the larger, in these days of rattling gallops and 
 desperate breathers. Who cares to patter after a sly old dog- 
 fox, that, fat and wary, leads the pack a tedious interminable 
 wind in and out through gorse and spinney, bricks himself 
 up in a drain, and takes an hour to be dug out, dodges about 
 till twilight, and makes the hounds pick the sceiit slowly and 
 wretchedly over marsh and through water ? Who would not 
 give fifty guineas a second for the glorious thirty minutes of 
 racing that show steam and steel over fence and fallow in a 
 y^^clipping rush without a check from find to finish ? So be it 
 ^ Vever ! The Tiding 'that graces the Shires, that makes Ted- 
 ^i\ worth and Pytchley, ihe Dukes and the Fitzwilliamses, 
 ^'' : household words and 'names beloved,' that fills Melton and 
 , i. Market Harborough, and makes the best flirts of the ball- 
 ^ V, room gallop fifteen miles to covert, careless of hail or rain, 
 ^ mire or slush, mist or cold, so long as it is a fine scenting 
 wind, is the same riding that sent the Six Hundred down 
 y: into the blaze of the Muscovite guns, that in our father's daya 
 gave to Grant's Hussars their swoop, like eagles, on to the 
 rear-guard at Morales, and that in the grand old East and 
 the rich trackless West, makes exiled campaigners with high 
 English names seek and win an aristeia of their own at the 
 
THE END OF A RINGING RUN €g 
 
 head of their wild Irregular Horse, who would charge heU 
 itself at their bidding. 
 
 Now in all the Service there was not a man who loved* 
 hunting better than Bertie. Though he was incorrigibly 
 lazy, and inconceivably effeminate in every one of his habits ; 
 though he suggested a portable lounging-chair as an improve- 
 ment at battues so that you might shoot sitting, drove to 
 every breakfast and garden party in the season in his brougham, 
 with the blinds down, lest a grain of dust should touch him ; 
 thought a waltz too exhaustive, and a saunter down Pall Mall 
 too tiring, and asked to have the end of a novel told him in 
 the clubs because it was too much trouble to read on a warm 
 day — though he was more indolent than any spoiled Creole, 
 
 • Beauty * never failed to head the first flight, and adored a 
 hard day cross country, with an east wind in his eyes and the 
 sleet in his teeth. The only trouble was to make him get up 
 in time for it. 
 
 * Mr. Cecil, sir, if you please, the drag will be round in 
 ten minutes,' said Eake, with a dash of desperation for the 
 seventh time into his chamber, one fine scenting morning. 
 
 ' I don't please,' answered Cecil, sleepily, finishing his cup 
 of coffee, and reading- a novel of La Demirep's. 
 
 * The other gentlemen are all down, sir, and you will be 
 too late.' 
 
 * Not a bit. They must wait for me,' yawned Bertie. 
 Crash came the Seraph's thunder on the panels of the 
 
 door, and a strong volume of Turkish through the keyhole: 
 
 * Beauty, Beauty, are you dead ? ' 
 
 ' Now, what an inconsequent question ! ' expostulated 
 Cecil, with appealing rebuke. If a fellow were dead, how 
 the devil could he say he v/as ? Do be logical, Seraph.' 
 
 * Get up ! ' cried the Seraph with a deafening rataplan, and 
 a final dash of his colossal stature into the chamber. We've 
 all done breakfast ; the traps are coming round ; you'll be an 
 hour behind tmie at the meet.' 
 
 Bertie lifted his eyes with plaintive resignation from the 
 Demirep's yellow-papered romance. 
 
 * I'm really in an interesting chapter : Aglae has just had 
 a marquis kill her son, and two brothers kill each other in ^ 
 the Bois, about her, and is on the point of discovering a raan 
 Bhe's in love with to be her own grandfather ; the complica- 
 tion is absolutely thrilling,' murmured Beauty, whom nothing 
 
 \%o^ 
 
70 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 /could ever * thrill,* not even plunging down the Matterhorn, 
 I losing 'long odds in thou' ' over the Oaks, or being sunned in 
 ^he eyes of the fairest woman in Europe. 
 ^ The Seraph laughed, and tossed the volume straight to the 
 other end of the chamber. ^^^^^^ 
 
 ' Confound you, Beauty, get up 1 * -' 
 
 * Never swear, Seraph, not ever so mildly,' yawned Cecil. 
 * It's gone out, you know ; only the cads and the clergy can 
 damn one nowadays ; it's such bad style to be so impulsive. 
 Look ! you have broken the back of my Demirep ! ' 
 
 * You deserve to break the King's back over the first 
 cropper,' laughed the Seraph. * Do get up ! ' 
 
 ' Bother,' sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, 
 while the Seraph disappeared in a cloud of Turkish. 
 
 Neither Bertie's indolence nor his insouciance was assumed ; 
 utter carelessness was his nature, utter impassibihty was hia 
 habit, and he was truly for the moment loth to leave his bed., 
 his coffee and his novel ; he must have his leg over the 
 saddle, and feel the strain on his arms of that * pulling ' pace 
 with which the King always went when once he settled into 
 his stride, before he would really think about winning. 
 
 The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present 
 squires found no favour with Bertie ; a slice of game and a 
 glass of Cura9oa were all he kept the drag waiting to swallow, 
 and the four bays going at a pelting pace, he and the rest of 
 the Household who were gathered at Royallieu were by good 
 luck in time for the throw-oli* of the Quorn, where the hero of 
 the blue ribbon was dancing impatiently under Willon's 
 hand, scenting the fresh, keen, sunny air, and knowing as 
 well what all those bits of scarlet straying in through field 
 and lane, gate and g£ip, meant, as well as though the merry 
 notes of the master's horn were winding over the gorse. The 
 meet was brilliant and very large, showing such a gathering 
 as only the Melton Country can ; and foremost among the 
 crowd of carriages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan 
 mare Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that 
 exquisite peeress in her violet habit, and her tiny velvet hat ; 
 and tht, pony equipage of the Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure 
 and silver, leopard rugs, and snowy reins: the breadth of 
 half an acre of grassland was between them, but the groups 
 of men about them were tolerably equal for number and for 
 rank. 
 
THE END OF A RINGING RUN 71 
 
 • Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph, 
 there's a good fellow,' inurniured Cecil, as he swung himself 
 into saddle. The Seraph gave a leonine growl, sighed, and 
 acquiesced. He detested women in the hunting-field, but 
 that sweetest-tempered giant of the Brigades never refused 
 anything to anybody — much less to * Beauty.' 
 
 To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvellous-^ 
 and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, \ ^ 
 to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted ' 
 himself between his two claimants — bending to his Countess^ 
 with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed' "^ ^ 
 perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently l^j^ 
 lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony-trap ^.'j 
 under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and y 
 restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of ,^^;- 
 a little gold sherry-flask, studded with turquoises, just ordered 
 for her from Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously 
 contemned, because she thought it had only cost twenty 
 guineas ; anchoring the victimised Seraph beside her by an 
 adroit * Ah I by-the-way. Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your rose- 
 scented jpai^elitos ; she's been wild to smoke them ; ' and 
 leaving the Zu-Zu content at securing a future Duke, was 
 free to canter back and flirt on the off-side of Vivandiere, till 
 the * signal,' the ' cast,' made with consummate craft, the 
 waving of the white sterns among the brushwood, the tighten- 
 ing of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the challenge, the 
 whimper, and the ' stole away ! ' sent the field headlong down 
 the course after as fine a long-legged greyhound fox as ever 
 carried a brush. 
 
 Away he went in a rattling spin, breaking straight at once 
 for the open, the hounds on the scent like mad : with a tally- 
 ho that thundered through the cloudless, crisp, cold, glittering 
 noon, the field dashed off pell-mell, the violet habit of her 
 ladyship, and the azure skirts of the Zu-Zu foremost of all in 
 the rush through the spinneys ; while Cecil on the King, and 
 the Seraph on a magnificent white weight-carrier, as thorough- 
 bred and colossal as himself, led the way with them. The 
 Bcent was hot as death in the spinneys, and the pack raced till 
 nothing but a good one could live with them ; fsw but good 
 ones, however, were to be found with the Quorn, and the 
 field held together superbly over the first fence, and on across 
 the grassland, the game old fox giving no sign of going to 
 
7« UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 covert, but running straight as a crow flies, while the pace 
 grew terrific, 
 
 * Beats cock-fighting ! ' cried the Zu-Zu, while her blue 
 skirts fluttered in the wind, as she lifted Cecil's brown mare, 
 very cleverly, over a bilberry hedge, and set her little white 
 teeth with a will on the Seraph's otto-of-rose cigarette. Lady 
 Guenevere heard the words as Vivandiere rose in the air with 
 the light bound of a roe, and a slight superb dash of scorn 
 came into her haughty eyes for the moment ; she never seemed 
 to know that ' that person ' in the azure habit even existed, 
 but the contempt awoke in her, and shone in her glance, 
 while she rode on as that fair leader of the Belvoir and Pytch- 
 ley alone could ride over the fallows. 
 
 The steam was on at full pressure, the hounds held close to 
 his brush, heads up, sterns down, running still straight as an 
 arrow over the open, past coppice and covert, through gorse 
 and spinney, without a sign of the fox making for shelter. 
 Fence and double, hedge and brook, soon scattered the field ; 
 straying off far and wide, and coming to grief with lots of 
 * downers,' it grew select, and few but the crack men could 
 keep the hounds in view. ' Catch 'em who can ' was the 
 one mot d'ordre, for they were literally racing, the line- 
 hunters never losing the scent a second, as the fox, taking to 
 dodging, made all the trouble he could for them through the 
 rides of the woods. Their working was magnificent, and, 
 heading him, they ran him round and round in a ring, viewed 
 him for a second, and drove him out of covert once more into 
 the pastures, while they laid on at a hotter scent and flew 
 after him like staghounds. 
 
 Only half a dozen were up with them now ; the pace was 
 tremendous, though all over grass ; here a flight of posts and 
 rails tried the muscle of the boldest ; there a bullfinch yawned 
 behind the blackthorn ; here a big fence towered ; there a 
 brook rushed angrily among its rushes ; while the keen 
 easterly wind blow over the meadows, and the pack streamed 
 along like the white trail of a plume. Cecil * showed the 
 v/ay * with the self-same stride and the self-same fencing as 
 liad won him the Vase. Lady Guenevere and the Seraph 
 were running almost even with him ; three of the Household 
 farther down ; the Zu-Zu and some Melton men two meadows 
 off; the rest of the field, nowhere. Fifty-two minutes had 
 gone by in that splendid running, without a single check, 
 
THE END OF A RINGING RUN 7j 
 
 while the fox raced as gamely and as fast as at the find ; the 
 speed was like lightning past the brown woods, the dark- 
 green pine plantations, the hedges, bright with scarlet berries ; 
 through the green low-lying grasslands, and the winding 
 drives of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued beech-trunks, 
 whose roots the violets were just purging with their blossom ; 
 while far away stretched the blue haze of the distance, and 
 above-head a flight of rooks cawed merrily in the bright air, 
 soon left far off as the pack swept onward in the most brilliant 
 thing of the hunting year. 
 
 * Water ! take care ! * cried Cecil, with a warning wave of 
 his hand as the hounds with a splash like a torrent dashed up 
 to their necks in a broad brawling brook that Reynard had 
 swam in first style, and struggled as best they could after 
 him. It was an awkward bit, with bad taking off and a vil- 
 lainous mud-bank for landing ; and the water, thickened and 
 swollen with recent rains, had made all the land that sloped 
 to it miry 8,nd soft as sponge. It was the risk of life and limb 
 to try it ; but all who still viewed the hounds, catching Bertie's 
 shout of warning, worked their horses up for it, and charged 
 towards it as hotly as troops charge a square. Forest King 
 was over like a bird ; the winner of the Grand Military was 
 not to be daunted by all the puny streams of the Shires ; 
 the artistic riding of the Countess landed Vivandik'e, with a 
 beautiful clear spring, after him by a couple of lengths ; the 
 Seraph's handsome white hunter, brought up at a headlong 
 gallop with characteristic careless dash and fine science 
 mingled, cleared it ; but, falling with a mighty crash, gave 
 him a purler on the opposite side, and was within an ace of 
 striking him dead with his hoof in frantic struggles to recover. 
 The Seraph, however, was on his legs with a rapidity mar- 
 vellous in a six-foot-three son of Anak, picked up the horse, 
 threw himself into saddle, and dashed off again quick as 
 lightning, with his scarlet stained all over, and his long fair 
 moustaches floating in the wind. The Zu-Zu turned Mother 
 o' Pea^rl back with a fiery French oath ; she hated to be ' cut 
 down,* but she liked still less to risk her neck ; and two of 
 the Household were already treated to * crackers ' that dis- 
 abled them for the day, while one Melton man was pitched 
 head-foremost into the brook, and another was sitting dolor- 
 ously on the bank vvith his horse's head in his lap, and the 
 poor brute's spine broken. There were only three of the first 
 
74 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 riders in England now alone with the hounds, who, with a 
 cold scent as the fox led them through the angular corner of a 
 thick pheasant covert, stuck like wax to the line, and working 
 him out, viewed him once more, for one wild, breathless, tan- 
 talising second, and, on a scent breast-high, raced him with 
 the rush of an express through the straggling street of a little 
 hamlet, and got him out again on the level pastures and across 
 a fine line of hunting country, with the leafless woods and the 
 low gates of a park far away to the westward. 
 
 ' A guinea to a shilling that we kill him,' cried the flute- 
 voice of her brilliant ladyship, as she ran a moment side by 
 side with Forest King, and flashed her rich eyes on his rider ; 
 she had scorned the Zu-Zu, but on occasion she would use 
 betting slang and racing slang with the daintiest grace in the 
 world herself without their polluting her lips. As though the 
 old fox heard the wager, he swept in a bend round towards 
 the woods on the right, making, with all the craft and the 
 speed there were in him, for the deep shelter of the boxwood 
 and laurel. * After him, my beauties, my beauties — if he 
 run there he'll go to ground and save his brush 1 ' thundered 
 the Seraph as though he were hunting his own hounds at 
 Lyonnesse, who knew every tone of his rich clarion notes as 
 well as they knew every wind of his horn. But the young 
 ones of the pack saw Re^-nard's move and his meaning as 
 quickly as he did ; having run fast before, they flew now : the 
 pace was terrific. Two fences were crossed as though they 
 were paper ; the meadows raced with lightning speed, a ha-ba 
 leaped, a gate cleared with a crashing jump, and in all the 
 furious excitement of *view' they tore down the mile-long 
 length of an avenue, dashed into a flower-garden, and, smash- 
 ing through a gay trellis-work of scarlet creeper, plunged into 
 the home-paddock and killed with as loud a shout ringing 
 over the country in the bright sunny day as ever was echoed 
 by the ringing cheers of the Shire ; Cecil, the Seraph, and 
 her victorious ladyship alone coming in for the glories of the 
 'finish.' 
 
 ' Never had a faster seventy minutes up-wind,' said Lady 
 Guenevere, looking at the tiny jewelled watch, the size of a 
 sixpence, that was set in the handle of her whip, as the brush, 
 with all the compHments customary, was handed to her. She 
 had won twenty before. 
 
 The park, so unceremoniously entered, belonged to a baronei^ 
 
THE END OF A RINGING RUN 75 
 
 who, though he hunted little hhnself, honoured the sport and 
 scorned a vulpecide ; he came out naturally and begged them 
 to lunch. Lady Guenevere refused to dismount, but con- 
 sented to take a biscuit and a little Lafitte, while clarets, 
 liqueurs, and ales, with anything else they wanted, w^ere 
 brought to her companions. The stragglers strayed in ; the 
 M.F.H. came up just too late. The men getting down, 
 gathered about the Countess or lounged on the grey stone steps 
 of the Elizabethan house. The sun shone brightly on the 
 oriel casements, the antique gables, the twisted chimneys, all 
 covered with crimson parasites and trailing ivy ; the horses, 
 the scarlet, the pack in the paddock adjacent, the shrubberies 
 of laurel and araucaria, the sun-tinted terraces, made a 
 bright and picturesque grouping. Bertie, with his hand on 
 Vivandiere's pommel, after taking a deep draught of spark- 
 ling Rhenish, looked on at it all with a pleasant sigh of amuse- 
 ment. 
 
 'By Jove,' he murmured softly, with a contented smile 
 about his lips, * that was a ringing run I ' 
 
 At that very moment, as the words were spoken, a groom 
 approached him hastily. His young brother, whom he had 
 scarcely seen since the find, had been thrown and taken home 
 on a hurdle ; the injuries were rumoured to be serious. M 
 
 Bertie's smile faded ; he looked very grave : world- spoiled* 
 as he was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he hady 
 long been by profession, he loved the lad. 
 
 When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloro- 
 form odour, the boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered 
 on the pillow, his chest bare, and his right arm broken and 
 splintered. The deathlike coma was but the result of the 
 chloroform ; but Cecil never stayed to ask or remember that ; 
 he was by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down by 
 it, his head bent on his arms. 
 
 ' It is my fault, I should have looked to him.' 
 
 Tlie words were very low ; he hated that any should see he 
 could still be such a fool as to feel. A minute, and he con- 
 quered himself; he rose, and with his hand on the boy's fair 
 tumbled curls, turned calmly to the medical men who, attached 
 to the household, had been on the spot at once. 
 
 * What is the matter ? ' 
 
 ' Fractured arm, contusion, nothing serious, nothing at all, 
 
76 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 at his age,' replied the surgeon ; when he wakes out of the 
 lethargy he will tell you so himself, Mr. Cecil.' 
 
 * You are certain ? ' — do what he would his voice shook a 
 little ; his hand had not shaken, two days before, when nothing 
 less than ruin or ransom had hung on his losing or v;inning 
 the race. 
 
 * Perfectly certain,' answered the surgeon cheerfully. * He 
 is not over-strong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight ; 
 he will be out of that bed in a fortnight.' 
 
 ' How did he fall ? ' 
 
 But while they told him he scarcely heard ; he was looking 
 at the handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay 
 stretched helpless and stricken before him ; and he was re- 
 membering the deathbed of their mother, when the only 
 voice he had ever reverenced had whispered, as she pointed 
 to the little child of three summers : * When you are a man, 
 take care of him, Bertie.' How had he fulfilled the injunc- 
 tion ? Into how much brilliantly tinted evil had he not led 
 him — by example at least ? 
 
 The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a length- 
 ened silence : 
 
 ' Your brother will be best unexcited when he comes to 
 himself, sir ; look — his eyes are unclosing now. Could you 
 do me the favour to go to his lordship ? His grief made him 
 perfectly wild — so dangerous to his life at his age. We could 
 only persuade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the plea 
 of Mr. Berkeley's safety. If you could see him ' 
 
 Cecil went, mechanically almost, and with a grave, weary 
 depression on him ; he was so unaccustomed to think at all, 
 BO utterly unaccustomed to think pamfully, that he scarcely 
 knew what ailed him. Had he had his old tact about him, 
 he would have known how worse than useless it would be for 
 him to seek his father in such a moment. 
 
 Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened 
 the door of his private apartments, heavily darkened and 
 heavily perfumed; at the turn of the lock he started up 
 eagerly. 
 
 ' What news of him ? ' 
 
 'Good news, I hope,' said Cecil gently, as he came for- 
 ward. * The injuries are not grave, they tell me. I am so 
 Borry that I never watched his fencing, but * 
 
 The old man had not recognised him till he heard his vcice, 
 
THE END OF A RINGING RUN 77 
 
 and he waved him off with a fierce contemptuous gesture; 
 the grief for his favourite's danger. The wild terrors that his 
 fears had conjured up, his almost frantic agony at the sight of 
 the accident, had lashed him into passion wellnigh delirious, 
 
 ' Out of my sight, sir,* he said fiercely, his mellow tonejj 
 quivering with rage. * I wish to God you had been dead in 
 a ditch before a hair of my boy's had been touched. You 
 live, and he hes dying there ! * 
 
 Cecil bowed in silence ; the brutahty of the words wounded, 
 but they did not offend him, for he knew his father was in 
 that moment scarce better than a maniac, and he was touched 
 with the haggard misery upon the old Peer's face. 
 
 * Out of my sight, sir,' re-echoed Lord Royallieu as he 
 strode forward, passion lending vigour to his emaciated frame, 
 while the dignity of his grand carriage blent with the furious 
 force of his infuriated blindness. ' If you had had the heart 
 of a man you would have saved such a child as that from his 
 peril ; warned him, watched him, succoured him at least when 
 he fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, 
 if death comes to him ! You are safe — you are always safe. 
 You try to kill yourself with every vice jnder heaven, and 
 only get more strength, more grace, more pleasure from it — 
 you are always safe because I hate you. Yes 1 I hate you, 
 sir ! ' 
 
 No words can give the force, the malignity, the concen- 
 trated meaning with which the words were hurled out, as the 
 majestic form of the old Lord towered in the shadow, with 
 his hands outstretched as if in imprecation. 
 
 Cecil heard him in silence, doubting if he could hear aright, 
 while the bitter phrases scathed and cut like scourges ; but he 
 bowed once more with the manner that was as inseparable 
 from him as his nature. 
 
 * Hate is so very exhausting ; I regret I give you the 
 trouble of it. May I ask why you favour me v/ith it ? ' 
 
 * You may ! ' thundered his father, while his hawk's eyes 
 flashed their glittering fire. * You are like the man I cursed 
 living and curse dead. You look at me with Alan Bertie's i 
 eyes, you speak to me with Alan Bertie's voice ; I loved your 
 mother, I worshipped her ; but — you are his son, not mine ! ' 
 
 The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The 
 blood flushed Bertie's face a deep and burning scarlet ; ha \ 
 started with an irrepressible tremor, like a man struck with j 
 
78 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 / 
 
 ^ a shot, he felt like one suddenly stabbed in the dark by a 
 sure and a cruel hand. The insult and the amazement of the 
 words seemed to paralyse him for the moment ; the next he 
 recovered himself, and lifted his head with a^ haughty a 
 gesture as his father's ; his features were perfectly composed 
 
 i again, and sterner than in all his careless, easy life they ever 
 
 1 yet had looked. 
 
 \ * You lie, and you know that you lie. My mother was 
 
 \ pure as the angels. Henceforth you can be only to me a 
 
 ' slanderer who has dared to taint the one name holy in my 
 
 I sight.' 
 
 "* And without another word he turned and went out of the 
 chamber. Yet, as the door closed, old habit was so strong on 
 him that, even in his hot and bitter pain, and his bewildered 
 sense of sudden outrage, he almost smiled at himself. * It 
 is a mania ; he does not know what he says,' he thought. 
 ^ ' How could /be so melodramatic ? We were like two men 
 at the Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such a bad 
 form 1 ' 
 
 But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, 
 and, gentle though his nature was, beyond all forgiveiiess 
 from him was the dishonour of his mother's memory. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 
 
 It was the height of the season, and the duties of the 
 Household were proportionately and insupportably heavy. 
 The Brigades were fairly worked to death, and the Indian 
 service, in the heat of the Aflghan war, was never more 
 onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from 
 Derby to Ducal. 
 
 Escorts to Levees, guards of honour to Drawing-rooms, or 
 field-days in the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least 
 portion of it. Far more severe, and still less to bo shirked, 
 were the morning exercise in the Ride ; the daily parade in 
 the Lady's Mile; the reconnaissances from club windows, 
 
APTER A RICHMOND DINNER 79 
 
 the videttes at Flirtation Corner ; the long campaigns at mess- 
 breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and 
 the fortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of 
 Chartreuse and Chambertin ; the breathless steady charges 
 of Belgravian staircases when a fashionable drum beat the 
 rataplan ; the skirmishes with sharpshooters of the bright - 
 armed Irregular Lancers ; the foraging-duty when fair com- 
 manders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties ; the 
 ball practice at Hornsey Handicaps ; the terrible risk of cross- 
 ing into the enemy's lines, and being made to surrender as 
 prisoners of war at the gaols of St. George's, or of St. Paul's, 
 Knightsbridge ; the constant inspections of the Flying Bat- 
 talions of the Ballet, and the pickets afterwards in the Wood 
 of St. John ; the anxieties of the Club commissariats, and the 
 close vigilance over the mess wines ; the fatigue duty of ball- 
 rooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the 
 clause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice ; 
 all these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and 
 the unremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First 
 Life and the rest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and 
 incessantly that some almost thought of changing into the 
 dreary depot of St. Stephen's ; and one mutinous Goldstreamer 
 was even rash enough and false enough to his colours to medi- 
 tate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself up at 
 St. George's — * because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you 
 know ! ' 
 
 The Household were very hard pressed through the season 
 — a crowded and brilliant one ; and Cecil was in request 
 most of all. Bertie, somehow or other, was the fashion — Y,y^* 
 marvellous and. iiidefi^nable w6rd,~that gives a more powerful 1^ 
 crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever ,,,-, 
 bestov/.. And no list was * the thing ' without his name, ^ 
 no reception, no garden party, no opera-box, or private con- 
 cert, or rose-shadowed boudoir, fashionably affiche without 
 being visited by him. How he, in especial, had got his 
 reputation it would have been hard to say, unless it were 
 that he dressed a shade more perfectly than anyone else, and 
 with such inimitable carelessness in the perfection, too, and 
 had an almost unattainable matchlessness in the sa7ig froid 
 of his soft, languid insolence, and incredible though ever 
 gentle effrontery. However gained, he had it ; and his 
 beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton with two blood 
 
8o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 greys dancing in impatience over the stones, or his little 
 dark-green brougham for night-work, were, one or another of 
 tbem, always seen from two in tlie day till four or five in 
 the dawn about the park or the town. 
 
 And yet this season, while he made a Prima Donna by a 
 * Bravissima ! ' introduced a new tie by an evening's wear, gave 
 a cook the cordon with his praise, and rendered a fresh 
 invented liqueur the rage by his recommendation, Bertie 
 knew very well that he was ruined. 
 
 The breach between his father and himself was irrevocable. 
 He had left Royallieu as soon as his guests had quitted it, 
 and young Berkeley was out of all danger. He had long 
 known he could look for no help from the old lord, or from 
 his elder brother, the heir : and now every chance of it was 
 hopelessly closed ; nothing but the whim or the will of those 
 who held his floating paper, and the tradesmen who had his 
 name on their books at compound interest of the heaviest, 
 stood between him and the fatal hour when he must ' send 
 in his papers to sell,' and be ' nowhere ' in the great race 
 of life. 
 fS^ He knew that a season, a month, a day, might be the 
 y only"respite left him, the only pause for him betwixt his 
 * V glittering luxurious world and the fiat of outlawry and exile. 
 \*i He knew that the Jews might be down on him any night 
 1. ^ that he sat at the Guards' mess, flirted with foreign princesses, 
 ^rJ' or laughed at the gossamer gossip of the town over iced 
 1^ drinks in the clubs. His liabilities were tremendous, his 
 resources totally exhausted ; but such was the latent reckless- 
 ness of the careless Royallieu blood, and such the languid 
 devil-may-care of his training and his temper, that the know- 
 ledge scarcely ever seriously disturbed his enjoyment of the 
 moment. Somehow, he never realised it. 
 
 If any weatherwise had told the Lisbon people of the 
 coming of the great earthquake, do you think they could 
 have brought themselves to realise that midnight darkness, 
 that yawning desolation which were nigh, while the sun was 
 still so bright and the sea so tranquil, and the bloom so 
 sweet on purple pomegranate and amber grape, and the 
 scarlet of odorous flowers, and the blush of a girl's kiss- 
 warmed cheek ? 
 
 A sentimental metaphor with which to compare the diffi- 
 culties of a dandy of the Household, because his * stiff ' was 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 8i 
 
 floating about in too many directions at too many high 
 figures, and he had hardly enough till next pay-day camo 
 round to purchase the bouquets he sent and meet the club- 
 fees that were due ! But, after all, may it not well ba 
 doubted if a sharp shock and a second's blindness, and a 
 sudden sweep down under the walls of the Cathedral on the 
 waters of the Tagus, were not, on the whole, a quicker and 
 pleasanter mode of extinction than that social earthquake — 
 
 * gone to the bad with a crash ' ? And the Lisbonites did 
 not more disbelieve in, and dream less of their coming ruin, 
 than Cecil did his, while he was doing the season, with 
 engagements enough in a night to spread over a month, the 
 best horses in the town, a dozen rose-notes sent to his clubs 
 or his lodgings in a day, and the newest thing in soups, colts, 
 beauties, neckties, perfumes, tobaccos, or square dances, 
 waiting his dictum to become the fashion. 
 
 ' How you do go on with those women. Beauty,' growled 
 the Seraph, one day after a morning of fearful hard work 
 consequent on having played the Foot Guards at Lord's, and, 
 in an unwary mom^ent, having allowed himself to be decoyed 
 afterwards to a private concert, and very nearly proposed to in 
 consequence, during a Symphony in A ; an impending terror 
 from which he could hardly restore himself by puffing Turkish 
 like a steam-engine, to assure himself of his jeopardised safety. 
 
 * You're horribly imprudent ! ' 
 
 * Not a bit of it,' rejoined Beauty, serenely. ' That is the 
 superior wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to 
 your neighbour's wife ; she can't marry you ! ' 
 
 ' But she may get you into the D. C.,' mused the Seraph, 
 who had gloomy personal recollection of having been twice 
 through that phase of law and life, and of having been 
 enormously mulcted in damages because he was a Duke in 
 ftduro, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion, 
 
 * You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they 
 ran away with me each time ! ' 
 
 • Oh ! everybody goes through the D. 0. somehow 6r other, 
 answered Cecil, with philosophy. * It's like the Church, the 
 Commons, and the Gallows, you know — one of the popular 
 Institutions.' 
 
 ' And it's the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better 
 figure than the robbed,* laughed the Seraph, consoling himself 
 that he had escaped the future chance of showing in the 
 
8s UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 latter class of marital defrauded, by shying that proposal 
 during the Symphony in A, on which his thoughts ran, aa 
 the thoughts of one who has just escaped from an Alpine 
 crevasse, run on the past abyss in which he has been so 
 nearly lost for ever. * I say, Beauty, were you ever near 
 doing anything serious — asking anybody to marry you, eh ? 
 1 suppose you have been — they do make such av/ful hard 
 running on one I ' and the poor hunted Seraph stretched his 
 magnificent limbs with the sigh of a martyred innocent. 
 
 * I was once — only once I ' 
 
 * Ah, by Jove ! and what saved you ? ' 
 
 The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying 
 sympathising curiosity towards a fellow-sufferer. 
 
 ' Well, I'll tell you,* said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man 
 who hated long sentences, and who was about to plunge into 
 a painful past. * It's ages ago ; day I was at a Drawing- 
 room ; year Blue Ruin won the Clearwell for Royal, I think. 
 Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw such a face — 
 the deuce, it almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She 
 was just out — an angel with a train I She had delicious 
 eyes — like a spaniel's, you know — a cheek like this peach, 
 and lips like that strawberry, there, on the top of your ice. 
 She looked at me, and I was in love 1 I knew who she was 
 — Irish lord's daughter — girl I could have had for the asking ; 
 and I vow that I thought I luould ask her — I actually was as 
 far gone ns that — I actually said to myself, I'd hang about her 
 a week or two, and then propose. You'll hardly believe it, 
 but I did ! Watched her presented ; such grace, such a smile, 
 such a divine lift of the lashes. I was really in love, and 
 with a girl who would marry me I I was never so near a 
 fatal thing in my life ' 
 
 * Well ? ' asked the Seraph, pausing to listen till he let the 
 ice in his sherry-cobbler melt away : when you have been so 
 near breaking your neck down the Matrimonial Matterhorn, 
 it is painfully interesting to hear how your friend escaped the 
 same risks of descent. 
 
 ' Well,' resumed Bertie, * I was very near it. I did nothing 
 but watch her ; she saw me, and I felt she was as flattered 
 and as touched as she ought to be. She blushed most 
 enchantingly ; just enough, you know; she was conscious I 
 followed her ; I contrived to get close to her as she passed 
 out, so close that I could see those excjuisite eyes lighten 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 83 
 
 and gleam, those exquisite lips part with a sigh ; that beau- 
 tiful face beam with the sunshine of a radiant smile. It 
 was the dawn of love I had taught her ! I pressed nearer 
 and nearer, and I caught her soft whisper aa she leaned to 
 her mother : ' Mamma, Tm so hungry ! I could eat a whole 
 chicken ! ' The sigh, the smile, the blush, the light, were 
 for her dinner — not for me ! The spell was broken for ever. 
 A girl whom I had looked at could think of wings and merry- 
 thoughts and white sauce I I have never been near a proposal 
 again.' 
 
 The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung 
 a hautboy at him. 
 
 * Hang you, Beauty ! If I didn't think you were going to 
 tell one how you really got out of a serious thing ; it is so 
 aw^fully difficult to keep clear of them nowadays. Those 
 before-dinner teas are only just so many new traps 1 What 
 became of her — eh ? * 
 
 * She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, 
 somewhere among the Hebrides. Serve her right,* murmured 
 Cecil, sententiously. * Only think what she lost just through 
 hungering for a chicken ; if I hadn't have proposed' for her — 
 for one hardly keeps the screw up to such self-sacrifice as that 
 when one is cool the next morning — I would have made her 
 the fashion ! ' 
 
 With which masterly description in one phrase of all he 
 could have done for the ill-starred debutante who had been 
 hungry in the wrong place, Cecil lounged out of the club to 
 drive with half a dozen of his set to a water-party — a Baccha- 
 nalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters for the 
 Naiads and the Household for their Tritons. 
 
 A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in 
 driving down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours 
 over the courses, contributing seven guineas apiece for the 
 repast, listening to the songs of the Cafe Alcazar, reproduced 
 with matchless elan by a pretty French actress, being pelted 
 with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their best cigars 
 thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving 
 back again to town in the soft starry night, with the gay 
 rhythms ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed 
 along in a stretching gallop down the Kew Road. It certainly 
 had no other more aquatic feature in it save a little drifting 
 about for twenty minutes before dining, in toy boats and 
 
 o2 
 
84 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the brunette 
 actress, sang a barcarolle that would have been worthy of 
 medieval 
 
 ^ Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and drop. 
 
 i 
 
 r> i It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's 
 
 / 
 
 fashion, 
 j Where be all those 
 
 1 Dear dead women, with such hair too, what's become of all the gold 
 I Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly and grown old ; 
 
 because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to 
 think at all ; in the second, if put to it he would have averred 
 that he knew nothing of "^.^nice, except that it was a musty 
 old bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and 
 iuggage and all that, chloride of lim'd you if you came from 
 the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were ever so ; 
 and in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, 
 he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who 
 were at that moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigar- 
 ettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, 
 
 • or pelting him with bonbons. 
 
 "** As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on 
 Cecil's box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere 
 in the dining-room. A cashmere is a "Parisian's soul, idol, 
 and fetish ; servants could not find it ; Cecil, who, to do him 
 this justice, was always as courteous to a comedienne as to a 
 countess, went himself. Passing the open windows of another 
 room, he recognised the face of his little brother among a set 
 of young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They 
 had no women with them ; but they had brought what was 
 perhaps worse — dice for hazard — and were turning the un- 
 conscious Star and Garter into an impromptu Crockford'a 
 
 .^.over their wine. 
 
 ,- Little Berke's pretty face was very flushed ; his lips were 
 
 f^' [ set tight, his eyes were glittering ; the boy had the gambler'a 
 
 ^ passion of the Royallicu blood in its~ho[rest intensity. He 
 
 vV was playing with a terriblo eagerness that went to Bertie's 
 
 heart with the same sort of pang of remorse with which he 
 
 had looked on him when he had been throvv^n like dead on hia 
 
 bed at home. 
 
 Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window. 
 
 ^ 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 85 
 
 * Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are 
 going home ; will you come ? ' he asked, with a careless nod 
 to the rest of the young fellows. 
 
 Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance. 
 
 * No, I can't,' he said, irritably ; * don't you see we are 
 playing, Bertie ? ' 
 
 * I see,' answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of 
 Badness in him, as he leaned farther over the window-sill with 
 his cigar in his teeth. 
 
 * Come away,' he whispered kindly, as he almost touched 
 the boy, who chanced to be close to the casement. * Hazard 
 is the very deuce for anybody ; and you know Royal hates it. 
 Come with us, Berke : there's a capital set here, and I'm 
 going to half a dozen good houses to-night, when we get 
 back. I'll take you with me. Come ! you like waltzing, 
 and all that sort of thing, you know.' 
 
 The lad shook himself peevishly ; a sullen cloud over his 
 fair, picturesque, boyish face. 
 
 * Let me alone before the fellows,' he muttered impatiently. 
 * I won't come, I tell you.' 
 
 ' Soit ! ' 
 
 Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the 
 Lelas' cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without 
 any more expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could 
 never be annoyed, but also he never troubled himself to 
 utter useless words. Moreover, he had never been in his Ufa 
 much in earnest about anything ; it was not worth while. 
 
 ' A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sing 
 enough on my own. shoulders for twenty,' he thought, as he 
 shook the ribbons and started the leaders off to the gay musio 
 of Laura Lelas' champagne-tuned laughter. 
 
 The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had. 
 looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly! 
 forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation when-! 
 ever he saw, in some grey summer dawn, as he had seen now,}^ lir 
 the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the prematura' 
 miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half- ; 
 querulous lamentations over his losses ; and he would essay, \ 
 with all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to ; 
 persuade him from his recklessness, and warn him of its con- \ 
 sequences. But little Berke, though he loved his elder after 
 a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and unstable as water. He 
 
86 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant, and would 
 
 promise anything under the sun ; but five minutes afterwards 
 
 he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably 
 
 resentful of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish 
 
 l^^emper can be. And Cecil — the last man in the world to 
 
 \turn Mentor — would light a cheroot, as he did to-night, and 
 
 forget all about it. The boy would be right enough when 
 
 he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy was 
 
 the essence of laissez /aire. 
 
 He wbiild have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer's 
 Field, to be long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the 
 right cru and lived in the right set. * If it be very severe,' 
 he would say, * it may give him a pang once a twelvemonth 
 — say the morning after a whitebait dinner. Repentance is 
 generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may generally 
 V be traced to too many truffles or olives.' 
 ,^^ /Cecil had no time or space for thought ; he never thought ; 
 ^' /would not have thought seriously for a kingdom. A novel, 
 1 idly skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature ; 
 ^/ \he never bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the 
 v| inews earlier than they told it ; and as he lived, he was too 
 ;i * constantly supplied from the world about him with amuse- 
 ment and variety to have to do anything beyond letting 
 himself be amused : quietly fanned, as it were, with the 
 lulling punkah of social pleasure, without even the trouble of 
 pulling the strings. He had naturally considerable talents, 
 and an almost dangerous facility in them ; but he might have 
 been as brainless as a mollusc for any exertion he gave his 
 -brain. 
 
 ' If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I'd use such 
 wits as I have : but why should I now ? ' he said on one 
 occasion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia. 
 'The best style is only just to say yes and no — and be 
 bored even in saying that — and a very comfortable stylo it 
 is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening 
 your lips.' 
 
 * But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then ? 
 you would not get amused,' suggested his interrogator, a 
 brilliant Parisienne. 
 
 ' Well — everybody is pretty nearly,' said Bertie ; ' but 
 there are always a lot of fellov/s who give their wits to get 
 their dinners — social rockets, you know — who will always 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 87 
 
 fire themselves off to sparkle instead of you if you give them 
 a white ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses. 
 It saves you so much trouble ; it is such a bore to have to 
 talk,' 
 
 He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good 
 houses, midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes, 
 making his bow in a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking 
 up the thread of the same flirtation at three different balls, 
 showing himself for a moment at a Premier's At-home, and 
 looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an 
 ambassadress's drawing-room, and winding up the series by 
 a dainty little supper in the grey of the morning, with a 
 sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles 
 of their own Clicquot. 
 
 When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Picca- 
 dilly, about five o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and 
 tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet con- 
 fidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service, which 
 would drag him off, in five hours' time, without the slightest 
 regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, 
 scorching work of a field-day at the Scrubs. 
 
 * Here — get me to perch as quick as you can. Pake,' he 
 murmured, dropping into an arm-chair : astonished that Rake 
 did not answer, he saw standing by him inste?.d the boy 
 Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of raw inexperience that 
 Cecil never felt ; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief, or the 
 presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never 
 have excited it in him. In the first place, he would have 
 merely lilted his eyebrows and said, * Be a fearful bore I ' in 
 the second he would have done the same, and murmured, 
 * Queer old cad ! * 
 
 Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy's untimely 
 apparition ; but his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, 
 while his lips dropped but one word : 
 
 * Amber-Amulet ? ' 
 
 Am.ber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvellous promise 
 at the Royallieu establishment, looked on to win the next 
 Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby as a certainty. An accident 
 to the young chestnut was the only thing that suggested 
 itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his brother 
 wait for him at five o'clock on a June morning. 
 
 Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently : 
 
88 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 • 'You are never thinking but of horses or women/ he 
 j said, peevishly; * there may be other thmgs in the world, 
 ' surely.' 
 
 * Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear 
 boy, but none so much to my taste,' said Cecil, composedly, 
 stretching himself with a yawn. ' With every regard to 
 hospitality, and the charms of your society, might I hint that 
 five o'clock in the morning is not precisely the most suitable 
 hour for social visits and ethical questions ? ' 
 
 ' For God's sake be serious, Bertie 1 I am the most 
 miserable wretch in creation.' 
 
 Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference 
 vanished from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate 
 concern on the serene insouciance of his face. 
 
 * Ah, you would stay and play that chicken-hazard,' he 
 thought, but he was not one who would have reminded the 
 boy of his own advice and its rejection ; he looked at him in 
 silence a moment, then raised himself with a sigh. 
 
 * Dear boy, why didn't you sleep upon it ? I never think 
 of disagreeable things till they wake me with my coffee ; 
 then I take them up with the cup and put them down with 
 it. You don't know how well it answers ; it disposes of 
 them wonderfully.' 
 
 The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, 
 and in the gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of 
 tears. 
 
 * How brutal you are, Bertie 1 I tell you I am ruined, 
 and you care no more than if you were a stone. You only 
 think of yourself ; you only live for yourself ! ' 
 
 He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him 
 off that very table the day before the Grand Military ; he had 
 forgotten the debts that had been paid for him out of the 
 winnings of that very race. There is a childish, wayward, 
 wailing temper, which never counts benefits received save as 
 iitle-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him 
 fwith just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be 
 rebuke, in his glance, but did not defend himself in any way 
 against the boyish -passionate accusation, nor recall his own 
 past gifts into remembrance. 
 
 ^ ♦ " Brutal I " What a word, little one ! Nobody's brutal 
 now ; you never see that form nowadays. Come, what is 
 the worst this time ? ' 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER S9 
 
 Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his 
 elbows leaned, scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, 
 the cigarettes, and the gold essence-bottles with which it was 
 strewn ; there was something dogged yet agitated, half- 
 insolent yet half -timidly irresolute, upon him, that was new 
 there. 
 
 • The worst is soon told,' he said, huskily, and his teeth 
 chattered together slightly as though with cold as he spoke ; 
 * I lost two hundred to-night ; I must pay it, or be disgraced 
 for ever ; I have not a farthing ; I cannot get the money for 
 my life ; no Jews will lend to me, I am under age ; and — 
 
 and ' his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he 
 
 knew that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both 
 his father and his brothers was the thing he had now to tell, 
 'and — I borrowed three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, 
 as he came from the Corner with a lot of bank-notes after 
 settling-day. I told him I would pay them to-morrow; I 
 made sure I should have won to-night.' ^\ 
 
 The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so ^ ., 
 madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and acts on, v-""*" 
 that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, 
 was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all ita 
 pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's confession. 
 
 Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated, 
 on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu 
 had dishonoured his mother's name. I^^his code there was , 
 one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable^egradation— ^7 
 it was to borrow of a friend. 
 
 * You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, 
 Berkeley,' he said, with a keener infliction of pain and con- 
 tempt than had ever been in his voice. 'Have you no 
 common knowledge of honour ? ' 
 
 The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a 
 flush of anger rather than of shame ; he did not lift his eyes, 
 but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris 
 romance he was irritably dog -earing. 
 
 'You are severe enough,' he said, gloomily, and yet 
 insolently. ' Are you such a mirror of honour yourself ? 
 I suppose my debts at the worst are about one-fifth of 
 yours.' 
 
 For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost 
 gave way. Be his debts what they would, there was not one 
 
90 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 among them to liis friends, or one for wliicli the law could 
 not seize him. He was silent ; he did not wish to have a 
 scene of dissension with one who was but a child to him ; 
 moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and 
 to avert even a dispute, at any cost. 
 
 He came back and sat down without any change of expres- 
 sion, putting his cheroot in his mouth. 
 
 * Tr^s cher, you are not courteous,' he said, wearily, ' but 
 it may be that you are right. I am not a good one for you 
 to copy from in anything, except the fit of my coats ; I don't 
 think I ever told you I was. I am not altogether so satisfied 
 with myself as to suggest myself as a model for anything, 
 unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond Street to 
 show the muffs how to dress. That isn't ^the point, though ; 
 you say you want near 3001. by to-morrow — to-day rather. 
 I can suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to tha 
 Shires, and ask Royal straight out ; he never refuses you.' 
 
 Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that 
 banished at a stroke his sullen defiance ; he was irresolute as 
 a girl, and keenly moved by fear. ~ " 
 
 'I would rather cut my throat,' he said, with a wild 
 exaggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepida- 
 tion on him ; * as I live I would ! I have had so much 
 .from him lately — jon don't know how much — and now of 
 j all times, v/hen they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on 
 
 i Eoyalheu ' 
 
 i * What ?— foreclose what ? ' 
 
 ; * The mortgage ! ' answered Berkeley, impatiently ; to hia 
 childish egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any 
 extremities should be considered save his own. ' You know 
 the lands are mortgaged as deeply as Monti and the entail 
 would allow them. They threatened to foreclose — I thiuk 
 that's the word— and Royal has had God knows what work 
 to stave them off ; I no more dare face him, and ask him for 
 a sovereign now, than I dare ask him to give me the gold 
 plate off the sideboard.' 
 
 Cecil listened gravely ; it cut him more keenly than he 
 showed to learn the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced 
 his house ; and to find how entirely his father's morbid mania 
 against him severed him from all the interests and all the con- 
 fidence of his family, and left him ignorant of matters even so 
 nearly touching him as these. 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 91 
 
 * Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one,* he said, 
 with a languid stretch of his limbs ; it was his nature to glide 
 olf painful subjects. 'And — I really am sleepy! You think 
 there is no hope Royal would help you ? ' 
 
 ' I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather 
 than ask him.* 
 
 Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging- 
 chair ; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every 
 portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to 
 sleep. He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had 
 his own career been different, less extravagant, less dissipated, 
 less indolently spendthrift, he might have exercised a better 
 influence, and his brother's young life might have been more 
 prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a 
 sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant 
 beggary in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise 
 even the sum that the boy now needed, a sum, so trifling in 
 his set and v>'ith his habits, that he had betted it over and 
 over again in a club-room on a single game of whist. It cut 
 him with a bitter impatient pain ; he was as generous as the 
 winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temper than the 
 poverty that paralyses its power to give. 
 
 * It is no use to give you false hopes, young one,' he said 
 gently. ' I can do nothing ! You ought to know me by 
 this time ; and if you do, you know, too, that if the money were 
 mine, it should be yours at a word ; if you don't, no matter I 
 Frankly, Berke, I am all down hill ; my bills may be called 
 in any moment ; when they are I must send in my papers to 
 sell, and cut the country, if my duns don't catch me before, 
 which they probably will, in which event I shall be, to all 
 intents and purposes — dead. This is not lively conversation, 
 but you will do me the justice to say that it was not I who 
 introduced it. Only — one word for all, my boy, understand 
 this : if I could help you I would, cost what it might, but as 
 matters stand — I cannot* 
 
 And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to en- 
 velope him : the subject wag painful, the denial wounded him 
 by whom it had to be given full as much as it could wound 
 him whom it refused. Berkeley heard it in silence, his head 
 still hung down, his colour changing, his hands nervously 
 j)laying with the boucjuet-bottles, shutting and opening their 
 gold tops. 
 
9i UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * No — yes — I know,' he said hurriedly ; ' I have no right 
 to expect it, and have been behaving like a cur, and — and — 
 
 idl that I know. But there is one way you could save 
 
 me, Bertie, if it isn't too much for a fellow to ask.' 
 
 * I can't say I see the way, little one,' said Cecil with a 
 Bigh. ♦ What is it ? ' 
 
 ' Why — look here. You see I'm not of age ; my signature 
 is of no use ; they won't take it ; else I could get money in 
 no time on what must come to me when Royal dies ; though 
 'tisn't enough to make the Jews " melt " at a risk. Now — 
 now — look here. I can't see that there could be any harm in 
 it. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he's as 
 rich as all the Jews put together. What could there be in it 
 if you just asked him to lend you a monkey for me ? Ke'd 
 do it in a minute, because he'd give his head away to you — 
 
 they all say so — and he'd never miss it. Now, Bertie w^ill 
 
 you ? ' ^ 
 
 In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the 
 appeal was panted out rather than spoken, and while his head 
 drooped and the hot colour burned in his face, he darted a 
 swift look at his brother, so full of dread and misery that it 
 pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from his chair and paced 
 the room, flinging his cheroot aside ; the look disarmed the 
 reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark. 
 
 * What you ask is impossible,' he said briefly. * If I did 
 Buch a thing as that, I should deserve to be hounded out of 
 the Guards to-morrow.' 
 
 The boy's face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, 
 as he still bent his arms on the table, his glance not meeting 
 bis brother's. 
 
 * You speak as if it would be a crime,' he muttered savagely, 
 with a plaintive moan of pain in the tone ; he thought himself 
 cruelly dealt with, and unjustly punished. 
 
 * It jKOJiMJpe. thetrickof a swiijillfir, and i^ would be the 
 Bhame of a gentleman,' said "Cecil as briefly stiU. * That ig 
 ansi^er enough^. 
 
 * Then you will not do it ? ' 
 
 * I have replied already.' 
 
 There was that in the tone, and in the look w^ith which he 
 paused before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen 
 in him before ; something that made the supple, childish, 
 petulant, cowardly nature of the boy shrink and be silenced ; 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 93 
 
 something for a single instant of the haughty and untamable 
 temper of The Eoyaliieu blood that awoke in the too feminine 
 softness and svreetness of Cecil's disposition. 
 
 ' You said that you would aid me at ^ny cost, and now 
 that I ask you so wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were 
 a scoundrel,* he moaned passionately. * The Seraph would 
 give you the money at a word. It is your pride — nothing 
 but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless 
 beggars 1 * 
 
 ' If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we 
 borrow of other men ? ' 
 
 * You are wonderfully scrupulous all of a sudden ! ' 
 
 Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke 
 ago in. He did not attempt to push the argument. His 
 character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, 
 and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of 
 misconstruction. 
 
 You are a brute to me ! ' went on the lad, with his 
 querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a 
 woman's. * You pretend you can refuse me nothing ; and 
 Ihe moment I ask you the smallest thing, you turn round on 
 me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. 
 You'll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your 
 pride to save me ; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I 
 should die in a debtors' prison ! Y^ou only brag about 
 *' honour " when you want to get out of helping a fellow, and if 
 I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your 
 shoulders, and sneer at my death in the club-room, v/ith a 
 jest picked out of your cursed French novels ! ' 
 
 ' Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,' murmured Bertie. 
 The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little ; 
 he was not given to making much of anything that Vy^as due 
 to himself, partly through carelessness, partly through gene- 
 
 ,- rosity ; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intan^ 
 
 i gible, indescribable, sensitive-nerve which men call Honour, an 
 absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to- , 
 
 1 night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him. 
 
 ^ There is no science that can supply this defect to the tem- 
 perament created without it ; it may be taught a counterfeit, 
 but it will never own a reality. 
 
 * Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you 
 Bay,' he began very gently a few moments after, as he leaned 
 
94 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 forward and looked straight in the boy's eyes ; * don't ba 
 down about this ; you w^ill pull through, never fear. Listen 
 to me ; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know 
 him better than you ; he will be savage for a second, but he 
 would sell every stick and stone on the land for your sake ; 
 he will see you safe through this. Only bear one thing in 
 mind — tell him all. No half-measures, no half-confidences ; 
 tell him the worst, and ask his help. You will not come 
 back without it.' 
 
 Berkeley Hstened, his eyes shunning bis brother's, the red 
 colour darker on his face. 
 
 ' Do as I say,' said Cecil, very gently still. ' Tell him, if 
 you like, that it is through following my follies that you have 
 come to grief ; he w411 be sure to pity you then.' 
 
 There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the 
 last words, but it passed at once, as he added : 
 
 * Do you hear me~will you go ? * 
 
 * If you want me— yes.' 
 
 * On your word, now ? * 
 ' Ou my word.' 
 There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eager- 
 
 ne>^s in the way he assented, that might have made the con- 
 sent rather a means to evade the pressure than a genuine 
 pledge to follow the advice ; that darker, more _eyil, more 
 defiant look was still upon his face, sweeping its youth aw^ay 
 and leaving in its stead a wavering shadow. lie rose with a 
 sudden movement; his tumbled hair, his disordered attire, 
 his bloodshot eyes, his haggard look of sleeplessness and ex- 
 citement in strange contrast with the easy perfection of Cecira 
 dress and the calm languor of his attitude. The boy was 
 very young, and was not seasoned to his life and acclimatised 
 to his ruin hke his elder brother. He looked at him with a 
 certain petulant envy — the envy of every young fellow for a 
 man of the world, ' I beg your pardon for keeping you up, 
 Bertie,' he said huskily. * Good night.' 
 / Cecil gave a little yawn. 
 
 / * Dear boy, it woiild have been better if you could have 
 I come in with the coffee. Never be impulsive ; don't do a bit 
 of good, and is such a bad form ! ' 
 
 He spoke lightly, serenely, both because such w\as as much 
 his nature as it was to breathe, and because his heart wag 
 heavy that he had to send away the young one without help, 
 
 s. 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 95 
 
 though he knew that the course he had made him adopt 
 would serve him more permanently in the end. But he leant 
 his hand a second on Berke's shoulder, while for one single 
 moment in his life he grew serious. 
 
 ' You must know I could not do what you asked ; I could 
 not meet any man in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself 
 and sunk them so low. Can't you see that, httle one *> ' 
 
 There was a wishfulness in the last words ; he would gladly 
 have believed that his brother had at length some perception 
 of his meaning. 
 
 * You say so, and that is enough,' said the boy, pettishly ; 
 * I cannot understand that I asked anything so dreadful ; 
 but I suppose you have too many needs of your own to have 
 any resources left for mine.' 
 
 Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. 
 But he could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, 
 less even for his brother's ingratitude than at his callousness 
 to all those finer, better instincts of which honour is the con- 
 crete nam-e. For the moment, thought, grave, weary, and 
 darkened, fell on him ; he had passed through what he would 
 have suffered any amount of misconstruction to escape — a 
 disagreeable scone ; he had been as unable as though he were 
 a commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succour 
 the necessities for which his help had been asked ; and he, 
 was forced, despite all his will, to look for the first time 
 blankly in the face the ruin that awaited him. There was ' 
 no other name for it : it would be ruin complete and wholly ' 
 inevitable. His signature would have been accepted no more , 
 by any bill-discounter in London ; he had forestalled all, to ; 
 the uttermost farthing ; his debts pressed heavier every day ; 
 he could have no power to avert the crash that must in a few 
 weeks, or at most a few months, fall upon him. And to him 
 an utter blankness and darkness lay beyond. 
 
 Barred out from the only Ufe he knew, the only life that 
 seemed to him endurable or worth the living ; severed from 
 all the pleasures, pursuits, habits, and luxuries of long custom ; 
 deprived of all that had become to him as second nature from 
 childhood ; sold up, penniless, driven out from all that he 
 had known as the very necessities of existence, his very name 
 forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling, a 
 man without a career, without a hope, without a refuge — he 
 could not realise that this was what awaited him then ; this 
 
 %^ 
 
96 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ;was the fate that must withm so short a space be his. Life 
 ihad gone so smoothly with him, and his Tvorld was a world 
 from whose surface every distasteful thought was so habitually 
 excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation 
 lying in wait for him, than one in the fulness and elasticity 
 of health can beheve the doom that tells him he will be a 
 '.dead man before the sun has set. 
 
 As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches 
 glancing on the gold and silver hilts of the cross-swords 
 above the fireplace, and the smoke of his cheroot curling 
 among the pile of invitation cards to all the best houses 
 in the town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe that 
 things were really come to this pass with him ; it is so hard 
 for a man who has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs 
 open to him day and night to beat into his brain the truth that 
 in six months hence he may be lying in the debtors* prison at 
 Baden ; it is so difficult for a man who has had no greater 
 care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of a Guards' Ball 
 or of a yacht's summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceive 
 the fact that in a year's time he will thank God if he have a 
 few francs left to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable 
 estaminct in a foreign bathing-place. 
 
 ' It mayn't come to that,' he thought ; ' something may 
 happen. If I could get my troop now, that would stave off 
 the Jews, or if I should win some heavy pots on the Prix de 
 Dames, things would swim on again. I viust v/in ; the King 
 will be as nt as in the Shires, and there will only bo the 
 French horses between us and an absolute * walk over.' 
 Things mayn't come to the worst after all.' 
 
 And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or un- 
 happily, was his temperament, that ho read himself to sleep 
 with Terrail's ' Club des Valets de Coeur,' and slept in ten 
 minutes* time as composedly as though he had inherited fifty 
 thousand a year. 
 
 That evening in the loose-box down at Eoyallieu Forest 
 King stood without any body-clothing, for the night was close 
 and sultry ; a lock of the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, 
 and his favourite wheaten-gruel standing uncared for under his 
 very nose : the King was in the height of excitation, alarm, 
 and haughty wrath. His ears v;cro laid fiat to his head, his 
 nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with 
 
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER 97 
 
 a nervous angry fire rarely in him, and ever and anon he 
 lashed out his heels with a tremendous thundering thud 
 against the opposite wall with a force that reverberated 
 through the stables, and made his companions start and edge 
 away. It was precisely these companions that the aristo- 
 cratic hero of the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred. 
 
 They had just been looking him over — to their own immi- 
 nent peril ; and the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant 
 six-year old of Paris, and Shire and Spa steeplechase fame, 
 the knightly descendant of the White Cockade blood, and of 
 the coursers of Circassia, had resented the familiarity propor- 
 tionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was a 
 very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and 
 ductile to a touch from those he loved ; but he liked very 
 few, and would suffer liberties from none. And of a truth 
 his prejudices were very just ; and if his clever heels had 
 caughf^^as it was not his fault that they did not — the heads 
 of his two companions, instead of coming with that ponderous 
 crash into the panels of his box, society would ce.^tainly have ' 
 been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than. 
 had ever before hung in the careless balance of his life. 
 
 But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught 
 the oak of his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry 
 oppressive night went on as the speakers moved to a prudent 
 distance, one of them thoughtfully chewing a bit of straw, 
 after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever seem as if 
 they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in 
 their mouths. 
 
 * It's a'most a pity — he's in such perfect condition. Tiptop. 
 Cool as a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener ; licks hia 
 oats up to the last grain ; leads the whole string such a 
 rattling spin as never was spun but by a Derby cracker before 
 him. It's a'most a pity,' said Willon meditatively, eyeing 
 his charge, the King, with remorseful glances. 
 
 * Prut — tush — tish ! ' said his companion, with a whistle 
 in his teeth that ended with a * damnation ! * * It'll only 
 knock him over for the race ; he'll be right as a trivet after 
 
 it. What's your little game, coming it soft like that all of a . .^ 
 Budden ? Xqu hate that_ere joung swell hke pison.' ^ J^ 
 
 'Ay,' assented the hea(f groom ~Wtth~~ar~ tigerish * energy, \jr ^ 
 viciously consuming his bit of straw. * What for am I — >p' 
 bead groom come nigh twenty yer.is ; and to Markisses and 
 
 B 
 
9$ UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Wiscounts afore liim— put aside in that ere away for a fellow 
 as he's took into his service out of the dregs of a regiment, 
 what was tied up at the triangles and branded D, as I know 
 on, and sore suspected of even worse games than that, and 
 now is that set up with pride and sich-like, that nobody's 
 woice ain't heard here except his ; I say, what am I called on 
 to bear it for ? ' and the head groom's tones grew hoarse and 
 vehement, roaring louder under his injuries. ' A man what'3 
 attended on Duke's 'osses ever since he was a shaver, to be 
 put aside for that workhus blackguard ! A 'oss has a cold — 
 it's Rake's mash what's to be given. A 'oss is off his feed — 
 it's Rake what's to weigh out the niter and steel. A 'oss 
 is a buck-jumper — it's Rake what's to cure him. A 'oss is 
 entered for a race — it's Rake what's to order his moruin* 
 gallops, and his go- downs o' water. It's past bearin' to have 
 f a rascally chap what's been and gone and turned walet set 
 j up over one's head in one's own establishment, and let to ride 
 ' the high 'oss over one roughshod like that ! ' 
 ,. And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely 
 thus heaped on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made 
 an end of it, with a vindictive * Will yer be quiet there : blow 
 yer,' to the King, who was protesting with his heels against 
 the conversation. 
 
 * Come, then, no gammon,' growled his companion — the 
 'cousin out o* Yorkshire ' of the keeper's tree. 
 
 * What's yer figure you say ? ' relented W^illon medita- 
 tively. 
 
 * Two thousand to nothin' — come ! — can't no handsomer,* 
 retorted the Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man con- 
 scious of behaving very nobly. 
 
 * For the race in Germany ? ' pursued Mr. Willon, still 
 meditatively. 
 
 * Two thousand to nothin' — come ! ' reiterated the other, 
 with his arms folded to intimate that this and nothing else 
 was the figure to which he would bind himself. 
 
 Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse 
 as though he were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to 
 judge ; grew a little pale ; and stooped forward. 
 
 ' Hush 1 Somebody'll spy on us. It's a bargain.* 
 
 * Done. And you'll paint him, eh ? ' 
 ' Yes— I'll— paint him.' 
 
 The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE 99 
 
 his eyes glanced with a furtive, frightened glance over the 
 loose-box. Then — still with that cringing, terrified look 
 backward to the horse as an assassin may steal a glance 
 before his deed at his unconscious victim — the head groom 
 and his comrade went out and closed the door of the loose-box 
 and passed into the hot lowering summer night. 
 
 Forest King, left in solitude, shook himself with a neigh ; 
 took a refreshing roll in the straw, and turned with an 
 appetite to his neglected gruel. Unhappily for himself, hig 
 fine instincts could not teach him the conspiracy that lay in 
 wait for him and his ; and the gallant beast, content to be 
 alone, soon slept the sleep of the righteous. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNB 
 
 * Seraph — I've been thinking ' — said Cecil, musingly, as 
 they paced homeward together from the Scrubs, with the 
 long line of the First Life stretching before and behind their 
 chargers, and the bands of the Household Cavalry playing 
 mellowly in their rear. 
 
 * You don't mean it I Never let it ooze out, Beauty ; you'll 
 ruin your reputation ! ' 
 
 Cecil laughed a httle, very languidly ; to have been in the 
 sun for four hours, in full harness, had almost taken out of 
 him any power to be amused at anything. 
 
 * I've been thinking,' he went on undisturbed, pulling 
 down his chin-scale. * What's a fellow to do when he's 
 smashed'?' 
 
 ' Eh ? ' The Seraph couldn't offer a suggestion ; he had 
 a vague idea that men who were smashed never did do 
 anything except accept the smashing ; unless, indeed, they 
 turned up afterwards as touts, of which he had an equally 
 vague suspicion. 
 
 * What do they do ? ' pursued Bertie. 
 
 * Go to the bad,' finally suggested the Seraph, lighting a 
 great cigar, without heeding the presence of the Duke, a 
 Field-Marshal, and a Serene Highness far on in front. 
 
 b2 
 
TOO UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Cecil shook his head. 
 
 'Can't go where thoy are ah-early. I've been thinking 
 what a fellow might do that was up a tree ; and on my honour 
 there are lots of things one might turn to ' 
 
 * ^Yell, I suppose there are,' assented the Seraph, with a 
 shake of his superb limbs in his saddle, till his cuirass and 
 chains and scabbard rang again. * I should try the P.R., 
 only they will have you train.* 
 
 * One might do better than the P.R. Getting yourself 
 into prime condition, only to be pounded out of condition and 
 into a jelly, seems hardly logical or satisfactory — specially to 
 your looking-glass, though, of course, it's a matter of taste. 
 But now, if I had a cropper, and got sold up * 
 
 * You, Beauty ? * The Seraph puffed a giant puff of 
 amazement from his Havana, opening his blue eyes to their 
 widest. 
 
 ' Possible ! ' returned Bertie, serenely, with a nonchalant 
 twist to his m,^ustaches. * Anyfching's possible. If I do 
 now, it strikes me there are vast fields open.* 
 
 'Gold fields?' suggested the Seraph, wholly bewil- 
 dered 
 
 ' Gold fields ? No J I.m.ean a field for — what d'ye call it ? 
 — genius. Nbw~Io6k here ; nine-tenths of creatures in this 
 world don't know how to put on a glove. It's an art, and an 
 art that requires long study. If a few of us were to turn 
 glove-fitters when we are fairly crashed, we might civilise 
 the whole world, and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting 
 glove ever blotting creation and prostituting Houbigant. 
 What do you say ? ' 
 
 'Don't be such a donkey. Beauty,' laughed the Seraph, 
 while his charger threatened to passage into an oyster-cart. 
 
 'You don't appreciate the majesty of great plans,* re- 
 joined Beauty, reprovingly. ' There's an immense deal in 
 what I'm saying. Think what we might do for society — 
 think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we just dedi- 
 cated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, 
 where the traders might go through a course of polite train- 
 ing before they blossomed out as millionaires ; the world 
 would be spared an agony of dropped h's and bad bows. 
 We might have a Bureau where we registered all our social 
 experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map of Belgravia, 
 with all the pitfalls marked, all the inaccessible heights 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LTJNE loi 
 
 coloured red, and all the liard-up great people dotted with 
 gold, to show the amount they'd be bought for, with directions 
 to the ignoramuses whom to know, court, and avoid. We 
 might form a Courier Company, and take Brummagen abroad 
 under our guidance, so that the Continent shouldn't think 
 Englishwomen always wear blue veils and grey shawls, and 
 hear every Englishman shout for porter and beefsteak in 
 Tortoni's. We might teach them to take their hats off to \ 
 women, and not to prod pictures with sticks, and to look at \ 
 statues without poking them with an umbrella, and to be 
 persuaded that all foreigners don't want to be bawled at, and 
 won't understand bad French any the better for its being 
 shouted. Or we might have a Joint-Stock Toilet Association, 
 for the purposes of national art, and receive Brummagen to 
 show it how to dress ; we might even succeed in making the 
 feminine British Public drape itself properly, and the B.P. 
 masculine wear boots that won't creak, and coats that don't 
 wrinkle, and take off its hat without a jerk, as though it 
 were a wooden puppet hung on very stiff strings. Or one 
 might ' 
 
 * Talk the greatest nonsense under the sun ! ' laughed the 
 Seraph. 'For mercy's sake, are you mad, Bertie ? ' 
 
 ' Inevitable question addressed to Genius ! ' yawned Cecil. 
 'I'm showing you plans that might teach a whole nation 
 good style if we just threw ourselves into it a little. I don't 
 mean you, because you'll never smash, and one don't turn 
 bear-leader, even to the B.P., without the primary impulse 
 of being hard-up. And I don't talk for myself, because, 
 when I go to the dogs, I have my own project.' 
 
 ' And what's that ? ' 
 
 * To be groom of the chambers at Meurice's or Claridge's,* 
 responded Bertie, solemnly. ' Those sublime creatures with 
 their silver chains round their necks and their ineffable supre- 
 macy over every other mortal I — one would feel in a superior 
 region still. And when a snob came to poison the air, how 
 exquisitely one could annihilate him with showing him hia 
 ignorance of claret ; and when an epicure dined, how delight- 
 fully, as one carried in a turbot, one could test him with the 
 i-proi(jVette 'positive, or crush him by the eprouvette ii&gativc. 
 We have been Equerries at the Palace, both of us, but I don't 
 think we know what true dignity is till we shall have risen to 
 head- waiters at a Grand Hotel.' 
 
102' UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 "^iVitb'whicli Bpj'tio lot his charger pace onward, while he 
 reflected thoughtfully on his future state. The Seraph 
 laughed till he almost swayed out of saddle, but he shook 
 himself into his balance again with another clash of his 
 brilliant harness, while his eyes lightened and glanced with 
 a fiery gleam down the line of the Household Cavalry. 
 
 ' Well, if I went to the dogs, I wouldn't go to Grand Hotels, 
 but I'll tell you where I would go, Beauty.' 
 
 * Where's that ? ' 
 
 * Into hot service, somewhere. By Jove, I'd see some good 
 fighting under another flag — out in Algeria, there, or with 
 the Poles, or after Garibaldi. I would, in a day — I'm not 
 sure I won't now, and I bet you ten to one the life would be 
 better than this.' 
 
 Which was ungrateful in the Seraph, for his happy temper 
 made him the sunniest and most contented of men, with no 
 cross in his life save the dread that somebody would manage 
 to marry him some day. But Rock had the true dash and 
 true steel of the soldier in him, and his blue eyes flashed over 
 his Guards as he spoke, with a longing wish that ho were 
 leading them on to a charge instead of pacing with them 
 towards Hyde Park. 
 
 Cecil turned in his saddle and looked at him with a certain 
 wonder and pleasure in his glance, and did not answer aloud. 
 
 * The deuce — that's not a bad idea,' he thought to himself ; 
 and the idea took root and grew with him. 
 
 Far down, very far down, so far that nobody had ever seen 
 it, nor himself ever suspected it, there was a lurking instinct in 
 
 * ]3eauty ' — the instinct that had prompted him, when he sent 
 the King at the Grand Military cracker, with that prayer, 
 
 * Kill me if you like, but don't fail me 1 ' — which, out of the 
 j languor and pleasure-loving temper of his unruffled life, had 
 j a vague, restless impulse towards the fiery perils and nervous 
 I excitement of a sterner and more stirring career. 
 
 It was only vague, for he was naturally very indolent, very 
 gentle, very addicted to taking all things passively, and very 
 strongly of persuasion that to rouse yourself for anything was 
 a niaiserie of the strongest possible folly ; but it was there. 
 It always is there with men of Bertie's order, and only comea 
 to light when the match of danger is applied to the touchhole. 
 Then, though * the Tenth don't dance,' perhaps, with graceful 
 indolent dandy insolence, they can fight as no others fight 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE 103 
 
 when Boot and Saddle rings through the morning air, and the 
 slashing charge sweeps down with lightning e^oed and falcon 
 swoop. 
 
 'In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more 
 excited,' says Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little oppor- 
 tunity of putting that doctrine for amatory intrigues to the 
 test in actual practice. Bertie, who had many opportunities, 
 differed with him. He found love-making in his own polished 
 tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was more 
 amused by Laura Lelas. However, he was sworn to the 
 service of the Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down 
 that day to another sort of Richmond dinner, of which the 
 lady was the object instead of the Zu-Zu. 
 
 She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and 
 inexorable lord, and arranged her flirtations to evade him 
 with a degree of skill so great, that it was lamentable it 
 should be thrown away on an agricultural husband, who 
 never dreamt that the ' FideUo — III — TstnegeR,' which met 
 his eyes in the innocent face of his Tivies, referred to an 
 appointment at a Regent Street modiste's, or that fi^ adver- 
 tisement — * White wins — Twelve,' meant that !> ' he wore 
 white cameUias in her hair at the opera, she would give 
 * Beauty ' a meeting after it. y 
 
 Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate con-^ 
 ventionalities. And yet she was a little faot — very fast indeed, 
 and was a queen of one of the fastest sets ; but then — 
 sacred shield of a wife's virtues-she could not have borne to 
 lose her very admirable position, her very magnificent jointure,^ ^^ 
 and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds I -^t^A'- 
 
 I don't know anything that will secure a husband from ^^3*^ 
 an infidelity so well as very fine family jewels, when such an ■ 
 infidehty would deprive his wife of them for ever. Many 
 women will leave their homes, their lords, their children, and 
 their good name, if the fancy take them ; but there is not one 
 in a miUion who will so far forget herself as to sever from 
 pure rose-diamonds. 
 
 So, for sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their 
 rendezvous under the rose. 
 
 This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, 
 out at Hampton Court — really went : she was never so impru- 
 dent as to falsify her word, and with the Dowager, who was 
 very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond, while the world 
 
104 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 thought her dining at Hampton Court. It waa nothing to 
 
 any one, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined 
 
 her there : that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged 
 
 their meeting at Baden next month : that while the Baroness 
 
 . dozed over the grapes and peaches — she had been a beauty 
 
 / herself, in her ov/n day, and still had her sympathies — they 
 
 went on the river, in the little toy that he kept there for his 
 
 ) fair friends' use, floating slowly along in the coolness of even- 
 
 l ing, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the 
 
 j sunset, and doing a graceful scene d la Musset and Meredith, 
 
 ' with a certain languid amusement in the assumption of those 
 
 poetic guises, for they were of the world worldly ; and neither 
 
 believed very much in the other. 
 
 When you have just dined well, and there has been no 
 fault in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the 
 Nile in the afterglow, the Arno in the moonhght, or the 
 Loire in vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, 
 it is the easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment 
 when you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you 
 to feel it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was a 
 low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending 
 among its sedges. She was very lovely, moreover, lying back 
 there among her laces and Indian shawls, with the sunset in 
 the brown depths of her eyes and on her delicate cheek. And 
 Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady, really had a glow of the 
 old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at his heart, as he 
 gazed on her in the half-light, and thought, almost wistfully, 
 ,'^_,.* If the Jews were down on me to-morrow, would she really 
 ,oJ) care, I wonder ? * 
 
 /^ ^ Eeally care? Bertie knew his world and its women too 
 .■well to deceive himself in his heart about the answer. Never- 
 ^theless, he asked the question. ' Would you care much, chdre 
 {belk?' 
 L ^ * Care what ? ' 
 
 \ * If I came to grief — went to the bad, you know ; dropped 
 Vout of the world altogether.' 
 
 She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate 
 shudder through all her laces. * Bertie I you would break 
 my heart ! What can you dream of? * 
 
 * Oh, lots of us end so. How is a man to end ? ' answered 
 Bertie, philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a 
 Bpeculative scepticism. ' Is there a heart to break ? ' 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE 105 
 
 Her ladyship looked at him and laughed. 
 
 * A Werfcer in the Guards ! I don't think the role will 
 Buit either you or your corps, Bertie ; but if you do it, pray 
 do it artistically. I remember, last year, diiving through 
 Asnieres, when they had found a young man in the Seine ; 
 he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast 
 in his clinched hand a gold lock of hair. Now, there wa3 
 a man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death 
 an idyl ! ' 
 
 * Died for a woman ? — ah ! ' murmured Bertie, with the 
 Brummel nonchalance of his order. *I don't think I should 
 do that, even for you, not, at least, while I had a cigar 
 left.' 
 
 And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew 
 brighter and the last reflection of the sun died out ; and they 
 planned to meet to-morrovv', and talked of Baden, and sketched 
 projects for the winter in Paris, and went in and sat by the 
 window, taking their coJGfee, and feeling, in a half-vague 
 pleasure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing softly in from the 
 garden below, and the quiet of the starlit river in the summer 
 evening, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the 
 gentle splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a 
 steamer : the quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded 
 rush of the London season. 
 
 * Would she really care?' thought Cecil, once more. In 
 that moment he could have wished to think she would. 
 
 But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been 
 tawny and classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous 
 Thames, were not things sufficiently in the way of either of 
 them to detain them long. They had both seen the Babylo- 
 nian sun set over the ruins of the Birs Nimrud, and had 
 talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had both 
 leaned over the terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon wa3 
 full on Giotto's tower, and had discussed their dresses for the 
 Veglione masquerade. It was not their style to care for these 
 matters ; they were pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so 
 many of them. 
 
 The Dowager went home in her brougham ; the Countess 
 drove in his mail-phaeton, objectionable, as she might be seen, 
 but less objectionable than letting her servants know he had 
 met her at Richmond. Besides, she obviated danger by 
 bidding him set her down at a little villa across the park 
 
f 
 
 106 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 where dwelt a confidential protegee of hers, whom she patro- 
 nised : a former French governess, married tolerably well, 
 who had the Countess's confidences, and kept them religiously 
 for sake of so aristocratic a patron, and of innumerable re- 
 versions of Spanish point and shawls that had never been 
 worn, and rings, of which her lavish ladyship had got tired. 
 
 From here she would take her ex-governess's little 
 brougham, and get quietly back to her own house in Eaton 
 Square in due time for all the drums and crushes at which 
 she must make her appearance. This was the sort of little 
 devices which really made them think themselves in love, 
 and gave the salt to the whole affair. Moreover, there was 
 this ground for it, that had her lord once roused from the 
 strawyards of his prize cattle, there was a certain stubborn, 
 irrational, old-world prejudice of pride and temper in him 
 that would have made him throw expediency to the winds, 
 then and there, wifch a blind and brutal disregard to slander, 
 and to the fact that none would ever adorn his diamonds as 
 she did. So that Cecil had not only her fair fame, but her 
 still more valuable jewels in his keeping when he started from 
 the Star and Garter in the warmth of the bright summer's 
 evening. 
 
 It was a lovely night ; a night for lonely Highland tarns, 
 and southern shores by Baiie ; without a cloud to veil the 
 brightness of the stars ; a heavy dew pressed the odours from 
 the grasses, and the deep glades of the avenues were pierced 
 here and there with a broad beam of silvery moonlight, slant- 
 ing through the massive boles of the trees, and falling white 
 and serene across the turf. Through the park, with the 
 gleam of the water ever and again shining through the 
 branches of the foliage, Cecil started his horses ; his groom he 
 had sent away on reaching Richmond, for the same reason as 
 the Countess had dismissed her barouche, and he wanted no 
 servant, since, as soon as he had sat down his liege lady at 
 her proteg6e's, he would drive straight back to Piccadilly. 
 But he had not noticed what he noted now, that instead of 
 one of his carriage-greys, who had fallen slightly lame, they 
 had put into harness the young one, Maraschino, who matched 
 admirably for size and colour, but who, being really a hunter, 
 though he had been broken to shafts as well, was not the 
 horse vdih which to risk driving a lady. 
 
 However, Beauty was a perfect whip, and had the pair 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE 107 
 
 perfectly in hand, so that he thought no more of the change, 
 as the greys dashed at a liberal half-speed through the park, 
 with their harness flashing in the moonlight, and their scarlet 
 rosettes fluttering in the pleasant air. The eyes beside him, 
 the Titian-like mouth, the rich, delicate cheek, these were, to 
 be sure, rather against the coolness and science that such a 
 five-year-old as Maraschino required ; they were distracting 
 even to Cecil, and he had not prudence enough to deny his 
 sovereign lady when she put her hands on the ribbons. 
 
 * The beauties I Give them to me, Bertie. Dangerous ! 
 How absurd you are ; as if I could not drive anything ! Do 
 you remember my four roans at Longchamps ? ' 
 
 She could, indeed, with justice, pique herself on her skill : 
 she drove matchlessly ; but as he resigned them to her, Maras- 
 chino and his companion quickened their trot, and tossed 
 their pretty thoroughbred heads, conscious of a less powerful 
 hand on the reins. 
 
 'I shall let their pace out, there is nobody to run over 
 here,' said her ladyship. ' "Va-t'en done, mon beau monsieur." ' 
 
 Maraschino, as though hearing the flattering conjuration, 
 swung off into a light, quick canter, and tossed his head 
 again ; he knew that, good whip though she was, he could 
 jerk his mouth free in a second if he wanted. Cecil laughed, 
 prudence was at no time his virtue, and leant back con- 
 tentedly, to be driven at a slashing pace through the balmy 
 summer's night, while the ring of the hoofs rang merrily 
 on the turf, and the boughs were tossed aside with a dewy 
 fragrance. As they went, the moonlight was shed about their 
 path in the full of the young night, and at the end of a vista 
 of boughs, on a grassy knoll, were some phantom forms, the 
 same graceful shapes that stand out against the purple heather 
 and the tawny gorse of Scottish moorlands, while the lean 
 rifle-tube creeps up by stealth. In the clear starlight there 
 stood the deer, a dozen of them, a clan of stags alone, \\ith 
 their antlers clashing like the clash of swords, and v/aving 
 like swaying banners as they tossed their heads and listened.^ 
 
 ^ Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant Highland stags 
 for comparing them one instant with the shabby, miserable-looking 
 wretches that travesty them in Richmond Park. After seeing these 
 latter scrubby, meagre apologies for deer, one wonders why something 
 better cannot be turned loose there. A hunting-mare I know well, 
 nevertheless flattered them thus by racing them through the park; 
 when in harness herself, to her own great disgust. 
 
io8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the aif, 
 and twitched with passionate impatience at his bit ; another 
 instant and he got his head, and launching into a sweeping 
 gallop rushed down the glade. 
 
 Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the 
 ribbons that in one instant had cut his companion's gloves to 
 stripes. 
 
 * Sit still,' he said calmly, but under his breath. * He has 
 been always ridden with the Buckhounds ; he will race the 
 deer as sure as we live ! * 
 
 Race the deer he did. 
 
 Startled, and fresh for their favourite nightly wandering, 
 the stags were off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and 
 the horses tore after them ; no skill, no strength, no science, 
 could avail to pull them in, they had taken their bits be- 
 tween their teeth, and the devil that was in Maraschino lent 
 the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare, who 
 had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in 
 her break. 
 
 Neither Cecil's hands nor any other force could stop them 
 now; on they went, hunting as straight in line as though 
 staghounds streamed in front of them, and no phaeton rocked 
 and swayed in a dead and dragging weight behind them. In 
 a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of the 
 peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to 
 keep his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the 
 first sign of exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death 
 might have come to them both ; but there was a gay excita- 
 tion in that headlong rush through the summer night, there 
 was a champagne-draught of mirth and mischief in that dash 
 through the starlit woodland, there was a reckless, breathless 
 pleasure in that neck-or-nothing moonlight chase ! 
 
 Yet danger was so near with every oscillation ; the deer 
 were trooping in fast flight, now clear in the moonlight, now 
 lost in the shadow, bounding with their lightning grace over 
 Bward and hillock, over briar and brushwood, at that speed 
 which kills most living things that dare to race the * IMonarch 
 of the Glens.* And the greys were in full pursuit ; the hunt- 
 ing fire was in the fresh young horse ; he saw the shadowy 
 branches of the antlers toss before him, and he knew no 
 better than to hunt down in their scenting line as hotly aa 
 though the field of the Queen's or the Baron's was after 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE 109 
 
 them. What cared he for the phaeton that rocked and 
 reeled on his traces, he felt its weight no more than if it 
 were a wicker-work toy, and, extended like a greyhound, he 
 swerved from the road, swept through the trees, and tore 
 down across the grassland in the track of the herd. 
 
 Through the great boles of the trunks, bronze and black 
 in the shadows, across the hilly rises of the turf, through the 
 brushwood pell-mell, and crash across the level stretches of 
 the sward, they raced as though the hounds were streaming 
 in front ; swerved here, tossed there, carried in a whirl- 
 wind over the mounds, wheeled through the gloom of the 
 woven branches, splashed with a hiss through the shallow 
 rain-pools, shot swift as an arrow across the silver radiance 
 of the broad moonlight, borne against the sweet south wind, 
 and down the odours of the trampled grass the carriage was 
 hurled across the park in the wild starlight chase. It rocked, 
 it swayed, it shook, at every yard, while it was carried on 
 like a paper toy. As yet the marvellous chances of accident 
 had borne it clear of the destruction that threatened it at 
 every step as the greys, in the height of their pace now, and 
 powerless even to have arrested themselves, flew through the 
 woodland, neither knowing what they did, nor heeding where 
 they went ; but racing down on the scent, not feeling the 
 strain of the traces, and only maddened the more by the 
 noise of the whirhng wheels behind them. 
 
 As Cecil leaned back, his hands clinched on the reins, his 
 sinews stretched almost to bursting in their vain struggle to 
 recover power over the loosened beasts, the hunting zest woke 
 in him too, even while his eyes glanced on his companion in 
 fear and anxiety for her. 
 
 * Tally-ho ! hark forward ! As I live, it is glorious 1 * he 
 cried, half unconsciously. * For God's sake sit still, Beatrice ! , 
 I will save you.' 
 
 Inconsistent as the words were, they were true to what he 
 felt : alone, he would have flung himself dehghtedly into the 
 madness of the chase, for her he dreaded with horror the p^\ 
 imminence of their peril. ^^^ 
 
 On fled the deer, on swept the horses ; faster in the gleam\ 
 of the moonlight the antlered troop darted on through tiie\ 
 gloaming ; faster tore the greys in the ecstasy of their free- \ 
 dom ; headlong and heedless they dashed through the thick- i 
 ness of leaves and the weaving of branches ; neck to neck, I 
 
no UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 straining to distance each other, and held together by the gall 
 of the harness. The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew 
 up beneath their hoofs, their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire 
 from the stones, the carriage was whirled, rocking and totter- 
 ing, through the maze of tree- trunks, towering like pillars of 
 black stone up against the steel-blue clearness of the sky. 
 TThe strain was intense ; the danger deadly : suddenly, straight 
 I ahead, beyond the darkness of the foliage, gleamed a line of 
 j light ; shimmering, liquid, and glassy, here brown as gloom 
 , I where the shadows fell on it, here light as life where the stars 
 / mirrored on it. That trembling line stretched right in their 
 \ path. For the first time from the blanched lips beside him a 
 ■jjry of terror rang. 
 
 * The river I— oh^Jieaven ! — the river ! ' 
 There it lay in the distance, the deep and yellow water, 
 cold in the moon's rays, with its farther bank but a dull grey 
 line in the mists that rose from it, and its swamp a yawning 
 grave, as the horses, blind in their delirium, and racing 
 against each other, bore down through all obstacles towards its 
 brink. Peath was rarely ever closer ; one score yards more, 
 one plunge, one crash down the declivity and against the 
 rails, one swell of the noisome tide above their heads, and 
 life would be closed and passed for both of them. For one 
 breathless moment his eyes met hers — in that moment he 
 loved her, in that moment their hearts beat with a truer, 
 fonder impulseto each'other than they had ever done. Be- 
 fore the presence of a threatening death life grows real, love 
 grows precious, to the coldest and most careless. 
 
 No aid could come ; not a living soul was nigh ; the soli- 
 tude was as complete as though a western prairie stretched 
 around them ; there were only the still and shadowy night, 
 the chilly silence, on which the beat of the plunging hoofs 
 shattered like thunder, and the glisten of the flowing water 
 growing nearer and nearer every yard. The tranquillity 
 around only jarred more horribly on ear and brain ; the 
 vanishing forms of the antlered deer only gave a weirder 
 grace to the moonlight-chase whose goal was the grave. It 
 was like the midnight hunt after Heme the Hunter; but 
 here, behind them, hunted Death. 
 
 The animals neither saw nor knew what awaited them, as 
 they rushed down on to the broad, grey stream, veiled from 
 them by the slope and the screen of flickering leaves ; to save 
 
A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE iii 
 
 tbern there was but one chance, and that so desperate that 
 it looked like madness. It was but a second's thought ; he 
 gave it but a second's resolve. 
 
 The next instant he stood on his feet, as the carriage swayed 
 to and fro over the turf, balanced himself marvellously as it 
 staggered in that furious gallop from side to side, clinched \A ^'■ 
 the reins hard in the grip of his teeth, measured the distance 
 with an unerring eye, and crouching his body for the spring ^>"^^ 
 with all the science of the old playing-fields of his Eton days, 
 cleared the dashboard and lighted astride on the back of the 
 hunting five -year- old ; how, he could never have remembered, 
 or have told. 
 
 The tremendous pace at which they went swayed him with 
 a lurch and a reel over the offside ; a woman's cry rang again, 
 clear, and shrill, and ago?iised on the night ; a moment more, 
 and he would have fallen head downward beneath the horses' 
 feet. But he had ridden stirrup-less and saddle-less ere now ; 
 he recovered himself with the suppleness of an Arab, and 
 firm-seated behind the collar, with one leg crushed between 
 the pole and Maraschino's flanks, gathering in the ribbons till 
 they were tight-drawn as a bridle, he strained with all the 
 might and sinew that were in him to get the greys in hand 
 before they could plunge down into the water. His wristsl 
 were wrenched like pulleys, the resistance against him was ' 
 hard as iron, but as he had risked life and limb in the leap 
 which had seated him across the harnessed loins of the now 
 terrified beast, so he risked them afresh to get the mastery 
 nov; ; to slacken them, turn them ever so slightly, and save 
 the woman he loved — loved, at least in this hour, as he liad^ 
 not loved her before. Que _^pHaent more, while the haif^^ Jt^ 
 maddened beasts rushed through the shadows ; one moment ^ 
 njijre-, till the river stretched full before them in all its length' "ij 
 and breadth, without a living thing upon its surface to break ^* 
 the still and awful calm ; one moment — and the force of cool 
 command conquered and broke their wills despite themselves. 
 The hunter knew his master's voice, his touch, his pressure, 
 and slackened speed by an irresistible, almost unconscious 
 habit of obedience ; the carriage mare, checked and galled in 
 the full height of her speed, stood erect, pawing the air with 
 her forelegs, and flinging the white froth over her withers, 
 while she plunged blindly in her nervous terror ; then with a 
 crash her feet came down upon the ground, the broken 
 
112 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 harness shiveredtogetherwitha sharp metallic clash ; snorting, 
 panting, quivering, trembling, the pair stood passive and 
 vanquished. 
 
 The carriage was overthrown ; but the high and fearless 
 courage of the peeress bore her unharmed, even as she was 
 flung out on to the yielding fern-grown turf ; fair as she was 
 in every hour, she had never looked fairer than as he swung 
 himself from the now powerless horses and threw himself 
 , beside her. 
 
 * My love — my love, you are saved ! * 
 
 The beautiful eyes looked up half unconscious ; the danger 
 told on her now that it was passed, as it does most commonly 
 with women. 
 
 * Saved ! — lost ! All the world must know, now, that you 
 are with me this evening,' she murmured with a shudder ; 
 she lived for the world, and her first thought was of self. 
 
 He soothed her tenderly. 
 
 ' Hush — be at rest. There is no injury but what I can 
 
 repair, nor is there a creature in sight to have witnessed the 
 
 accident. Trust in me ; no one shall ever know of this. You 
 
 shall reach town safely and alone.' 
 
 r And while he promised, he forgot that he thus pledged his 
 
 I honour to leave four hours of his life so buried that, however 
 
 much he needed, he neither should nor could account for 
 
 \ them. ^v^ 
 
 ,...^''^r' 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PAINTED BIT 
 
 *T, Baden was at its brightest. The Victoria, the Badischer 
 jf Hof, the Stephanie Bauer were crowded. The Kurliste had 
 \ a dazzling string of names. Imperial grandeur sauntered in 
 slippers, chiefs used to be saluted with * Ave Caesar Impera- 
 tor,' smoked a papelito in peace over Galignani. Emperors 
 gave a good-day to ministers who made their thrones beds of 
 thorns, and little kings elbowed great capitalists who could 
 have bought them all up in a morning's work in the money 
 market. Statecraft was in its slippers, and diplomacy in its 
 
THE PAINTED BIT 113 
 
 dressing-gown. Statesmen who had just been outwitting 
 each other at the hazard of European poHtics laughed good- 
 humouredly as they laid their gold down on the colour. Eivala 
 who had lately been quarrelling over the knotty points of 
 national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud 
 from the bouquetUre. Knights of the Garter and Knights of 
 the Golden Fleece, who had hated each other to deadliest 
 rancour with the length of the Continent between them, got 
 friends over a mutually good book on the Eastadt or Foret 
 Noir. Brains that were the powder depot of one half of the 
 universe let themselves be lulled with the monotone of * Faites 
 votre jeu ! * or fanned to tranquil amusement by a fair idiot's 
 coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could loosen the 
 coursing slips of the Vfild hell-dogs of war, murmured love to 
 a princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morning, 
 or smiled over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or 
 Cham. 
 
 Baden was full. The^supreme empires of demi-monde 
 sent their sovereigns diamoifd- crowned "arid resistless to out- 
 shine all other principahties and powers, while in breadth of 
 marvellous skirts, in costliness of cobweb laces, in unap- 
 proachability of Indian shawls, and gold embroideries, and 
 mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for 
 a Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced by none. 
 
 Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered 
 under the pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there 
 was not one in his way greater than the steeplechaser, 
 Forest King — certes, there was not one half so honest. 
 
 The Guards' crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the 
 sole representative of England. There were two or three 
 good things out of French stables, specially a killing little 
 bay, L'Etoile, and there was an Irish sorrel, the property of 
 an Austrian of rank, of which fair things were whispered ; 
 but it was scarcely possible that anything could stand against 
 the King, and that wonderful stride of his which spread- 
 eagled his field like magic, and his countrymen were well 
 content to leave their honour and their old renown to * Eoauty ' 
 and his six-year old. 
 
 Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a 
 sort of conviction that the German race would set every- 
 thing square. He stood either to make a very good thing on 
 it, or to be very heavily hit. There could be no medium* 
 
 I 
 
114 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He never hedged in his Ufa ; and as ife was almost a practical 
 impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get 
 together would even be able to land within half a dozen 
 lengths of the King, Cecil, always willing to console himself, 
 and invariably too careless to take the chance of adverse 
 accident into account, had come to Baden, and was amusing 
 himself there dropping a Friedrich d'Or on the rouge, flirting 
 in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady Guene- 
 vere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene 
 Highness, supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupy- 
 ing rooms that a Russian Prince had had before him, with all 
 the serenity of a millionaire as far as memory of money 
 went. With much more than the serenity in other matters 
 of most millionaires, who, finding themselves uncommonly ill 
 at ease in the pot-pourri of monarchs and ministers, of beau- 
 monde and demi-monde, would have given half their newly 
 turned thousands to get rid of the odour of Capel Court and 
 the Bourse, and to attain the calm, negligent assurance, the 
 easy, tranquil insolence, the nonchalance with Princes, and 
 the supremacy among the Free Lances, which they saw and 
 coveted in the indolent Guardsman. 
 
 Bertie amused himself. He might be within a day of his 
 ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his 
 iced sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. 
 His epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick's, 
 and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain 
 into 
 
 Drink a pure claret while you may, 
 Your ' stiff ' is still a-flying ; 
 
 And he who dines so well to-day 
 To-morrow may be lying, 
 
 Pounced down upon by Jews tout net, 
 ' Or outlawed in a French guinguctte \ 
 
 Bertie was a great believer — if the words are not too 
 sonorous and too earnest to be applied to his very incon- 
 sequent views upon any and everything — in the philosophy 
 of happy accident. Far as it was in him to have a con\dction 
 at all, which was a thoroughgoing serious sort of thing not 
 by any means his * form,' he had a conviction that the 
 doctrine of ' Eat, drink, and enjoy, for to-morrow we die,' 
 was an universal panacea. He was reckless to the uttermost 
 stretch of recklessness, all serene and quiot though his poco- 
 
THE PAINTED BIT 115 
 
 curantism and his daily manner were ; and while subdued to 
 the undeviating monotone and languor of his peculiar set in 
 all his temper and habits, the natural daredevil in him took 
 out its inborn instincts in a wildly careless and gamester-like 
 imprudence with that most touchy-tempered and inconsistent 
 of all coquettes — Fortune. 
 
 Things, he thought, could not well be worse with him 
 than they were now. So he piled all on one coiipj and stood to 
 be sunk or saved by the Prix de Dames. Meanwhile, all the 
 same, he murmured Mussetism to the Guenevere under the 
 ruins of the Alte Schloss, lost or won a rouleau at the 
 roulette-wheel, gave a bank-note to the famous Isabel for a 
 tea-rose, drove the Zu-Zu four-in-hand to see the Flat races, 
 took his guinea tickets for the Concerts, dmed with Princes, 
 lounged arm-in-arm with Grand Dukes, gave an Emperor a 
 hint as to the best cigars, and charmed a Monarch by unfold- 
 ing the secret of the aroma of a Guards* Punch, sacred to the 
 Household. 
 
 * Si on ne meurt pas de d^sespoir^ on f^nit par manger des 
 huitres,' said the witty Frenchwoman. Bertie, who believed 
 in bivalves, but not in heroics, thought it best to take the 
 oysters first, and eschew the despair entirely. 
 
 He had one unchangeable quality — insouciance'^ and he 
 had, moreover, one unchangeable faith — the King. Lady 
 Guenevere had reached home unnoticed after the accident of 
 their moonlight stag-hunt. His brother meeting him a day 
 or two after their interview, had nodded affirmatively, though 
 sulkily, in answer to his inquiries, and had murmured tha.t it 
 was ' all square now.' The Jews and the tradesmen had 
 let him leave for Baden without more serious measures than a 
 menace, more or less insolently worded. In the same fashion 
 he trusted that the King's running at the Bad, with the 
 moneys he had on it, would set all things right for a little 
 while, when, if his family interest, which was great, would 
 get him his step in the First Life, he thought, desperate as 
 things were, they might come round again smoothly, without 
 a notorious crash. 
 
 ' You are sure the King will " stay," Bertie ? ' asked Lady 
 Guenevere, who had some hundreds in gloves (and even 
 under the rose ' sported a pony ' or so more seriously) on the 
 event. 
 
 'Certain! But if he don't, I promise you as pretty a 
 
 l2 
 
ii6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 tableau as your Asni^res one ; for your sake, I'll make the 
 finish as picturesque as possible ; wouldn't it be well to give 
 me a lock of hair in readiness ? ' 
 
 Her ladyship laughed, and shook her head ; if a man killed 
 himself she did not desire that her gracious name should be 
 entangled with the folly. 
 
 * No, I don't do those things,' she said, with captivating 
 waywardness. ' Besides, though the Oos looks cool and 
 pleasant, I greatly doubt that under any pressure you would 
 trouble it ; suicides are too pronounced for your style, 
 Bertie.' 
 
 ' At all events, a little morphia in one's own rooms would 
 be quieter, and better taste,' said Cecil, while he caught him- 
 self listlessly wondering, as he had wondered at Pdchmond, 
 if this badinage were to turn into serious fact — how much 
 wmild she C9-re. 
 
 " * May your sins be forgiveo you ! * cried Chesterfield, the 
 apostle of training, as he and the Seraph came up to the table 
 where Cecil and Cos Wentworth were breakfasting in the 
 garden of the Stephanien on the race-day itself. * Liqueurs, 
 truffles, and every devilment under the sun ? — cold beef, and 
 nothing to drink. Beauty, if you've any conscience left ! ' 
 
 * Never had a grain, dear boy, since I can remember,* 
 murmured Bertie, apologetically. * You took all the rawnesa 
 off me at Eton.' 
 
 * And you've been taking coffee in bed, I'll swear ? ' pur- 
 sued the cross-examiner. 
 
 * What if he have ? Beauty's condition can't be upset by 
 a little mocha, nor mine either,' said his universal defender, 
 and the Seraph shook his splendid limbs with a very pardon- 
 able vanity. 
 
 'Huteroih trains ; Ruteroth trains awfully,' put in Cog 
 Wentworth, looking up out of a great silver flagon of Bad- 
 minton, with when he was ending his breakfast ; and 
 referring to the Austrian who was to ride the Paris favourite. 
 * Bemember him at La IMarche last year, and the racing at 
 Vincennes — didn't take a thing that could make flesh — muscles 
 like iron, you know — never touched a soda even ' 
 
 * I've trained too,' said Bertie, submissively ; * look how 
 I've been waltzing ! There isn't harder work than that for 
 any fellow. A deux- temps with the Duchess takes it out of 
 you like any spin over the flat. 
 
THE PAINTED BIT 117 
 
 His censurers laughed, but did not give in their point. 
 'You've run shocking risks, Beauty,' said Ch"festerfield ; 
 
 * the King's in fine running-form, don't say he isn't ; but 
 you've said scores of times what a deal of riding he takes. 
 Now, can you tell us yourself that you're in as hard condition 
 as you were when you won the Military — eh ? ' 
 
 Cecil shook his head with a sigh : 
 
 * I don't think I am ; I've had things to try me, you see. 
 There was that Verschoyle's proposal. I did absolutely think 
 at one time she'd marry me before I could protest against it ! 
 Then there was that shock to one's whole nervous system, 
 when that indigo man, who took Lady Laura's house, asked 
 ics to dinner, and actually thought we should go ! — and there 
 was a scene, you know, of all earthly horrors, when Mrs. 
 Gervase was so near eloping with me, and Gervase cut up 
 rough, instead of pitying me ; and then the field-days were 
 so many, and so late into the season ; and I exhausted myself 
 so at the Belvoir theatricals at Easter ; and I toiled so 
 atrociously playing Almaviva at your place. Seraph — a private 
 opera's galley slave's work ! — and, altogether, I've had a good 
 many things to pull me down since the winter,' concluded 
 Bertie, with a plaintive self-condolence over his truffles. 
 
 The rest of his condemning judges laughed, and passed 
 the plea of sympathy ; the Coldstreamer alone remained cen- 
 sorious and untouched. 
 
 * Pull you down ! You'll never pull off the race if you 
 sit drinking liqueurs all the morning,' growled that censor. 
 
 • Look at that ! ' 
 
 Bertie glanced at the London telegram tossed across to him, 
 Bent from a private and confidential agent. 
 
 ' Betting here — 2 to 1 on L'Etoile ; Irish Eoan offered 
 and taken freely. Slight decline in closing prices for the 
 King ; getting on French bay rather heavily at midnight. 
 Fancy there's a commission out against the King. Looks 
 suspicious.' Cecil shrugged his shoulders and raised his eye- 
 brows a little. 
 
 * All the better for us. Take all they'll lay against me. 
 It's as good as our having a * Commission out ' ; and if any 
 cads get one against us it can't mean mischief, as it would 
 with professional jocks.' 
 
 * Are you so sure of yourself. Beauty ? ' 
 Beauty shook his head repudiatingly. 
 
ii8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Never am sure of anything, much less of myself ; I'm a 
 chameleon, a perfect chameleon ! ' 
 
 ' Are you so sure of the King, then ? ' 
 
 * My dear fellow, no ! I ask you in reason, how can I be 
 sure of what isn't proved ? I like that country fellow the 
 old story tells of — he believed in fifteen shillings because he'd 
 once had it in his hand ; others, he'd heard, believed in a 
 pound ; but, for his part, he didn't, because he'd never seen 
 it. Now that was a man who'd never commit himself ; he 
 might have had the Exchequer ! I'm the same : I believe 
 the King can win at a good many things because I've seen 
 him do 'em ; but I can't possibly tell whether he can get this, 
 because I've never ridden him for it. I shall be able to tell 
 you at three o'clock — but that you don't care for ' 
 
 And Bertie, exhausted with making such a lengthened 
 exposition — the speeches he preferred were monosyllabic — 
 completed his sins against training with a long draught of 
 claret-cup. 
 
 ' Then what the devil do you mean by telling us to pile 
 cue pots on ycu ? ' asked the outraged Coldstreamer with 
 natural wrath. 
 
 * Faith is a beautiful sight I ' said Bertie, with solemnity. 
 * If J'm bowled over, you'll be none the less sublime instances 
 of heroic devotion ' 
 
 * Offered on the altar of the Jews ! ' laughed the Seraph, 
 as he turned him away from the breakfast-table by the 
 shoulders. 'Thanks, Beauty; I've "four figures" on you, 
 and you'll be good enough to win them for me. Let's 
 have a look at the King. They are just going to walk him 
 over.' 
 
 Cecil complied. While he lounged away with the others to 
 the stables, with a face of the most calm, gentle, weary in- 
 difference in the world, the thought crossed him for a second 
 of how very near he was to the wind. The figures in his 
 betting-book were to the tune of several thousands, one way 
 or another. If he won this morning it would be all right, 
 of course : if he lost — even Beauty, odd mixture of devil- 
 may-care and languor though he was, felt his lips grow, for 
 the moment, hot and cold by turns as he thought of that 
 possible contingency. 
 
 The King looked in splendid condition ; he knew well 
 enough what was up again, knew what was meant by that 
 
THE PAINTED BIT 119 
 
 extra sedulous dressing-gown, that setting muzzle that had 
 been buckled on him some nights previous, the limitation put 
 to his drink, the careful trial spins in the grey of the morn- 
 ings, the conclusive examination of his plates by a skilful 
 hand ; he knew what was required of him, and a horse in 
 nobler condition never stepped out in body-clothing, as he 
 was ridden slowly down on to the plains of Ifiesheim. The 
 Austrian Dragoon, a Count and a Chamberlain likewise, who 
 was to ride his only possible rival, the French horse L'Etoile, 
 pulled his tawny silken moustaches as he saw the great 
 English hero come up the course, and muttered to himself, 
 ^ U affaire est finie.* L'Etoile was a brilliant enough bay in 
 his fashion, but Count Ruteroth knew the measure of his 
 pace and powers too thoroughly to expect him to live against 
 the strides of the Guards' grey. 
 
 * My beauty, won't you cut those German fellows down ! ' 
 muttered Rake, the enthusiast, in the saddling enclosure. 
 ' As for those fools what go agin you, you'll pat them in a 
 hole, and no mistake. French horse, indeed! Why, you'll 
 spread-eagle all them .Hossoos' and Meinherrs' cattle in a 
 brace of seconds ' 
 
 Rake's foe, the head groom, caught him up savagely. 
 
 * Won't you never learn decent breedin' ? When loe wins 
 we wins on the quiet, and when ice loses we loses as if we 
 liked it ; all that brayin' and flauntin' and boastin' is only 
 fit for cads. The 'oss is in tip-top condition ; let him show 
 what he can do over furren ground.' 
 
 * Lucky for him, then, that he hasn't got yoit across the 
 pigskin ; you'd rope him, I believe, as soon as look at him, 
 if it was made worth your while,' retorted Rake, in caustic 
 wrath ; his science of repartee chiefly lay in a successful 
 ' plant,* and he was here uncomfortably conscious that his 
 opponent was in the right of the argument, as he started 
 through the throng to put his master into the * shell ' of the 
 Shire-famous scarlet and white. 
 
 * Tip-top condition, my boy — tip-top, and no mistake,' 
 murmured Mr. Willon, for the edification of those around 
 them, as the saddle-girths were buckled on, and the Guards' 
 crack stood the cynosure of every eye at Iffesheim. 
 
 Then, in his capacity as head attendant on the hero, he 
 directed the exercise-bridle to be taken off, and with his own 
 hands adjusted a new and handsome one, slung across his arm. 
 
120 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 • 'Tis a'most a pity. 'Tis a'niost a pity,' thought the 
 worthy, as he put the curb on the King ; ' but I shouldn't 
 have been haggravated with that hinsolent soldiering chap. 
 There, my boy, if you'll win with a painted quid, I'm a 
 Dutchman.' 
 
 Forest King champed his bit between his teeth a little ; it 
 tasted bitter ; he tossed his head and licked it wath his tongue 
 impatiently ; the taste had got down his throat and he did 
 not like its flavour : he turned his deep, lustrous eyes w'ith a 
 gentle patience on the crowd about him as though asking 
 them what w^is the matter with him. No one moved his 
 bit ; the only person who could have had such authority was 
 busily giving the last polish to his coat with a fine handker- 
 chief — that glossy neck which had been so dusted many a 
 time wath the cobweb coronet-broidered ha^ndkerchiefs of 
 great ladies — and his instincts, glorious as they were, were 
 not w^ise enough to tell him to kick his head groom down, then 
 and there, with one mortal blow, as his poisoner and be- 
 trayer. 
 
 The King chafed under the taste of that * painted quid * ; 
 he felt a nausea as he swallowed, and he turned his handsome 
 head with a strange, pathetic astonishment in his glance ; at 
 that moment a familiar hand stroked his mane, a familiar 
 foot was put into his stirrup, Bertie threw himself into saddle, 
 the lightest weight that ever gentleman-rider rode, despite 
 his six-foot length of limb. The King, at the well-known 
 touch, the well-loved voice, pricked his delicate ears, quivered 
 in all his frame with eager excitation, snuffed the air rest- 
 lessly through his distended nostrils, and felt every vein 
 under his satin skin thrill and swell with pleasure ; he w^as 
 all impatience, all power, all longing, vivid intensity of life. 
 If only that nausea would go ! He felt a restless sickliness 
 stealing on him that his young and gallant strength had never 
 known since he was foaled. But it was not in the King to 
 yield to a little ; he flung his head up, champing angrily at 
 the bit, then w^alked down to the starting-post with his old 
 calm, collected grace ; and Cecil, looking at the glossy bow 
 of the neck, and feeling the width of the magnificent ribs 
 beneath him, stooped from his saddle a second as he rode out 
 of the enclosure, and bent to the Seraph. 
 
 * Look at him, Rock ! the thing's as good as won.' 
 
 The day was very warm and brilliant ; all Baden had come 
 
THE PAINTED BIT lai 
 
 down to the race-course, continuous strings of carriages, with 
 their four or six horses, and postilHons, held the line far down 
 over the plains ; mob there was none, save of women in 
 matchless toilets, and men with the highest names in the 
 
 * Almanach de Gotha ' ; the sun shone cloudlessly on the broad 
 green plateau of Iftesheim, on the white amphitheatre of 
 chalk hills, and on the glittering silken folds of the flags of 
 England, France, Prussia, and of the Grand Duchy itself, that 
 floated from the summits of the Grand Stand, Pavilion, and 
 Jockey Club. 
 
 The ladies, descending from the carriages, swept up and 
 down on the green course that was so free from * cads ' and 
 
 * legs,' their magnificent skirts trailing along without the risk 
 of a grain of dust, theu- costly laces side by side with the 
 Austrian uniforms of the mihtary men from Rastadt. The 
 betting was but slight ; the Paris formulas, * Combien contre 
 I'Etoile ? * * Six cents francs sur le cheval Anglais,' echoing 
 everywhere in odd contrast with the hubbub and striking 
 clamour of English betting-rings ; the only approach to any- 
 thing like * real business ' being transacted between the 
 members of the Household and those of the Jockey Clubs. 
 Iffesheim was pure pleasure, like every other item of Baden 
 existence, and all aristocratic, sparkling, rich, amusement- 
 seeking Europe seemed gathered there under the sunny skies, 
 and on every one's lips in the titled throng was but one name 
 — Forest King's. Even the coquettish bouquet-sellers, who 
 remembered the dresses of his own colours which Cecil had 
 given them last year when he had won the Rastadt, would 
 sell nothing except little twin scarlet and white moss rose- 
 buds, of which thousands were gathered and died that morn- 
 ing in honour of the English Guards' champion. 
 
 A slender event usually, the presence of the renowned 
 crack of the Household Cavalry made the Prix de Dames the 
 most eagerly watched-for entry on the card, and the rest of 
 the field were scarcely noticed as the well-known gold- 
 broidered jacket came up at the starting-post. 
 
 The King saw that blaze of light and colour over course 
 and stands that he knew so well by this time ; he felt the 
 pressure round him of his foreign rivals as they reared and 
 pulled and fretted and passaged; the old longing quivered 
 in all his eager limbs, the old fire wakened in all his daunt- 
 less blood ; like the charger at sound of the trumpet-call, he 
 
^1112 ^ ^h^ ^ UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 i lived in his past victories, and was athirst for more. But yet 
 
 j between him and the sunny morning there seemed a dim 
 
 ' hazy screen on his delicate ear — the famihar clangour smote 
 
 ' with something dulled and strange ; there seemed a numb- 
 
 i ness stealing down his frame ; he shook his head in an unusual 
 
 I and irritated impatience ; he did not know what ailed him. 
 
 ; The hand he loved so loyally told him the work that wag 
 
 ; wanted of him ; but he felt its guidance dully, too, and the 
 
 ; dry, hard, hot earth, as he struck it with his hoof, seemed to 
 
 ' sway and heave beneath him ; the opiate had stolen into hig 
 
 veins, and was creeping stealthily and surely to the sagacious 
 
 brain, and over the clear, bright senses. 
 
 The signal for the start was given; the first mad head- 
 long rush broke away with the force of a pent-up torrent 
 suddenly loosened ; every instinct of race and custom, and of 
 that obedience which rendered him flexible as silk to hig 
 rider's will, sent him forward with that stride which made 
 the Guards' crack a household word in all the Shires. For a 
 moment he shook himself clear of all his horses, and led of!" in 
 the old grand sweeping canter before the French bay three 
 lengths in one single efibrt. 
 
 Then into his eyes a terrible look of anguish came ; the 
 numb and sickly nausea was upon him, his legs trembled, 
 before his sight was a blurred whirling mist ; all the strength 
 and force and mighty life within him felt ebbing out, yet ha 
 struggled bravely. He strained, he panted ; he heard the 
 thundering thud of the first flight gaining nearer and nearer 
 upon him ; he felt his rivals closing hotter and harder in on 
 him ; he felt the steam of his opponent's smoking, foam-dashed 
 withers burn on his own flanks and shoulders ; he felt the 
 m addening pressure of a neck-to-neck struggle ; he felt what 
 n all his victorious life he had never known — the paralysis of 
 defeat. 
 
 The glittering throngs spreading over the plains gazed at 
 him in the sheer stupor of amazement ; they saw that the 
 famous English hero was dead beat as any used-up knacker. 
 
 One second more he strove to wrench himself through the 
 throng of his horses ; through the headlong crushing press ; 
 tlirongh — worst foe of all ! — the misty darkness curtaining 
 bis sight ! One second more he tried to wrestle back the old 
 life into his limbs, the unworn power and freshness into 
 nerve and sinew. Then the darkness fell utterly ; the mighty 
 
•PETITE RETNE' 123 
 
 heart failed ; he could do no more — and his rider's hand 
 Blackened and turned him gently backward, his rider's voice 
 Bounded very low and quiet, to those who, seeing that every 
 effort was hopeless, surged and clustered round his saddle. 
 
 * Something ails the King,' said Cecil, calmly ; ' he is fairly 
 knocked off his legs. Some vet. must look to him ; ridden a 
 yard farther he will fall.' - > 
 
 Words so gently spoken ! — yet in the single minute that 
 alone had passed since they had left the Starter's Chair, a 
 lifetime seemed to have been centred alike to Forest King J 
 and to his owner. y 
 
 The field swept on with a rush without the favourite ; and 
 the Prix de Dames was won by the French bay L'Etoile. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 * PETITE REINE' 
 
 When a young Prussian had shot himself the night before 
 for roulette losses, the event had not thrilled, startled, and 
 impressed the gay Baden gathering one tithe so gravely and 
 so enduringly as did now the unaccountable failure of the 
 great Guards' crack. 
 
 Men could make nothing of it save the fact that there was 
 * something dark * somewhere. The * painted quid ' had 
 done its work more thoroughly than Willon and the Welsher ) 
 had intended ; they had meant that the opiate should be just v^ 
 sufficient to make the favourite off his speed, but not to take F 
 effects so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly pre^ J^ 
 pared, that under examination no trace could be found of it,( ^ ^ 
 and the results of veterinary investigation, while it left un-/ 
 removed the conviction that the horse had been doctored,,, 
 could not explain when or how, or by what medicines.^ 
 Forest King had simply * broken down ' ; favourites do this 
 on the flat and over the farrow from an overstrain, from a 
 railway journey, from a touch of cold, from a sudden decay of 
 power, from spasm, or from vertigo ; those who lose by them 
 may think what they will of 'roping,' or 'painting,' or 
 •nobbling,' but what can they prove ? 
 
Y. 124 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ■J "^ Even in the great scandals that come before the autocrats 
 
 rt ^of the Jockey Club, where the tampering is clearly known, 
 
 ^ : can the matter ever be really proved and sifted ? Very rarely : 
 
 ^ ^ the trainer affects stolid unconsciousness or unimpeachable 
 
 ^.;i respectability ; the hapless stable-boy is cross-examined, to 
 
 ^ ^"' protest innocence and ignorance, and most likely protest them 
 
 J ^, rightly ; he is accused, dismissed, and ruined ; or ^some young 
 
 ^; "^~. jock has a 'caution' out everywhere against him, and never 
 
 V again can get a mount even for the commonest handicap ; but, 
 
 ,. as^a rule,- the jeal criminals are never unearthed, and by con- 
 
 ^ sequence are never reached and punished. 
 
 The Household, present and absent, were heavily hit; 
 they cared little for the * crushers ' they incurred, but their 
 champion's failure, when he was in the face of Europe, cut 
 them down more terribly. The fame of the English riding- 
 men had been trusted to Forest King and his owner, and they 
 who had never before betrayed the trust placed in them had 
 broken down like any screw out of a livery-stable, like any 
 jockey bribed to ' pull ' at a suburban selling-race. It was 
 fearfully bitter work, and unanimous to a voice the indignant 
 murmur of 'doctored' ran through the titled fashionable 
 crowds on the Baden course in deep and ominous anger. 
 
 The Seraph's grand wrath poured out fulminations against 
 the wicked doer, whosoever he was, or wheresoever he lurked ; 
 and threatened, with a vengeance that would be no empty 
 words, the direst chastisement of the * Club,' of which both 
 his father and himself were stewards, upon the unknown 
 criminal. The Austrian and French nobles, while winners by 
 the event, were scarce in less angered excitement ; it seemed 
 to cast the foulest slur upon their honour, that upon foreign 
 ground, the renowned English steeplechaser should have been 
 tampered with thus ; and the fair ladies of either world added 
 the influence of their silver tongues, and were eloquent in the 
 vivacity of their sympathy and resentment with a unanimity 
 women rarely show in savouring defeat, but usually reserve 
 for the fairer opportunity of swaying the censer before 
 success. 
 
 Cecil alone amid it all was very quiet : he said scarcely a 
 word, nor could the sharpest watcher have detected an altera- 
 tion in his countenance. Only once, when they talked around 
 him of the investigations of the Club, and of the institution of 
 inquiries to discover the guilty traitor, he looked up with a 
 
•PETITE REINE' 125 
 
 Budden, dangerous lighting of his soft, dark, hazel eyes, under 
 the womanish length of their lashes : * When you find him, 
 leave him to me.' ^ 
 
 The light wag gone again in an instant ; but those who 
 knew the wil^ strain that ran in the Royallieu blood knew by \ 
 it that, despite his gentle temper, a terrible reckoning for the 
 evil done his horse might come some day from the Quietist. 
 
 He said little or nothing else, and to the sympathy and 
 indignation expressed for him on all sides he answered with 
 his old listless calm. But, in truth, he barely knew what 
 was saying or doing about him ; he felt like a man stmmed 
 and crushed with the violence of some tremendous fall ; the 
 excitation, the agitation, the angry amazement around him 
 (growing as near clamour and tumult as was possible in those 
 fashionable betting-circles, so free from roughs and almost 
 free from bookmakers), the conflicting opinions clashing here 
 and there, even, indeed, the graceful condolence of the 
 brilliant women, were insupportable to him. He longed to 
 be out of this world which had so well amused him ; he 
 longed passionately, for the first time in his life, to be alone. ^| 
 
 For he knew that with the failure of Forest King had gone l\/' 
 the last plank that saved him from ruin ; perhaps the last'/V* 
 chance that stood between him and dishonour. He had never 
 looked on it as within the possibilities of hazard that the 
 horse could be defeated ; now, little as those about him knew 
 it, an absolute and irremediable disgrace fronted him. For, 
 secure in the issue of the Prix de Dames, and compelled to 
 weight his chances in it very heavily, that his winnings might 
 be wide enough to relieve some of the debt-pressure upon 
 him, his losses now were great, and he knew no more how to 
 raise the moneys to meet them than he would have known 
 how to raise the dead. 
 
 The blow fell with crashing force ; the fiercer because his ( 
 indolence had persisted in ignoring his danger, and because ' 
 his whole character was so naturally careless, and so habituated ' 
 to ease and to enjoyment. 
 
 A bitter, heart-sick misery fell on him ; the tone of honour 
 was high with him ; he might be reckless of everything else, 
 but he could never be reckless in what infringed, or went 
 nigh to infringe, a very stringent code. Bertie never rea- 
 soned in that way ; he simply followed the^ instincts of hia 
 breeding without analysing them; but these led hmfsafely 
 
126 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and Burely right in all his dealings with his fellow-men, 
 
 however open to censure his life might be in other matters. 
 
 ' Careless as he was, and indifferent, to levity, in many things, 
 
 his ideas of honour were really very pure and elevated ; he 
 
 ; suffered proportionately now, that through the follies of his 
 
 f own imprudence, and the baseness of some treachery he could 
 
 1' neither sift nor avenge, he saw himself driven down into ag 
 close a jeopardy of disgrace as ever befell a man who did not 
 wilfully, and out of guilty coveting of its fruits, seek it. 
 
 For the first time in his Ufe the society of his troops of 
 acquaintance became intolerably oppressive ; for the first time 
 in his life he sought refuge from thought in the stimulus of 
 drink, and dashed down neat Cognac as though it were iced 
 Badminton, as he drove with his set off the disastrous plains 
 of Iffesheim. He shook himself free of them as soon as he 
 could ; he felt the chatter round him insupportable ; the men 
 were thoroughly good-hearted, and though they were sharply 
 hit by the day's issue, never even by implication hinted at 
 owing the disaster to their faith in him ; but the very cor- 
 diality and sympathy they showed cut him the keenest — the 
 very knowledge of their forbearance mads his own thoughts 
 darkest. 
 
 Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day's 
 calamity brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith 
 these men had placed in him, and the losses which his own 
 mistaken security had caused them. Granted he could neither 
 guess nor avert the trickery which had brought about his 
 failure ; but none the less did he feel that he had failed them ; 
 none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they 
 showed him sting him Hke a scourge. 
 
 He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into 
 the gardens of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley 
 shut him in in solitude, and the only echo of the gay world 
 of Baden was the strain of a band, the light mirth of a laugh, 
 or the roll of a carriage sounding down the summer air. 
 
 It was eight o'clock ; the sun was slanting to the west in a 
 cloudless splendour, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden 
 glow, and tingeing to bronze the dark masses of the Black 
 Forest. In another hour he was the expected guest of a 
 Russian Prince at a dinner-party, where all that was highest, 
 fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every 
 nationahty represented there would meet ; and in the midst 
 
•PETITE REINE' 127 
 
 of this radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where 
 every man worth owning as such was his friend, and every 
 woman whose smile he cared for welcomed him, he knew 
 himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as the lifeless 
 Prussian lying in the deadhouse. No aid could serve him, 
 for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take 
 it ; no power could save him from the ruin which in a few 
 days later at the farthest would mark him out for ever an 
 exiled, beggared, perhaps dishonoured man — a debtor and an 
 alien. 
 
 AVhere he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a moun- 
 tain-ash, trying vainly to realise this thing which had come 
 upon him, and to meet which not training, nor habit, nor 
 a moment's grave reflection had ever done the slightest to 
 prepare him, gazing blankly and unconsciously at the dense 
 pine-woods and rugged glens of the forest that sloped upwards 
 and around above the green and leafy nest of Baden, he 
 v/atched mechanically the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner 
 going up the hillside in the distance through the firs. 
 
 * Those poor devils envy us 1 ' he thought. * Better be 
 one of them ten thousand times than be trained for the Great 
 Race, and started with the cracks, dead weighted with the 
 penalty-shot of Poverty I ' 
 
 A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there ; he looked 
 up, surprised : before him stood a dainty, delicate, little form, 
 all gay with white lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and 
 floating hair fastened backward v/ith a golden fillet ; it was 
 that of the little Lady Venetia, the only daughter of the House 
 of Lyonnesse, by a late marriage of his Grace, the eight-year- 
 old sister of the'colossal Seraph ; the plaything of a young and 
 lovely mother, who had flirted in Belgravia with her future 
 stepson before she fell sincerely and veritably in love with the 
 gallant and still handsome Duke. 
 
 Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by 
 months together at Lyonnesse most years of the child's life, 
 and had been gentle to her as he was to every living thing, 
 though he had noticed her seldom. 
 
 * Well, Petite Reine,' he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts 
 were, calling her by the name she generally bore, * all alone ? 
 \Vhere are your playmates ? ' 
 
 ' Petite Reine,' who, to justify her sohriquetf was a grand, 
 imperial, little lady^ bent her delicate head — a very delicate 
 
12.8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 head, indeed, carrying itself royally, young though it 
 was. 
 
 * Ah I you know I never care for children I ' 
 
 It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a 
 touch of afTectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a 
 matured and contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment 
 it amused him. She did not wait an answer, but bent nearer, 
 with an infinite pity and anxiety in her pretty eyes. 
 
 *I want to know ; you are so vexed, are you not? 
 
 They say you have lost all your money ! ' 
 
 ' Do they ? They are not far wrong then. Who are 
 "they," Petite Reine ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, Prince Alexis, and the Due de Lorance, and Mamma, 
 and everybody. Is it true ? ' 
 
 * Very true, my little lady.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' she gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, 
 with her head on one side, and her lips parted ; ' I heard the 
 Russian gentleman saying that you were ruined. Is that true, 
 too ? ' 
 
 'Yes, dear,' he answered wearily, thinking little of the 
 child in the desperate excess to which his life had come. 
 
 Petite Reine stood by him silent ; her proud, imperial young 
 ladyship had a very tender heart, and she was very sorry ; 
 she had understood what had been said before her of him, 
 vaguely, indeed, and with no sense of its true meaning, yet 
 still, with the quick perception of a brilliant and petted child. 
 Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes were 
 filled with tears ; he put out his hand and drew her to him. 
 
 * Why, little one, what do you know of these things ? How 
 did you find me out here ? * 
 
 She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with ita 
 bright gossamer muslins, like a dainty harebell, and lifting her 
 face to his, earnest, beseeching, and very eager. 
 
 * I came — I came — please don't be angry — because I heard 
 them say you had no money, and I w\ant you to take mine. 
 Do take it ! Look, it is all bright gold, and it is my own, my 
 very own. Papa gives it to me to do just what I like with. 
 Do take it ; pray do I ' 
 
 Colouring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct 
 of generous natures, a most sensitive delicacy for others, but 
 growing ardent in her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, 
 uh© shook on to Cecil's knee, out of a little* enamel sweetmeat- 
 
« PETITE REINE' i»9 
 
 box, twenty bright Napoleons that fell in a glittering shower 
 on the grass. 
 
 He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook 
 for offence. She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, 
 and with her large eyes gleaming and melting with passionate 
 entreaty. 
 
 ' Don't be angry ; pray take it ; it is all my own, and you 
 know I have bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, 
 and dogs till I am tired of them ; I never want the money, 
 indeed I don't. Take it, please take it ; and if you will only 
 let me ask papa or Rock they will give you thousands and 
 thousands of pounds, if that isn't enough ; do let me I ' 
 
 Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him ; when 
 he spoke his voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes 
 dim with an emotion that he had not known in all his careless 
 life ; the child's words and action touched him deeply ; the 
 caressing generous innocence of the offered gift beside the i 
 enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy of his career, j 
 smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange i 
 pleasure. 
 
 *PeLt^e Eeine,' he murmured gently, striving vainly for 
 his old lightness — ' Petite Reine, how some man will love 
 you one day I Thank you from my heart, my little innocent 
 friend.* 
 
 Her face flushed with gladness; she smiled with all a 
 child's unshadowed joy. 
 
 * Ah ! then you will take it ? and if you want more only 
 let me ask them for it. Papa and Philip never refuse me 
 anything ! * 
 
 His hand wandered gently over the shower of her hair, as 
 he put nback the Napoleons that he had gathered up into her 
 azure bonbonnUre. 
 
 * Petite Reine, you are a little angel ; but I cannot take 
 your money, my child, and you must ask for none for my sake 
 from your father or from Rock. Do not look so grieved, little 
 one ; I love you none the less because I refuse it.' 
 
 Petite Reine'h face was very pale and grave ; a delicate face, 
 in its miniature feminine childhood almost absurdly like the 
 Seraph's ; her eyes were full of plaintive wonder and of 
 pathetic reproach. 
 
 * Ah 1 ' she said, drooping her head with a sigh, * it is no 
 good to you because it is such a little ; do let me ask for more I * 
 
 s 
 
130 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He smiled, but the smile was very weary. 
 
 ' No, dear, you must not ask for more ; I have been very 
 foolish, my little friend, and I must take the fruits of my 
 folly ; all men must. I can accept no one's money, not even 
 yours ; when you are older and remember this, you will know 
 why ; but I do not thank you the less from my heart.' 
 
 She looked at him pained and wistful. 
 
 * You will not take anything, Mr. Cecil ? ' she asked with 
 a sigh, glancing at her rejected Napoleons. 
 
 He drew the enamel honhonniere away. 
 
 * I will take that if you will give it me, Petite Reine, and 
 keep it in memory of you.' 
 
 As he spoke, he stooped and kissed her very gently ; the act 
 had moved him more deeply than he thought he had it in him 
 to be moved by anything, and the child's face turned upwards 
 to him was of a very perfect and aristocratic loveliness far 
 beyond her years. She coloured as his lips touched hers^ and 
 swayed -slightly from him. She was an extremely proud 
 young sovereign, and never allowed caresses ; yet she lingered 
 by him troubled, grave, with something intensely tender and 
 \ pitiful in the musing look of her eyes. She had a perception 
 ] that this calamity which smote him was one far beyond the 
 ' ministering of her knowledge. 
 
 J"*- He took the pretty Palais Royal gold-rimmed sweatmeat 
 
 f I box, and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket ; it was only a 
 
 , I child's gift, a tiny Paris toy ; but it had been brought to him 
 
 \ I in a tender compassion, and he did keep it ; kept it through 
 
 ^ ! dark days and wild nights, through the scorch of the desert 
 
 J ! and the shadows of death, till the young eyes that quesoioned 
 
 N 1 him now with such innocent wonder had gained the grander 
 
 P I lustre of their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider 
 
 ^^i -than he knew now. 
 
 At that moment, as the child stood beside him under the 
 drooping acacia boughs, with the green sloping lower valley 
 seen at glimpses through the wall of leaves, one of the men 
 of the Stephanien approached him with an EngHsh letter, 
 which, as it was marked 'instant,' they had laid apart from 
 the rest of the visitors' pile of correspondence. Cecil took it 
 wearily — nothing but fresh embarrassments could come to him 
 from England — and looked at the little Lady Venetia. 
 
 * You will allow me ? ' 
 
 She bowed her graceful head ; with all the naif uncon- 
 
'PETITE REINE' 131 
 
 sciousness of a cliild, she had all the manner of the vieilh cottr; 
 together they made her enchanting. 
 
 He broke the envelope and read — a blurred, scrawled, 
 miserable letter, the words erased with passionate strokes, and 
 blotted with hot tears, and scored out in impulsive misery. It 
 was long, yet at a glance he scanned its message and its 
 meaning ; at the first few words he knew its whole as well as 
 though he had studied every line. 
 
 A strong tremor shook him from head to foot, a tremor at 
 once of passionate rage and of as passionate pain ; his face 
 blanched to a deadly whiteness ; his teeth clinched as though 
 he were restraining some bodily suffering, and he tore the 
 letter in two and stamped it down into the turf under his 
 heel, with a gesture as unlike his common serenity of manner 
 as the fiery passion that darkened in his eyes was unlike the 
 habitual softness of his too pliant and too unresentful temper. 
 He crushed the senseless paper again and again down into the 
 grass beneath his heel ; his lips shook under the silky abund- 
 ance of his beard : the natural habit of long usage kept him 
 from all utterance, and even in the violence of its shock he 
 remembered the young Venetia's presence ; but, in that one 
 fierce, unrestrained gesture, the shame and suffering upon him 
 broke out despite himself. 
 
 The child watched him, startled and awed. She touched 
 his hand softly. 
 
 ' What is it ? — is it anything worse ? ' 
 
 He turned his eyes on her with a dry, hot, weary anguish 
 in them ; he was scarcely conscious what he said or what he 
 answered. 
 
 * Worse — worse ? ' he repeated m.echanically, while his 
 heel still ground down in loathing the shattered paper into 
 the grass. * There can be nothing worse ! It is the vilest, \ 
 blackest sliameZ 
 
 He spoke to his thoughts, not to her : the words died in 
 his throat ; a bitter agony was on him ; all the golden summer 
 evening, all the fair green world about him, were indistinct 
 and unreal to his senses ; he felt as if the whole earth were 
 of a sudden changed; he could not realise that this thing 
 could come to him and his — that this foul (dishonour could 
 creep up and stain them — that this infamy "could ever 
 be of them and upon them. All the ruin that before had 
 fallen on him to-day was dwarfed and banished ; it looked 
 
 s2 
 
V 
 
 132 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 nothing beside the unendurable horror that reached him 
 now. 
 
 The gay laughter of children sounded do^vn the air at that 
 moment ; they were the children of a French Princess seeking 
 their playmate Venetia, who had escaped from them and from 
 their games to find her way to Cecil; he motioned her to 
 them ; he could not bear even the clear and pitying eyes of 
 the Petite Reine to be upon him now. 
 
 She lingered wistfully ; she did not like to leave him. 
 ' Let me stay with you,' she pleaded caressingly. You are 
 vexed at something ; I cannot help you, but Rock will — the 
 Duke will. Do let me ask them ! ' 
 
 He laid his hand on her shoulder : his voice, as he answered, 
 was hoarse and unsteady. 
 
 ' No ; go, dear. You will please me best by leaving me. 
 Ask none — tell none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite 
 Reine.' 
 
 She gave him a long, earnest look. 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered simply and gravely, as one who accepts, 
 and not lightly, a trust. 
 
 Then she went slowly and Imgeringly, with the sun on 
 
 the gold fillet binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the 
 
 ] shadow of her silken lashes. When next they met again the 
 
 ) lustre of a warmer sun that once burned on the white walls 
 
 j of the palaces of Phoenicia and the leaping flames of the 
 
 Temple of the God of Healing shone upon them, and through 
 
 i the veil of those sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless 
 
 ' sovereignty of a proud and patrician womanhood. 
 
 1"^ Alone, his head sank down upon his hands, he gave reina 
 
 ^ to the fiery scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn 
 
 seized him with every moment that seared the words of the 
 
 letter deeper and deeper down into his brain. Until this he 
 
 had never known what it was to suffer ; until this his languid 
 
 creeds had held that no wise man^teels strongly, and that to 
 
 glide through life untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it 
 
 is politic. Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly aa_.a_dog, 
 
 passionately as a barbarmn ; now he was met by that which, in 
 
 the moment of its dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, 
 
 and escaped his light philosophies. 
 
 * Oh, God I ' he thought, * if it were anything — anything 
 — except Disgrace 1 ' 
 In a miserable den, an hour or so before — there are 
 
» PETITE REINE' 133 
 
 miserable clens even in Baden, that gold-decked reudezvo&g 
 of princes, where crowned heads are numberless as couriers, 
 and great ministers must sometimes be content with a shake- 
 down — two men sat in consultation. Though the chamber 
 was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various 
 expensive wines and hqueurs ; of a truth, they were flush of 
 money, and selected this poor place from motives of conceal- 
 ment rather than of necessity. One of them was the 
 Welsher, Ben Davis ; the other, a smaller, quieter man, 
 with a keen vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive -tinted skin, 
 a Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally 
 eilent ; the Welsher, heated, eager, flushed with triumph, 
 and glowing with a gloating malignity. Excitement and the 
 fire of very strong wines, of whose mintage brandy formed a 
 large part, had made him voluble in exultation ; the mono- 
 syllabic sententiousness that had characterised him in the 
 loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardour 
 of success ; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a 
 pipe between his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a 
 brutal contentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the 
 personification of culminated cunning and of delighted j\ 
 tyranny. --- 1 • j^_.y r ; - ■ '^ "^ 
 
 * That precious Guards swell ! ' he muttered gloatingly^ W 
 for the hundredth time. * I've paid him out at last ! B.e \ 
 won't take a "Walk Over" again in a hurry. Cuss them /f^'^' 
 swells I they allays die so game ; it ain't half a go after all, \ 
 giving 'em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under! 
 
 it; all, and never show they are down, even when their 
 backers throw up the sponge. You can't make 'em give in 
 not even when they're mortal hit ; that's the crusher of it.* 
 
 * Veil, vhat matter that ven you have hit 'em,' expostu-\ "f 
 lated the more philosophic Jew. | _£ 
 
 *Why, it is a fleecin' of one,* retorted the Welsher, "^ 
 savagely, even amid his successes. ' A clear fleecin' of one. 
 If one gets the better of a dandy chap like that, and brings 
 him down neat and clean, one ought to have the spice of it. 
 
 One ought to see him wince and cuss 'em all ! — that's 
 
 just what they'll never do. No ! not if it was ever so. You 
 
 may pitch into 'em like old Harry, and those d d fine 
 
 gentlemen '11 just look as if they Uked it. You might strike 
 'em dead at your feet, and it's my belief, while they was cold 
 fts stones, they'd manage to look not heate7i yeU It's a fleecin* 
 
 
134 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 of one — a fleecin' of cue ! ' be growled afresh, draining down 
 a great draught of brandy-heated Roussillon to drown the 
 impatient conviction which possessed him that, let him 
 f'iriumph as be would, there would ever remain, in that fine 
 intangible sense which his coarse nature could feel, though he 
 could not have further defined it, a superiqritx_in his adver- 
 sary; he could not conquer, a difi:erence between him" and "his 
 prey be could not bridge over. 
 The Jew laughed a little. 
 
 * Vot a shild you are, you Big Ben ! Vot matter how he 
 look, so long as you have de success and pocket de monish ? ' 
 
 Big Ben gave a long growl like a mastiff tearing to reach 
 a bone just held above him. 
 
 * Hang the blunt I The yellows ain't a quarter worth to 
 me what it 'ud be to see him just look as if he knew he was 
 knocked over. Besides, lajdng agin' him by that ere com- 
 mission's piled up hatsfull of the ready to be sure, I don't say 
 it hain't, but there's two tliou' knocked off for Willon, and 
 the fool don't deserve a tizzy of it ; he went and put the 
 paint on so thick that if the Club don't have a fiare-up about 
 the whole thing ' 
 
 * Let dem I ' said the Jew, serenely. * Dey can do vot 
 dey like ; dey von't get to de bottom of de veil. Dat Villon 
 is sharp ; he vill know how to keep his tongue still ; dey can 
 prove nothin' ; dey may give de sack to a stable-boy, or dey 
 may tink demselves mighty bright in seein' a mare's-nest, but 
 dey vill never come io us.' 
 
 The Welsher gave a loud horse-guffaw of relish and enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 ' No I We know the ins and outs of Turf Law a trifle too 
 well to be caught napping. A neater thing weren't ever done, 
 if it hadn't been that the paint was put a trifle too thick. 
 The 'oss should have just run ill, and not knocked over clean 
 out o' time like that. However, there ain't no odds a cryin' 
 over spilt milk. If the Club do come a inquiry, we'll show 
 'em a few tricks that'll puzzle 'em. But it's my belief they'll 
 let it off on the quiet ; there ain't a bit of evidence to show 
 the *oss was doctored, and the way he went stood quite as 
 well for having been knocked oif his feed and off his legs by 
 the woyage and sich like. And now you go and put that 
 Bwell to the grindstone for Act 2 of the comedy, will 
 yer ? ' 
 
» PETITE REINE' 13S ^, 
 
 Ezra Baroni smiled where he leant against the table looking --^ 
 over some papers. , >c 
 
 ' Dis is a delicate matter ; don't you come putting your big ^"^ 
 paw in it — you'll spoil it all.' 
 
 Ben Davis growled afresh : c 
 
 *No, I ain't a goin'. You know as well as me I can't ~^ 
 show in the thing. Hanged if I wouldn't a'most lief risk a ^ 
 lifer out at Botany Bay for the sake 0' wringin' my fine ^ 
 feathered bird myself, but I daresn't ; if he was to see me in '^ 
 it all 'ud be up. You must do it. Get along ; you look ^ 
 uncommon respectable. If your coat tails was a little bit y 
 longer, you might right and away be took for a parson.' ^ 
 
 The Jew laughed softly, the Welsher grimly, at the com-\"'-~-^ 
 pliment they paid the Church ; Baroni put up his papers into \ ^ 
 a neat Russia-letter book. Excellently dressed, without a ;^^ 
 touch of flashiness, he did look eminently respectable — and ' 
 lingered a moment 
 
 ' I say, dear shild, vat if de Marquis vant to buy off and 
 hush up ? Ten to von he vill ; he care no more for monish: 
 than for dem macaroons, and he love his friend, dey'; 
 say.' 
 
 Ben Davis took his legs off the table with a crash, and 
 stood up, flushed, thirstily eager, almost aggressive in his 
 peremptory excitement. 
 
 ' Without wringing my dainty bird's neck ? Not for a ^ 
 million paid out 0' band ! Without crushing my fine gen- 
 tleman down into pov/der ? Not for all the blunt of ever^ 
 one of the Eothschilds I Curse his woman's face ! I've\ J: 
 got to keep dark now, but when he's crushed, and smashed, ' 
 and ruined, and pilloried, and druv' out of this fine world, 
 and warned ofi' of all his aristocratic race-courses, then I'll 
 come in and take a look at him; then I'll see my brilliant' 
 gentleman a worn-out, broken-down swindler, a-dyin' in ^ 
 bagnio I ' 
 
 The intense malignity, the brutal hungry lust for ven- 
 geance that inspired the words, lent their coarse vulgarity 
 something that was for the moment; almost tragical in its 
 strength, almost horrible in its passion. Ezra Baroni looked 
 at him quietly, then without another word went out — to a 
 congenial task. 
 
 'Dat big shild is a fool.' mused the subtler and gentlpr 
 Jew. ' Vengeance is but de breath of de vind, it blow for 
 
 >n> I 
 
136 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 you one day, it blow against you de next : de only real good 
 IS monish.* 
 
 The Seraph had ridden back from Iffesheim to the Bad in 
 company with some Austrian officers and one or two of his 
 own comrades. He had left the Course late, staying to 
 exhaust every possible means of inquiry as to the failure of 
 Forest King, and to discuss with other members of the New- 
 market and foreign jockey clubs the best methods — if method 
 there were — of discovering what foul play had been on foot 
 with the horse. That there was some, and very foul too, the 
 testimony of men and angels would not have dissuaded the 
 Seraph, and the event had left him most unusually grave and 
 regretful. 
 
 The amount he had lost himself, in consequence, was of 
 not the slightest moment to him, although he was extravagant 
 enough to run almost to the end even of his own princely 
 tether in money matters ; but that * Beauty ' should be cut 
 down was more vexatious to him than any evil accident that 
 could have befallen himself, and he guessed pretty nearly the 
 terrible influence the dead failure would have on his friend's 
 position. 
 
 True, he had never heard Cecil breathe a syllable that 
 hinted at embarrassment ; but these things get known with 
 tolerable accuracy about the town, and those who were 
 acquainted, as most people in their set were, with the im- 
 poverished condition of the Royallieu Exchequer, however 
 hidden it might be under an unabated magnificence of living, 
 were well aware also that none of the old Viscount's song 
 could have any safe resources to guarantee them from as rapid 
 a ruin as they liked to consummate. Indeed, it had of late 
 been whispered that it was probable, despite the provisions 
 of the entail, that all the green wealth and Norman beauty of 
 Royallieu itself would come into the market. Hence the 
 Seraph, the best-hearted and most generous-natured of men, 
 was worried by an anxiety and a despondency which he would 
 never have indulged, most assuredly on his own account, as 
 he rode away from Iffesheim after the defeat of his corps' 
 champion. 
 
 He was expected to dinner with one of the most lovely of 
 foreign Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterwards to 
 the Vaudeville, at the pretty golden theatre, where a troupe 
 from the Bouffes were playing ; but he felt anything but m 
 
•PETITE REINE' 137 
 
 the mood for even her bewitching and — in & marriageable 
 sense — safe society, as he stopped his horse at his own hotel, 
 the Badischer Hof. 
 
 As he swung himself out of saddle, a well-dressed, quiet, 
 rather handsome little man drew near respectfully, lifting his 
 hat — it was M. Baroni. The Seraph had never seen the man 
 in his Ufe that he knew of, but he was himself naturally frank, 
 affable, courteous, and never given to hedging himself behind 
 the pale of his high rank ; provided you did not bore him, 
 yoii might always get access to him easily enough — the Duke 
 used to tell him too easily. 
 
 Therefore, when Ezra Baroni deferentially approached * the 
 Most Noble the Marquis of Rockingham, I think ? ' the 
 Seraph, instead of leaving the stranger there discomfited, 
 nodded and paused with his inconsequent good nature, think- 
 ing how much less bosh it would be if everybody could call 
 him, Uke his family and his comrades, * Rock.' 
 
 * That is my name,* he answered. ' I do not know you ; 
 do you want anything of me ? ' 
 
 The Seraph had a vivid terror of people who 'wanted 
 him,' in the subscription, not the police, sense of the word ; 
 and had been the victim of frauds innumerable. 
 
 ' I wished,' returned Baroni respectfully, but with sufficient 
 independence to concihate his auditor, whom he saw at a 
 glance cringing subservience would disgust, 'to have the 
 opportunity of asking your lordship a very simple question.' 
 
 The Seraph looked a little bored, a little amused. 
 
 ' Well, ask it, my good fellow ; you have your oppor- 
 tunity I ' he said impatiently, yet good-humom^ed still. 
 
 * Then would you, my lord,' continued the Jew with hia 
 strong Hebrew-German accent, * be so good as to favour me by 
 saying whether this signa^ture be your own ? * 
 
 The Jew held before him a folded paper, so folded that one 
 line only was visible, across which was dashed in bold charac- 
 ters, Bochingliam. 
 
 The Seraph put up his eyeglass, stooped, and took a stead- 
 fast look, then shook his head. 
 
 * No, that is not mine, at least I think not. Never made 
 my R half a quarter so well in my life.' 
 
 *Many thanks, my lord,* said Baroni, quietly. 'One 
 question more and we can substantiate the fact. Did your 
 lordship indorse any bill on the 15th of last month ? ' 
 
138 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 The Seraph looked surprised, and reflected a moment. 
 'No, I didn't,' he said, after a pause; 'I have done it for 
 men, but not on that day ; I was shooting at Hornsey Wood, 
 most of it, if I remember right. Why do you ask ? * 
 
 * I will tell you, my lord, if you grant me a private inter- 
 view.' 
 
 The Seraph moved away. 'Never do that,' he said, 
 briefly ,• ' private interviews,' thought he, acting on past 
 experience, * with women always mean proposals, and with 
 men always mean extortion.' 
 
 Baroni made a quick movement towards him. 
 
 * An instant, my lord ! This intimately concerns yourself. 
 The steps of an hotel are surely not the place in which to speak 
 ofit?'^ 
 
 ' I wish to hear nothing about it,' replied Rock, putting 
 him aside ; while he thought to himself, regretfully, ' That is 
 " Etiif," that bit of paper ; perhaps some poor wretch is in a 
 scrape. I wish I hadn't so wholly denied my signature. If 
 the mischief's done there's no good in bothering the fellow.' 
 
 The Seraph's good nature was apt to overlook such trifles as 
 the Law. 
 
 Baroni kept pace with him as he approached the hotel door, 
 and spoke very low. 
 
 * My lord, if you do not listen worse may befall the repu- 
 tation both of your regiment and your friends.' 
 
 The Seraph swung round ; his careless handsome face set 
 stern in an instant ; his blue eyes grave, and gathering an 
 ominous fire. 
 
 ' Step yonder,' he said curtly, signing the Hebrew towards 
 the grand staircase. ' Show that person to my rooms, 
 Alexis.' 
 
 But for the publicity of the entrance of the Badischer Hof 
 the mighty right arm of the Guardsman might have termi- 
 nated the interview then and there in different fashion. 
 Baroni had gained his point and was ushered into the fine 
 chambers set apart for the future Luke of Lyonnesse ; the 
 Seraph strode after him, and, as the attendant closed the door 
 and left them alone in the first of the great lofty suite, all 
 glittering with gilding, and ormolu, and malachite, and rose 
 velvet, and Parisian taste, stood like a tower above the Jew's 
 small, slight form ; while his words came curtly, and only by 
 a fierce effort, through his lips. 
 
'PETITE REINE' 139 
 
 * Substantiate what you dare to say, or my grooms shall 
 throw you out of that window ! — now ? ' 
 
 Baroni looked up unmoved ; the calm, steady, undisturbed 
 glance sent a chill over the Seraph ; he thought if this man 
 came but for purposes of extortion, and were not fully sure 
 that he could make good what he had said, this was not the 
 look he would give, 
 
 * I desire nothing better, my lord,' said Baroni, quietly, 
 ' though I greatly regret to be the messenger of such an 
 errand. This bill, which in a moment I will have the honour 
 of showing you, was transacted by my house (I am one of the 
 partners of a London discounting firm), endorsed thus by your 
 celebrated name. Moneys were lent on it ; the bill was made 
 payable at two months' date ; it was understood that you ac- 
 cepted it ; there could be no risk with such a signature as yours. 
 The bill was negotiated ; I was in Leyden, Lubeck, and other 
 places at the period ; I heard nothing of the matter. When I 
 returned to London, a little less than a week ago, I saw the 
 signature for the first time. I was at once aware that it was 
 not yours, for I had some paid bills, signed by you, at hand, 
 with which I compared it. Of course, my only remedy was 
 to seek you out, although I was nearly certain before your 
 present denial that the bill was a forgery.* 
 
 He spoke quite tranquilly still, with a perfectly respectful 
 regret, but with the air of a man who has his title to be 
 heard, and is acting simply in his own clear right. The 
 Seraph listened, restless, impatient, sorely tried to keep the 
 passion in which had been awakened by the hint that this 
 wretched matter could concern or attaint the honour of his 
 corps. 
 
 * Well 1 speak out 1 ' he said, impatiently. * Details are 
 nothing. Who drew it? Who forged my name, if it be 
 forged. Quick ! give me the paper.' 
 
 ' With every trust and every deference, my lord, I cannot 
 let the bill pass out of my own hands until this unfortunat« 
 matter be cleared up — if cleared up it can be. Your lordship 
 shall see the bill, however, of course, spread here upon the 
 table ; but first, let me warn you, my Lord Marquis, that 
 the sight will be intensely painful to you. Very painful, 
 my lord,' added Baroni, impressively. 'Prepare yourself 
 for " 
 
 Rock dashed his hand down on the marble table with a 
 
140 . UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 force that made the lustres and the statuettes on it ring and 
 tremble. 
 
 ' No more words ! Lay the bill there.' 
 
 Baroni bowed and smoothed out upon the console the 
 crumpled document, holding it with one hand, yet leaving 
 visible with the counterfeited signature one other, the name 
 of the forger in whose favour the bill was drawn : that other 
 signature was — —Bertie Cecil, 
 
 * I deeply regret to deal you such a blow from such a 
 friend, my lord,' said the Jew, softly. The Seraph stooped 
 and gazed — one instant of horrified amazement kept him dumb 
 there, staring at the written paper as at some ghastly thing ; 
 then all the hot blood rushed over his fair, bold face ; he flung 
 himself on the Hebrew, and ere the other could have breath 
 or warning, tossed him upward to the painted ceiling, and 
 hurled him down again upon the velvet carpet, as lightly as a 
 retriever will catch up and let fall a wild duck or a grouse, 
 and stood over Baroni where he lay. 
 
 ' You hound 1 ' 
 
 Baroni, lying passive and breathless with the violence of 
 the shock and the surprise, yet keeping — even amid the hurri- 
 cane of wrath that had tossed him upwards and downwards as 
 the winds toss leaves — his hold upon the document, and his 
 clear, cool, ready self-possession. 
 
 *My lord,' he said, faintly, *I do not wonder at your 
 excitement, aggressive as it renders you ; but I cannot admit 
 that false which I know to be a for ' 
 
 * Silence I Say that word once more and I shall forget 
 myself, and hurl you out into the street like the d og^f a Je w 
 you are ! ' 
 
 'Have patience an instant, my lord. Will it profit your 
 friend and brother-in-arms if it be afterwards said that when 
 this charge was brought against him, you, my Lord Rocking- 
 ham, had so little faith in his power to refute it that you bore 
 down with all your mighty strength in a personal assault upon 
 one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end to the evi- 
 dence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and 
 by — what will look, legally, my lord, like — an attempt to 
 coerce me into silence,and to obtain the paper from my hands 
 by violence ? ' 
 
 Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken 
 with quiet confidence, with admirable acumen ; they were the 
 
'PETITE REINE' 141 
 
 very words to lash the passions of his listener into unendurable 
 fire, yet to chain them powerless down ; the Guardsman stood 
 above him, his features flushed and dark with rage, his eyes 
 literally blazing with fury, his lips working under his tawny 
 leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown himself 
 afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as 
 so much carrion ; y^t^thg^impotence that truth so often feels 
 caught and meshed in the coils of sul)tlety— the desperate dis- 
 advantage at which TJigirt is so often placed when met by the 
 cunning science and sophistry of Wrong — held the Seraph in 
 their net now. He saw his own rashness ; he saw how his 
 actions could be construed till they cast a slur even on the 
 man he defended ; he saw how legally he was in error ; how 
 legally the gallant vengeance of an indignant friendship might 
 be construed into consciousness of guilt in the accused for 
 whose sake the vengeance fell. 
 
 He stood silent, overwhelmed with the intensity of his own 
 passion, baffled by the ingenuity of a serpent-wisdom he could 
 not refute. 
 
 Ezra Baroni saw his advantage : he ventured to raise him- 
 self slightly. 
 
 * My lord, since your faith in your friend is so perfect, 
 send for him. If he be innocent, and I a liar, with a look 
 I shall be confounded.' 
 
 The tone was perfectly impassive, but the words expressed 
 a world. For a moment the Seraph's eyes flashed on him 
 with a look that made him feel nearer his death than he had 
 been near to it in all his days ; but Rockingham restrained 
 himself from force. 
 
 * I 7c>ill send for him,' he said briefly ; in that answer there 
 was more of menace and of meaning than in any physical 
 action. 
 
 He moved, and let Baroni rise, shaken and bruised, but 
 otherwise little seriously hurt, and still holding, m a tenacious 
 grasp, the crumpled paper. He rang ; his own servant an- 
 swered the summons. 
 
 ' Go to the Stephanien and inquire for Mr. Cecil. Be quick ; 
 and request him, wherever he be, to be so good as to come to 
 me instantly — here.* 
 
 The servant bowed and withdrew ; a perfect silence fol- 
 lowed between these two so strangely assorted companions ; 
 the Seraph stood with his back against the mantelpiece, with 
 
 i(: 
 
142 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 every sense on the watch to catch every movement of the 
 Jew's, and to hear the first eound of Cecil's approach. The 
 minutes dragged on ; the Seraph was in an agony of probation 
 and impatience. Once the attendants entered to light the 
 chandeliers and candelabra ; the full light fell on the dark, 
 slight form of the Hebrew, and on the superb attitude, and the 
 fair, frank, proud face of the standing Guardsman ; neither 
 moved — once more they were left alone. 
 
 The moments ticked slowly away one by one, audible in 
 the silence. Now and then the quarters chimed from the 
 clock ; it was the only sound in the chamber. 
 
 ■J/ 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 FOE A woman's sake 
 
 The door opened — Cecil entered. 
 
 The Seraph crossed the room, with his hand held out ; not 
 for his life in that moment would he have omitted that gesture 
 of friendship. Involuntarily he started and stood still one 
 instant in amaze ; the next, he flung thought away and dashed 
 into swift, inconsequent words. 
 
 ' Cecil, my dear fellow I — I'm ashamed to eond for you on 
 such a blackguard errand. Never heard of such a swindler's 
 trick in all my life ; couldn't pitch the fellow into the street 
 because of the look of the thing, and can't take any other 
 measures without you, you know. I only sent for you to 
 expose the whole abominable business, never because I be- 
 lieve Hang it 1 Beauty, I can't bring myself to say it 
 
 even ! If a sound thrashing would have settled the matter, 
 I wouldn't have bothered you about it, nor told you a syllable. 
 Only you are sure, Bertie, aren't you, that I never listened to 
 this miserable outrage on us both with a second's thought 
 there could be truth in it ? You know me ? you trust me too 
 well not to be certain of that ? ' 
 
 The incoherent address poured out from his lips in a breath- 
 less torrent ; he had never been so excited in his life ; and he 
 pleaded with as imploring an earnestness as though he had 
 Been the suspected criminal, not to be accused with having 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 143 
 
 one shadow of shameful doubt against his friend. His words 
 would have told nothing except bewilderment to one who 
 should have been a stranger to the subject on which he spoke ; 
 yet Cecil never asked even what he meant. There was no 
 surprise upon his face, no flush of anger, no expression of 
 amaze or indignation, only the look which had paralysed Eock 
 on his entrance. He stood still and mute. 
 
 The Seraph looked at him, a great dread seizing him lest 
 he should have seemed himself to cast this foul thing on his 
 brother-in-arms ; and in that dread all the fierce fire of his 
 freshly loosened passion broke its bounds. 
 
 * Damnation ! Cecil, can't you hear me ? A hound has 
 bi^oiiSkLU'E-^i^st you the vilest charge that ever swiiT^Iers 
 frainedj^ an infamyjihat_ he deserves Ao_ be shot for, as if he 
 were a dog. He makes me stand before you as if^JT were 
 your accuser ; as if J doubted you ; as if 7 lent an ear one 
 second to his loathsome lie. I sent for you to confront him, 
 and to give him up to the law. Stand out, you scoundrel, 
 and let us see how you dare look at us now 1 ' 
 
 He swung round at the last words, and signed to Baroni 
 to rise from the couch where he sat. The Jew advanced 
 slowly, softly. 
 
 ' If your lordship will pardon me, you have scarcely made 
 it apparent what the matter is for which this gentleman is 
 wanted. You have scarcely explained to him that it is on a 
 charge of forgery.' 
 
 The Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a light like a lion's, 
 and his right hand clinched hard. 
 
 * By my life I if you say that word again you shall be flung 
 in the street, like the cur you are, let me pay what I will for 
 it. Cecil, why don't you speak ? ' 
 
 Bertie had not moved : not a breath escaped his lips. He 
 stood like a statue, deadly pale in the gaslight. When the 
 figure of Baroni rose up and came before him, a great dark- 
 ness stole on his face — it was a terrible bitterness, a great J 
 horror, a loathing disgust ; but it was scarcely criminality, • 
 and it was not fear. Still he stood perfectly silent — a guilty 
 man, any other than his loyal friend would have said : guilty, 
 and confronted with a just accuser. The Seraph saw that 
 look, and a deadly chill passed over him, as it had done at 
 the Jew's first charge — not doubt ; such heresy to his creeds, 
 such shame to his comrade and his corps could not be in him, 
 
144 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 but a vague dread hushed his impetuouB vehemence. The 
 dignity of the old Lyonnesse blood asserted its ascendency. 
 
 * Monsieur Baroni, make your statement. Later on, Mr. 
 Cecil can avenge it.' 
 
 Cecil never moved; once his eyes went to Rockingham 
 with a look of yearning, grateful, unendurable pain, but it 
 was repressed instantly ; a perfect passiveness was on him. 
 The Jew smiled. 
 
 * My statement is easily made, and will not be so new to 
 this gentleman as it was to your lordship. I simply charge the 
 Honourable Bertie Cecil with having negotiated a bill with my 
 firm for £750, on the 15th of last month, drawn in his own 
 favour, and accepted at two months' date by your lordship. 
 Your signature you, my Lord Marquis, admit to be a forgery 
 — with that forgery I charge your friend.' 
 
 * The 15th ! ' 
 
 The echo of those words alone escaped the dry white lips 
 of Cecil ; he showed no amaze, no indignation ; once only, as 
 the charge was made, he gave a sudden gesture, with a 
 sudden gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in his eyes, that his 
 comrade thought and hoped that with one moment more the 
 Jew would be dashed down at his feet with the he branded 
 on his mouth by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged 
 honour. The action was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, 
 more hopeless, because more resigned, than any sign of pain 
 or of passion, returned either by force of self-control or by the 
 stupor of despair. 
 
 The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror ; 
 he could not believe his senses ; he could not realise what he 
 saw. His dearest friend stood mute beneath the charge of 
 lowest villainy — stood powerless before the falsehoods of a Jew 
 extortioner 1 
 
 ' Bertie ! Great Heaven 1 * he cried, wellnigh beside 
 himself, ' how can you stand silent there ? Do you hear — 
 do you hear aright ? Do you know the accursed thing this 
 conspiracy has tried to charge you with ? Say something, for 
 the love of God 1 I will have vengeance on your slanderer, 
 if you take none.' 
 
 He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang 
 in his own imperious words ; for the fearless wrath of an 
 insulted gentleman; the instantaneous outburst of a con- 
 temptuous denial ; the fire of scorn ; the lightning flash of 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 145 
 
 fury — all that he gave himsolf, all that must be so naturally 
 given by a slandered man under a libel that brands him with 
 disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for 
 the setting of one sun and the rise of another; he would 
 have staked his life on the course of his friend's conduct 
 as he would upon his own, and a ghastly terror sent a pang 
 to his heart. 
 
 Still — Cecil stood silent ; there was a strange, set, repressed 
 anguish on his face that made it chill as stone ; there was 
 an unnatural calm upon him ; yet he lifted his head with a 1 
 gesture haughty for the moment as any action that his ^ 
 defender could have wished. 
 
 * I am not guilty,' he said simply. ^ 
 The Seraph's hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp ^ 
 
 almost ere the words were spoken. 4 
 
 * Beauty, Beauty ! never say that to me. Do you think I f 
 can ever doubt you ? * 
 
 For a moment Cecil's head sank ; the dignity with which he 
 had spoken remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance 
 and his denial faded. 
 
 * No, you cannot ; you never will.' . 
 The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in 4 
 
 a dream. Ezra Baroni, standing calmly there with the tran- ^ 
 quillity that an assured power alone confers, smiled slightly -^ 
 once more. ^ 
 
 * You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil ? I shall be charmed if we -^ 
 can find it so. Your proofs ? ' ^ 
 
 * Proof ? I _giva-you 7ny luord.* ^ 
 BaronfFdwed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued. 
 
 • * We men of business, sir, are — perhaps inconveniently for 
 j gentlemen — given to a preference in favour of something more 
 > substantial. Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your 
 f acquaintance ; it is a pity for you that your friend's name 
 \ should have been added to the bond you placed with us. 
 I Business men's pertinacity is a little wearisome, no doubt, 
 to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself ; 
 . but all the same I must persist — how can you disprove this , 
 [charge ? ' ""' 
 
 The Seraph turned on him with the fierceness of a blood- 
 hound. 
 
 * You dog ! If you use that tone again in my presence, I 
 will double-thong you till you cannot breathe ! ' 
 
 h 
 
146 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could 
 not resist the. pleasure -of -bra^ving and of torturing ^the^ 
 * aristocrats/ 
 
 TTdbn't doubt your will or your strength, my lord ; but 
 neither do I doubt the force of the law to make you account 
 for any brutality of the prize-ring your lordship may please 
 to exert on me.' 
 
 The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet. 
 
 * We waste words on that wretch,' he said abruptly to 
 Cecil. ' Prove his insolence the he it is, and we will deal 
 with him later on.' 
 
 * Precisely what I said, my lord,' murmured Baroni. * Let 
 Mr. Cecil prove his innocence.' 
 
 Into Bertie's eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. 
 He turned them on Rockingham with a look that cut him to 
 the heart ; yet the abhorrent thought crossed him — was it 
 thus that men guiltless looked ? 
 
 * Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7.50 on the evening 
 of the loth. It was long over business hours, but my partner 
 to oblige him stretched a point,' pursued the soft, bland, 
 malicious voice of the German Jew. If he were not at our 
 office — where was he ? That is simple enough.' 
 
 ' Answered in a moment ! * said the Seraph, with im- 
 petuous certainty. ' Cecil 1 — to prove this man what he is, 
 not for an instant to satisfy me — where were you at that 
 time on the 15th ?' 
 
 ' The 15th ! ' 
 
 * Where were you ? ' pursued his friend. * Were you at 
 mess ? at the clubs ? dressing for dinner ? — where ? where ? 
 
 ^J There must be thousands of ways of remembering — thousands 
 ^ of people who'll prove it for you ? * 
 
 r Cecil stood mute still ; his teeth clinched on his under- 
 ^ lip; he could not speak; — a woman's reputation lay in his 
 ': silence. 
 
 ^ * CanH you remember ? ' implored the Seraph. * You will 
 think — you must think 1 ' 
 
 There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted 
 helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momen- 
 tous was received was forcing in on him a thought that he 
 flung away like an asp. 
 
 Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes — both his accuser 
 and his friend. He was held as speechless as though his 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 147 
 
 tongue were paralysed ; he was bound by his word of honour;^ 
 he was weig];ted with a woman's secret. 
 
 * Don't look at me so, Bertie, for mercy's sake 1 Speak ! 
 where were you ? * 
 
 ' I cannot tell you ; but I was not there.' 
 
 The words were calm ; there was a great resolve in them, 
 moreover ; but his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. 
 He paid a bitter price for the butterfly pleasure of a summer- 
 day love. 
 
 * Cannot tell me ? — cannot ? You mean you have for- 
 gotten ! ' 
 
 * I cannot tell you : it is enough.' 
 
 There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the 
 answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was ^ 
 terrible. A woman's reputation — a thing so lightly thrown. > 
 away with an idler's word, a Lovelace!3,^mile ! — that was all V 
 he had to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering , J 
 around him. That was all ! And his word of honour. S^ 
 
 Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 ' I. feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil '* cannot tell." As it 
 happens, my partner ca7i tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at 
 the hour and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil trans- 
 acted with him the bill that I have had the honour of showing 
 you ' 
 
 * Let 7?ie see it.* 
 
 The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil 
 would have faced his death far sooner than he would have 
 looked upon that piece of paper. 
 
 Baroni smiled. 
 
 ' It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfor- 
 tune in the manner we treat you, sir ; they are usually dealt 
 with more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse 
 altogether my showing you the document ; both you and his 
 lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science 
 of fist-attack.' ^ 
 
 He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of ] 
 insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social j 
 rank, yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy. -^ ^ 
 
 -^ * You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it ? * 
 thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. 
 *Do you judge the world by your own wretched villainieB ? 
 
148 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Let him see the paper ; lay it there, or, as there is truth on 
 earth, I will kill you where you stand.' 
 
 The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine 
 eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him. 
 
 ' I confide it to your honour, my Lord Marquis,* he said, 
 as he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able 
 diplomatist. 
 
 Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed 
 across the paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, 
 like a shiver of intense cold, that ran through him as he did 
 so, and saw his teeth clinch tight, in the extremity of rage, 
 in the excess of pain, or — to hold in all utterance that might 
 be on his hps. 
 
 ' Well ? * asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He 
 knew not what to believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or 
 how to unravel this mystery of villainy and darkness ; but 
 he felt, with a sickening reluctance which drove him wild, 
 that his friend did not act in this thing as he should have 
 acted ; not as men of assured innocence and secure honour 
 act beneath such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike 
 every deed and word of his life, unlike every thought of 
 the Seraph's fearless expectance, when he had looked for 
 the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure and 
 instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the 
 false accuser. 
 
 ' Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the 
 face of that bill, Mr. Cecil ? ' asked the bland, sneering, 
 courteous voice of Ezra Baroni. 
 
 ' I do. I never wrote either of those signatures ; I never 
 saw that document until to-night.* 
 
 The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came 
 again in his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and un- 
 flinchingly the looks fastened on him ; but the nerves of his 
 lips twitched, his face was haggard as by a night's deep 
 gambling ; there was a heavy dew on his forehead — it was 
 not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious 
 man ; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed 
 into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation. 
 
 * And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for 
 your occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th ? 
 Unfortunate 1 ' 
 
 * I do ; but in your account of them you lie.' 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 149 
 
 There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. 
 Under it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched ; 
 and a fear of the man he accused smote him, more deep, more 
 keen than that with v/hich the sweeping might of the Seraph's 
 fury had moved him. He knew now why Ben Davis had 
 hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that slept 
 
 under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of * the d d 
 
 Guards swell.' 
 
 What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest 
 sign. . 
 
 ' As a matter of course you deny it I ' he said, with a polite v 
 wave of his hand. * Quite right ; you are not required to / 
 criminate yourself. I wish sincerely we were not compelled/ 
 to criminate you.' *;,r'-w - v ., v-.( ---..v 
 
 The Seraph's grand," rolling voice broke in ; he had stood 
 chafing, chained, panting, in agonies of passion and of misery. 
 
 * M. Baroni ! ' he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his 
 anger and his bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of 
 either law or fact, ' you have heard his signature and your 
 statements alike denied once for all by Mr. Cecil. Your docu- 
 ment is a libel and a conspiracy, like your charge ; it is false, 
 and you are swindling ; it is an outrage, and you are a scoun- 
 drel ; you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion : 
 not a sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accu- 
 sation you dare to make true, I am the only one whom it can 
 concern, since it is my name which is involved. Were it 
 true — could it possibly be true — I should forbid any steps to 
 be taken in it ; I should desire it ended once and for ever. It 
 shall be so now, by God ! ' 
 
 He scarcely knew what he was saying, yet what he did say, 
 utterly as it defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so 
 gallant a ring, had so kingly a wrath, that it awed and im- 
 pressed even Baroni in the instant of its utterance. 
 
 ' They say that those fine gentlemen fight hke a thousand 
 lions when they are once roused,' he thought. ' I can beheve 
 it.' 
 
 * My lord,' he said softly, ' you have called me by many 
 epithets and menaced me with many threats since I have 
 entered this chamber ; it is not a wise thing to do with a man 
 whoknows the law. However, I can allow for the heaF'^~ 
 your excitement. Ag regards the rest of your speech, you ^ 
 will permit me to say that its wildness of language is only j 
 
15© UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 f equalled by the utter irrationality of your deductions and 
 1 your absolute ignorsnce of all legalities. Were you alone 
 I concerned and alone the discoverer of this fraud, you could 
 i prosecute or not as you please ; but we are the subjects of its 
 I imposition — ours is the money that he has obtained by that 
 forgery, and we shall in consequence open the prosecution.' 
 l._ ' Prosecution 1 ' The echo rang in an absolute agony from 
 his hearer ; he had thought of it as, at its worst, only a ques- 
 tion between himself and Cecil. 
 
 The accused gave no sign, the rigidity and composure he 
 had sustained throughout did not change ; but at the Seraph's 
 accent the hunted and pathetic misery which had once before 
 gleamed in his eyes came there again ; he held his comrade in 
 a loyal and exceeding love. He would have let ail the world 
 stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend should 
 cast even a look of contempt. 
 
 * Prosecution 1 ' replied Baroni, quietly. 'It is a matter 
 of course, my lord, that Mr. Cecil denies the accusation ; it 
 is very wise ; the law specially cautions the accused to say 
 nothing to criminate themselves. But we waste time in 
 words ; and, pardon me, if you have your friend's interest at 
 heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship, this 
 utterly useless opposition to an inevitable line of action. I 
 must arrest Mr. Cecil ; but I am willing — for I know to high 
 families these misfortunes are terribly distressing — to conduct 
 everything with the strictest privacy and delicacy. In a 
 word, if you and he consult his interests, he will accompany 
 me unresistingly ; otherwise I must summon legal force. Any 
 opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of 
 physical force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the 
 sake of his relatives and position, to spare him.' 
 
 A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows 
 on an insult that cannot be averted or avenged, on a thing too 
 hideously shameful for the thoughts to grasp it as reality. 
 
 In the first moment of Baroni's words, Cecil's eyes had 
 gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion 
 that would have been worse to face even than his comrade's 
 wrath ; it died, however, wellnigh instantly, repressed by a 
 marvellous strength of control, whatever its motive. He was 
 simply, as he had been throughout, passive — so passive that 
 even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamt, 
 looked at him in wonder, and felt a faint sickly fear of that 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 151 
 
 singular unbroken calm. It perplexed him — tb-e first thing 
 which had ever done so in his own peculiar paths of finesse 
 and of intrigue. 
 
 The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it 
 were the judge and champion of his brother-in-arms, felt wild 
 and blind under this unutterable shame, which seemed to net 
 them both in such close and hopeless meshes. He, heir to 
 one of the greatest coronets in the world, must see his friend 
 branded as a common felon, and could do no more to aid or to 
 avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder 
 in the pine-woods 1 His words were hoarse and broken as he 
 spoke : 
 
 * Cecil, tell me — what is to be done ? This infamous out- 
 rage cannot pass ! cannot go on 1 I will send for the Duke, 
 for ' 
 
 * Send for no one.' 
 
 Bertie's voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man ex- 
 hausted by a long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. 
 Its composure fell on Rockingham's tempestuous grief and 
 rage with a sickly, silencing awe, with a terrible sense of 
 some evil here beyond his knowledge and ministering, and of 
 an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend and to 
 avenge — the deadhest thing his fearless life had ever known. 
 
 'Pardon me, my lord,* interposed Baroni, *I can waste 
 time no more. You must be now convinced yourself of your 
 friend's implication in this very distressing affair.' 
 
 ' J / ' The Seraph's majesty of haughtiest amaze and 
 scorn blazed from his azure eyes on the man who dared say 
 this thing to him. ' 7 / If you dare hint such a damnable 
 shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with as little 
 remorse as I would a kite's. I believe in his guilt ? Forgive 
 me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word I I believe in it ? 
 I would as soon believe in my own disgrace— in my father's 
 dishonour ! ' 
 
 ' How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil's total 
 inability to tell us how he spent the hours between six and 
 nine on the 1 5th ? ' 
 
 ' Unable ? He is not unable ; he declines ! Bertie, tell 
 me what you did that one cursed evening ? Whatever it was, 
 wherever it was, say it for my sake, and shame this devil.' 
 
 Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of levelled \\ 
 rifle-tubes aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty 
 
152 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 from the man be loved best on earth. Pie staggered slightly, 
 as if be were about to fall, and a faint white foam came on 
 his lips ; but he recovered himself almost instantly. It was 
 BO natural to him to repre ss every, emotion that it was simply 
 old habit to do so now. 
 
 * I have answered,' he said very low, each word a pang — 
 • I cannot.' 
 
 Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite signifi- 
 cant gesture. 
 
 ' In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you 
 follow me quietly, sir, or must force be employed ? ' 
 
 ' I will go with you. ' 
 
 The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met hig 
 own as it was given, Baroni saw that some other motive 
 than that of any fear was its spring ; that some cause beyond 
 the mere abhorrence of a ' scene * was at the root of the 
 quiescence. 
 
 * It must be so,' said Cecil huskily to his friend. * This 
 man is right, so far as he knows. He is only acting on his 
 own convictions. We cannot blame him. The whole is — a 
 mystery, an error. But, as it stands, there is no resistance.' 
 
 ' Resistance ! By God I I would resist if I shot him dead, 
 or shot myself. Stay — wait — one moment! If it be an 
 error in the sense you mean, it must be a forgery of your name 
 as of mine. You think that ? * 
 
 * I did not say so.' 
 
 The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance ; for once 
 the suspicion crept in on him — tvas this guilt ? Yet even now 
 the doubt would not be harboured by him. 
 
 * Say so — you must mean so ! You deny them as yours ; 
 what can they be but forgeries ? There is no other expla« 
 nation. I think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort 
 money ; but 1 may be wrong — let that pass. If it be, on the 
 contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has been 
 palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment. 
 Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need 
 to press the matter further, unless they find out the de- 
 linquent. See here I ' He went to a writing-cabinet at the 
 end of the room, flung the lid back, swept out a herd of 
 papers, and wrenching a blank cheque from its book, threw it 
 down before Baroni. • Here 1 fill it up as you like, and I 
 will sign it, in exchange for the forged sheet.' 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 153 
 
 Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adora- j 
 fcion that excluded every other passion ; that blank cheque, I 
 that limitJess carte blanche, that vast exchequer from which 
 to draw I — it was a sore temptation. He thought wistfully 
 of the Welsh er's peremptory forbiddance of all compromise — 
 of the Welsher's inexorable command to ' wring the fine- 
 feathered bird,* lose whatever might be lost by it. 
 
 Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leant forward, took the 
 cheque and tore it in two. 
 
 * God bless you, Rock,' he said, so low that it only reached 
 the Seraph's ear, ' but you must not do that.' 
 
 * Beauty, are you mad ? ' cried the Marquis, passionately. 
 * If this villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as 
 much as I — tenfold more than I. If this Jew choose to sell 
 the paper to me, naming his own compensation, whose affair 
 is it except his and mine ? They have been losers ; we in- 
 demnify them. It rests with us to find out the criminal. 
 M. Baroni, there are a hundred more cheques in that book ; 
 name your price, and you shall have it ; or, if you prefer my 
 father's, I will send to him for it. His Grace will sign one 
 without a question of its errand, if I ask him. Come ! your 
 price ? ' 
 
 Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was 
 strong in the austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of social 
 duty. 
 
 * You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, 
 my lord,' he said politely. ' I am glad such friendship 
 exists on eaith. But you really ask me what is not in my 
 power. In the first place, I am but one of the firm, and 
 have no authority to act alone ; in the second, I most cer- 
 tainly, were I alone, should decline totally any pecuniary 
 compromise. A great criminal action is not to be hushed up 
 by any monetary arrangement. You, my Lord Marquis, may 
 be ignorant in the Guards of a very coarse term used in law, 
 called " compounding with felony." That is to what you 
 tempt me now.' 
 
 The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the 
 Hebrew's blood run cold, though he was no coward, opened 
 his Ups to speak ; Cecil arrested him with that singular 
 impassiveness, that apathy of resignation which had charac- 
 terised his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief 
 moments. 
 
£54 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own 
 justification. I will wait for mine. To resist would be to 
 degrade us with a bully's brawl ; they have the law with 
 them. Let it take its course.' 
 
 The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes ; he felt blind 
 — the room seemed to reel with him. 
 
 ' Oh, God ! that you ' 
 
 He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his 
 friend, one of his own corps, of his own world, should be 
 arrested like the blackest thief in Whitechapel, or in the 
 Rue du Temple ! 
 
 Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearn- 
 ing — infinitely gentle ; a shudder shook him all through his 
 limbs. He hesitated a moment, then he stretched out his 
 hand. 
 - ' Will you take it— still ? ' 
 
 Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in 
 both of the Seraph's. 
 
 * Take it ? Before all the world— always ; come what 
 will.* 
 
 His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang 
 clear as the ring of silver, though there was the tremor of 
 emotion in it. He had forgotten the Hebrew's presence ; 
 
 : he had forgotten all save his friend and his friend's extremity. 
 
 i Cecil did not answer ; if he had done so, all the courage, all 
 the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike sus- 
 tained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness ; 
 his hand closed fast in his companion's, his eyes met his once 
 
 i in a look of gratitude that pierced the heart of the other like 
 a knife ; then he turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity. 
 
 * M. Baroni, I am ready.' 
 
 ' Wait ! ' cried Rockingham. * Where you go I come.' 
 
 TJie Hebrew interposed demurely. 
 
 ' Forgive me, my lord — not now. You can take what 
 steps you will as regards your friend later on ; and you may 
 rest assured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible 
 with the case, but you cannot accompany him now. I rely on 
 Jiis word to go with me quietly ; but I now regard him — and 
 you must remember this — as not the son of Viscount Royallieu ; 
 not the Honourable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards ; not the 
 friend of one so distinguished as yourself ; but as simply an 
 arrested forger.' 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 155 
 
 Baroni coulu not deny himself that last sting of his ven- 
 geance, yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung 
 the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his 
 temerity with his life. He put his hand above his eyes 
 with a quick involuntary movement, like a man who wards 
 ofl* a blow. 
 
 ' Gentlemen,' and his teeth chattered as he spoke, ' one 
 sign of violence, and I shall summon legal force.' 
 
 Cecil caught the Seraph's lifted arm and stayed it in its 
 vengeance. His own teeth were clinched tight as a vice, and 
 over the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red flush had 
 come. 
 
 ' We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go — they 
 must do what they will. My reckoning must wait, and my 
 justification. One word only : take the King, and keep him 
 for my sake.' 
 
 Another moment and the door had closed : he was gone out 
 to his fate, and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed 
 down his head upon his arms, where he leaned against the 
 marble table, and, for the first time in all his hfe, felt the 
 hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the passion of a 
 woman mastered and unmanned him ;— he would sooner a 
 thousand times have laid his friend down in his grave than 
 have seen him live for this. 
 
 Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright 
 eyes of the Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him ; a 
 single sign of any effort to evade him would have been 
 arrested by him in an instant with preconcerted skill. He 
 looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in his 
 prisoner's mind. Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went 
 to his doom ; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave 
 him a remembrance. The Hebrew did not stand to him in 
 the colours he wore to Rockingham, who beheld this thin*^: but 
 on its surface : Baroni was to him only the agent of an in- 
 evitable shame, of a helpless fate that closed him in, netting 
 him tight with the w^eb of his own past actions ; no more 
 than the irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew's 
 sight and in knowledge a just sentence. He condemned his 
 accuser in nothing ; no more than the conscience of a guilty 
 man can condemn the discoverers and the instruments of his 
 ehastisement. 
 
 Was he guilty 9 
 
156 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so 
 as he passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance 
 with that dead resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid 
 
 Ilook set on his features, and gazing almost in stupefaction 
 out from the dark hazel depths of eyes that women had loved 
 for their lustre, their languor, and the softness of their smile. 
 They walked out into the evening air unnoticed : he had 
 given his consent to follow the bil] -discounter without re- 
 sistance, and he had no thought to break his word ; he had 
 submitted himself to the inevitable course of this fate that 
 had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and his 
 breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the 
 doctrine of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing 
 before the hotel, waiting for those who were going to the 
 ball-room, to the theatre, to an archduke's dinner, to a 
 princess's entertainment ; he looked at them with a vague, 
 strange sense of unreality — the^e ^things of the life from 
 'f which he was now barred out forever.' The sparkling tide 
 ^ ^ i of existence in Baden was flowmg on its way, and he went 
 ^ --^ \ out an accused felon, branded, and outlawed, and dishonoured 
 1 from all place in the world that he had led, and been caressed 
 C I by, and beguiled with for so long. 
 
 , U Jr To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all 
 
 (S^ tt that was highest and gayest and fairest in Europe at the 
 
 5" V banquet of a prince — and he went by his captor's side a 
 
 y convicted criminal. 
 
 ^ Once out in the air, the Hebrew laid his hand on his arm : 
 
 he started — it was the first sign that his liberty was gone ! 
 
 He restrained himself from all resistance still, and passed 
 
 onward, down where Baroni motioned him out of the noise 
 
 of the carriages, out of the glare of the light, into the narrow, 
 
 darkened turning of a side street. He went passively ; for 
 
 this man trusted to his honour. 
 
 / In the gloom stood three figures, looming indistinctly in 
 
 the shadow of the houses ; one was a Huissier of the Staats- 
 
 Procurator, beside whom stood the Commissary of Police of 
 
 the district ; the third was an ^nglijh detective. Ere he saw 
 
 them, their hands were on his shoulders, and the cold chill 
 
 of steel touched his wrists. The Hebrew had betrayed him, 
 
 and arrested him in the open street. In an instant, as the 
 
 ring of the rifle rouses the slumbering tiger, all the life and 
 
 the soul that were in him rose in revolt as the icy glide of 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 157 
 
 the handcuffs sought their hold on his arms. In an instant 
 all the wild blood of his race, all the pride of his breeding, 
 all the honour of his service, flashed into fire and leapt into 
 action. Trusted, he would have been true to his accuser ; 
 deceived, the chains of his promise were loosened, and all he 
 thought, all he felt, all he knew were the lion impulses, the 
 knightly instincts, the resolute choice to lose life rather than 
 to lose freedom, of a soldier and a gentleman. All he remem- 
 bered was that he would fight to the death rather than be 
 taken alive ; that they should kill him where he stood, in the 
 starlight, rather than lead him in the sight of men as a felon. 
 
 With the strength that lay beneath all the gentle languor 
 of his habits and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields 
 of his boyhood, he wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had 
 closed, and with the single straightening of his left armielled-^;>,a^ 
 the_detectiye to earth like a bullock, with a crashing blow ,-^^^ 
 that sounded 'through' the stillness like some heavy timber - 
 stove in. Flinging himself like lightning on the Huissier, h^-^*^^ 
 twisted out of his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs, l^^^^ 
 and wrestling with him was woven for a second in that close- ^^ 
 knit struggle which is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle 
 for life and death. The German was a powerful and firmly 
 built man, but Cecil's science was the finer and the more 
 masterly. His long, slender, delicate limbs seemed to twine 
 and writhe around the massive form of his antagonist like 
 the coils of a cobra ; they rocked and swayed to and fro on 
 the stones, while the shrill, shrieking voice of Baroni filled 
 the night with its clamour. The vice -like pressure of the 
 stalwart arms of his opponent crushed him in till his ribs 
 seemed to bend and break under the breathless oppression, 
 the iron force ; but desperation nerved him, the Royallieu 
 blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for the first 
 time in his careless life ; his skill and his nerve were un- 
 rivalled, and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off 
 him, and lifting him up — he never knew how — as he would 
 have lifted a log of wood, hurled him down in the white 
 streak of moonlight that alone slanted through the peaked 
 roofs of the crooked by- street. 
 
 The cries of Baroni had already been heard ; a crowd 
 drawn by their shrieking appeals were bearing to^ j-rds the 
 place in tumult. The Jew had the quick wit to give them, 
 as call-word, that it was a croupier who had been found 
 
iS8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 cheating aud fled ; it sufficed to inflame the whole mob 
 against the fugitive. Cecil looked round him once — such a 
 glance as a Royal gives when the gazehouuds are panting 
 about him, and the fangs are in his throat : then with the 
 swiftness of the deer itself he dashed downwards into the 
 gloom of the winding passage at the speed which had carried 
 him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old green Eton 
 meadows. There was scarce a man in the Queen's Service 
 who could rival him for lightness of limb, for power of 
 endurance in every sport of field and fell, of the moor and 
 the gymnasium ; and the athletic pleasures of many a happy 
 hour stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his 
 terrible extremity. 
 
 Fh'ght I — for the instant the word thrilled through him 
 with a loathing sense. Flight I — the craven's refuge, the 
 criminal's resource. He wished in the moment's agony that 
 they would send a bullet through his brain as he ran, rather 
 than drive him out to this. Flight ! — he felt a coward and 
 a felon as he fled ; fled from every fairer thing, from every 
 peaceful hour, from the friendship and goodwill of men, from 
 the fame of his ancient race, from the smile of the women 
 that loved him, from all that makes life rich and fair, from 
 all that men call honour ; fled, to leave his name disgraced in 
 the service he adored ; fled, to leave the world to think him a 
 guilty dastard who dared not face his trial ; fled, to bid his 
 closest friend believe him low sunk in the depths of foulest 
 felony, branded for ever with a criminal's shame — by his 
 own act, by his own hand. Flight I — it has bitter pangs 
 that make brave men feel cowards when they fly from 
 tyranny, and danger, and death, to a land of peace and 
 promise ! But in his flight he left behind bim all that made 
 life worth living, and went out to meet eternal misery, 
 renouncing every hope, yielding up all his future. 
 
 ' It is for her sake — and his,' he thought ; and without 
 a moment's pause, without a backward look, he ran, as the 
 stag runs with the bay of the pack behind it, down into the 
 shadows of the night. 
 
 The hue and cry was after him ; the tumult of a crowd's 
 
 excitement, raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on 
 
 ibis steps, joined with the steadier and keener pursuit of 
 
 \men organised for the hunter's work, and trained to follow 
 
 'the faintest track, the slightest clue. The moon was out. 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE 159 
 
 and they saw liim clearly, though the marvellous fleetness 
 of his stride had borne him far ahead in the few moments' ^ ^ 
 start he had gained. He heard the beat of their many feet ^ 
 on the stones, the dull thud of their rurming, the loud clamour "^ic 
 of the mob, the shrill cries of the Hebrew offering gold with '\t. 
 frantic lavishness to whoever should stop his prey. All the ^ 
 breathless excitation, all the keen and desperate straining, all 
 the tension of the neck-and-neck struggle that he had known , 
 so often over the brown autumn country of the Shires at ^ 
 home, he knew now, intensified to horror, made deadly with 
 despair, changed into a race for life and death. 
 
 Yet with it the wild blood in him woke ; the recklessness 
 of peril, the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his 
 levity and languor heated his veins and spurred his strength ; 
 he was ready to die if they chose to slaughter him ; but for 
 his fi'eedom he strove as men will strive for life ; to distance 
 them, to escape them, he would have breathed his last at the 
 goal ; they might fire him down if they would, but he swore 
 in his teeth to die free. 
 
 Some Germans in his path hearing the shouts that thun- 
 dered after him in the night drew their mule-cart across the 
 pent-up passage-way down which he turned, and blocked 
 the narrow road. He saw it in time ; a second later, and it 
 would have been instant death to him at the pace he went ; 
 he saw it, and gathered all the force and nervous impetus in 
 his frame to the trial as he came rushing downward along 
 the slope of the lane, with his elbows back, and his body 
 straight, as prize-runners run. The waggon, sideways, 
 stretched across — a solid barrier, heaped up with fir boughs 
 brought for firing from the forests ; the mules stood abreast 
 yoked together. The mob following saw, too, and gave a 
 hoot and yell of brutal triumph ; their prey was in their 
 clutches : the cart barred his progress, and he must double 
 like a fox faced with a stone wall. 
 
 Scarcely ! They did not know the man with whom they 
 had to deal — the daring and the coolness that the languid 
 surface of indolent fashion had covered. Even in the im- 
 minence of supreme peril, of breathless jeopardy, he measured 
 with unerring eye the distance and the need ; rose as lightly f 
 in_ thebaic as Forest King had risen with him over lence and 1 
 hedge, and with a single running leap cleared the width of \ 
 the mules' backs, and, landing safely on the farther side, ' 
 
i6o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 dashed on, scarcely pausing for breath. The yell that hissed 
 in his wake, as the throng saw him escape, by what to their 
 slow Teutonic^ instincts seemed a devil's miracle, was on his 
 ear lil^e the bay of the slothoimds to the deer. They might 
 kill him if they could, but they should never take him 
 captive. 
 
 And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear, shining 
 down in the summer light, as though in love with the beauty 
 of earth ! He looked up once ; the stars seemed reeling round 
 him in disordered riot ; the chill face of the moon looked un- 
 pitying as death. All this loveliness was round him ; this 
 glory of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil planet, 
 and there was no help for him. 
 
 A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the dis- 
 tance ; he had left the brilliance of the town behind him, and 
 was now in its by-streets and outskirts. The sound seemed 
 to thrill him to the bone ; it was Hke the echo of the lost life 
 he was leaving for ever. 
 
 He saw, he felt, he heard, he thought ; feeling and sense 
 were quickened in him as they had never been before, yet he 
 never slackened his pace save once or twice, when he paused 
 for breath ; he ran as swiftly, he ran as keenly, as ever stag 
 or fox had run before him, doubling with their skill, taking 
 the shadow as they took the covert, noting with their rapid 
 eye the safest track, outracing with their rapid speed the 
 pursuit that thundered in his wake. 
 
 The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well- 
 nigh out of the town, with the open country and forest lying 
 before him. The people whom he met rushed out of his 
 path ; happily for him they were few, and were terrified, be- 
 cause they thought him a madman broken loose from his 
 keepers. He never looked back ; but he could tell that the 
 pursuit was falling farther and farther behind him ; that the 
 speed at which he went was breaking the powers of his 
 hunters : fresh throngs added indeed to the first pursuers as 
 they tore down through the starlit night, but none had the 
 [science with which he went, the trained, matchless skill of 
 Uhe university footrace. He left them more and more behind 
 him each second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it 
 seem ed, had lasted barely three minutes. If the night were but 
 dark I He felt that pitiless luminance glistening bright about 
 him, everywhere, shining over all the summer world, and 
 
FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE i6i 
 
 leaving scarce a shadow to fail athwart his way. The silver 
 glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground ; one 
 hour of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black 
 rain of an autumn storm, and he could have made for shelter 
 as the stag makes for it across the broad brown Highland 
 water. 
 
 Before him stretched, indeed, the gloom of the masses of 
 pine, the upward slopes of tree -stocked hills, the vastness of 
 the Black Forest ; but they were like the mirage to a man 
 who dies in a desert ; he knew at the pace he went he could 
 not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his brain, 
 and pumping from his heart ; a tightness hke an iron band 
 seemed girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath 
 in with loud gasping spasms ; he knew that in a little space 
 his speed must slacken — he knew it by the roar like the noise 
 of waters that was rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like 
 a hand's hard grip that seemed above his heart. 
 
 But he would go till he died ; go till they fired on him ; go 
 though the skies felt swirhng round like a sea of fire, and the 
 hard hot earth beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his 
 feet struck it flying. 
 
 The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and 
 high-peaked gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across 
 his road — a shadow black and ray less, darker for the white 
 glisten of the moon around. Built more in the Swiss than 
 the German style, a massive balcony of wood ran round it, 
 upon and beneath which in its heavy shade was an impene- 
 trable gloom, while the twisted wooden pillars ran upward to 
 the gallery, loggia-like. With rapid perception and intuition 
 he divined rather than saw these things, and swinging himself 
 up with noiseless lightness, he threw himself full length down 
 on the rough flooring of the balcony. If they passed he was 
 safe for a brief time more at least ; if they found him — hia 
 teeth ^clinched hke a mastiff's where he lay — he had the 
 strengthlh him' stiirto^ sell hfs life learly. 
 
 The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamours 
 that floated up in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew 
 that they had tracked him. He heard the tramp of tbeir feet 
 as they came under the loggia ; he heard the click of the 
 pistols — they were close upon him at last in the blackness of 
 night. 
 
 M 
 
102 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ^ 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE KING'S LAST SERVIOB 
 
 * Is he up there ? ' asked a voice in the darkness. 
 
 * Not likely. A cat couldn't scramble up that woodwork,' 
 answered a second. 
 
 ' Send a shot, and try,' suggested a third. 
 
 There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the 
 
 verandah. He heard thev/ords as the thronging mob surged, 
 
 and trampled, and swore, and quarrelled beneath him, in th« 
 
 blackness of the gloom, balked of their prey, and savage for 
 
 w ft -some amends. There was a moment's pause, a hurried, eager 
 
 «^' eonsultation ; then he heard the well-known sound of a charre 
 
 "Ht. being rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod ; 
 
 there was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second i» 
 
 ; his sight, a ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush. 
 
 ^ and bedded itself in the timber a few inches above his un- 
 
 ' covered hair. A dead silence followed ; then the muttering 
 
 ^©f many voices broke out afresh. 
 
 ' He's not there, at any rate,' said one, who seemed the 
 «hief ; ' he couldn't have kept as still as that with a shot so 
 Bear him. He's made for the open country and the forest, 
 I'll take my oath.' 
 
 Then the treading of many feet trampled their way out from 
 beneath the loggia ; their voices and their rapid steps grew 
 fainter and fainter as they hurried away through the night. 
 For awhile, at least, he was safe. 
 
 For some moments he lay prostrated there ; the rushing of 
 the blood on his brain, the beating of his heart, the panting of 
 his breath, the quivering of his limbs after the intense mus- 
 eular effort he had gone through, mastered him, and flung 
 feim down there beaten and powerless. He felt the foam om 
 his lips, and he thought with every instant that the surcharged 
 veins would burst; hands of steel seemed to crush in upon his 
 chest, knotted cords to tighten in excruciating pain about hie 
 loins ; he breathed in short convulsive gasps ; his eyes were 
 blind, and his head swam. A dreaming fancy that this was 
 death vaguely came on him, and he was glad it should be so. 
 
IHE KING'S LAST SERVICE 163 
 
 His eyelids closed unconsciously, weighed down as by the 
 weight of lead ; he saw the starry skies above him no more, 
 and the distant noise of the pursuit waxed duller and duller 
 on his ear ; then he lost all sense and memory — he ceased even 
 to feel the night air on his face. How long he lay there he 
 never knew ; when consciousness returned to him all was 
 still ; the moon was shining down clear as the day ; the west 
 wind was blowing softly among his hair. He staggered to 
 his feet and leaned against the timber of the upper wall ; the 
 shelving, impenetrable darkness sloped below ; above were the 
 glories of a summer sky at midnight, around him the hills and 
 woods were bathed in the silver light ; he looked, and he re- 
 membered all. 
 
 He had escaped his captors ; but for how long ? While yet 
 there were some hours of the night left, he must find some 
 surer refuge, or fall into their hands again. Yet it was strange 
 that in this moment his own misery and his own peril were 
 less upon him than a longing to see once more — and for th&^ 
 last time — the woman for whose sake he suffered this. Their 1 
 j love had had the lightness and the languor of their world, 
 
 and had had but httle depth in it ; yet in that hour of his / 
 1 supreme sacrifice to her, he loved her as he had not loved in . > 
 \ his life. '^ 
 
 ^■^' Recklessness had always been latent in him, with all hig[<(^^ 
 serenity and impassiveness ; a reckless resolve entered him^j J 
 now — reckless to madness. Lightly and cautiously, though' - 
 his sinews still ached, and his nerves still throbbed with theV*'' 
 past strain, he let himself fall, hand over hand, as men go;r^ 
 down a rope, along the woodwork to the ground, Once^^,^ 
 touching earth, off he glided, swiftly and noiselessly, keeping- ^) 
 in the shadow of the walls all the length of the streets he['^'^'" 
 took, and shunning every place where any sort of tumult'^"^^ 
 could suggest the neighbourhood of those who were out and'^^jj 
 hunting him down. As it chanced, they had taken to the ^ 
 open country ; he passed on unquestioned, and wound his way ^^ti 
 to the Kursaal. He remembered that to-night there was & ^.:^^' 
 masked ball, at which all the princely and titled world of f ' 
 Baden were present ; to which he would himself have gone? 
 after the Russian dinner. By the look of the stars he saw 
 that it must be midnight, or past ; the ball would be now at its 
 height. 
 
 The daredevil wildness and the cool quietude that were 
 
 u2 
 
i64 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 BO intimately and intricately mingled in his nature could 
 alone have prompted and projected such a thought and such 
 an action as suggested themselves to him now ; in the moment 
 of his direst extremity, of his utter hopelesF^ness, of his most 
 imminent peril, he went — to take a last look at his mistress ! 
 Baden, for aught he knew, might be but one vast network 
 
 /to mesh in and to capture him ; yet he ran the risk with the 
 
 I dauntless temerity that had ever lain underneath the in- 
 
 ! differentism and the indolence of his habits. 
 
 *— Keeping always in the shadow, and moving slowly, so as 
 to attract no notice from those he passed, he made his way 
 deliberately, straight towards the blaze of light where all the 
 gaiety of the town was centred ; he reckoned, and rightly 
 as it proved, that the rumour of his story, the noise of his 
 pursuit, would not have penetrated here as yet ; his own 
 world would be still in ignorance. A moment, that was all 
 
 (he wanted, just to look upon a woman's beauty; he went 
 
 ^forward daringly and tranquilly to its venture. If any had 
 told him that a vein of romance was in him, he would have 
 stared and thought them madmen ; yet something almost as 
 wild was in his instinct now. He had lost so much to keep 
 her honour from attainder ; he wished to meet the gaze of 
 her fair eyes once more before he went out to his exile. 
 
 In one of the string of waiting carriages he saw a loose 
 domino lying on the seat ; he knew the liveries and the foot- 
 men, and he signed them to open the door. ' Tell Count Carl 
 I have borrowed these,' he said to the servant, as he sprang 
 into the vehicle, sHpped the scarlet and black domino on, 
 took the mask, and left the carriage. The man touched his 
 ,I\.O^^h'at and said nothing ; he knew Cecil well as an intimate 
 riend of his young Austrian master. In that masquerade 
 
 ^ guise he was safe, for the few minutes, at least, which were 
 all he daredtake. 
 
 He went on, mingling among the glittering throng, and 
 pierced his way to the ball-room, the Venetian mask covering 
 his features. Many spoke to him ; by the scarlet and black 
 colours they took him for the Austrian. He answered none, 
 and threaded his way among the blaze of hues, the joyous 
 echoes of the music, the flutter of the silk and satin dominoes, 
 the mischievous challenge of whispers. His eyes sought 
 only one ; he soon saw her, in the white and silver mask- 
 dress, with the spray of carmine-hued eastern flowers, by 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 165 
 
 which he had been told days ago to recognise her. A crowd 
 of dominoes were about her, some masked, some not. Hei 
 eyes glanced through the envious disguise, and her lips were 
 laughing. He approached her with all his old tact in the 
 art d^arborer le cotillo7i ; not hurriedly, so as to attract notice, 
 but carefully, so as to glide into a place near her. 
 
 'You promised me this waltz,' he said very gently in her 
 ear. * I have come in time for it.' 
 
 She recognised him by his voice, and turned from a French 
 prince to rebuke him for his truancy, with gay raillery and 
 mock anger. 
 
 * Forgive me, and let me have this one waltz — please 
 do I ' She glanced at him a moment, and let him lead her 
 out. 
 
 * No one has my step as you have it, Bertie,' she mur- 
 mured, as they glided into the measure of the dance. 
 
 She thought his glance fell sadly on her as he smiled. 
 
 ' No ? — but others will soon learn it.' 
 
 Yet he had never threaded more deftly the maze of the 
 waltzers, never trodden more softly, more swiftly, or with 
 more science, the polished floor. The waltz was perfect ; she 
 did not know it was also a farewell. The delicate perfume 
 of her floating dress, the gleam of the scarlet flower-spray, 
 the flash of the diamonds studding her domino, the fragrance 
 of her lips as they breathed so near his own — they haunted 
 him many a long year afterwards. ~ 
 
 ""TOs~voice was very calm, his smile was very gentle, his 
 step, as he swung easily through the intricacies of the circle, 
 was none the less smooth and sure for the race that had so 
 late strained his sinews to bursting ; the woman he loved saw 
 no change in him ; but as the waltz drew to its end, she felt 
 his heart beat louder and quicker on her own, she felt his 
 hand hold her own more closely, she felt his head drooped over 
 her till his lips almost touched her brow ; — it was his last 
 embrace ; no other could be given here, in the multitude of 
 these courtly crowds. Then, with a few low-murmured 
 words that thrilled her in their utterance, and echoed in her 
 memory for years to come, he resigned her to the Austrian 
 Grand TDi] ke7 wBo was her next claimant, and left her silently 
 — for ever. 
 
 Less heroism has often proclaimed itself, with blatant 
 trumpet to the world — a martyrdom. 
 
i66 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He looked back once as he passed from the ball-room — 
 back to the sea of colours, to the glitter of light, to the moving 
 hues, amid which the sound of the laughing intoxicating 
 music seemed to float ; to the glisten of the jewels, and the 
 gold, and the silver, .to the scene, in a word, of the life that 
 \vould be his no more. lETe looked back in a long lingering 
 look, such as a man may give the gladness of the earth before 
 the gates of a prison close on him ; then he went out once 
 more into the night, threw the domino and the mask back 
 again into the carriage, and took his way, alone. 
 
 He passed along till he had gained the shadow of a by- 
 street, by a sheer unconscious instinct ; then he paused, and 
 looked round him — what could he do ? He wondered vaguely 
 if he were not dreaming ; the air seemed to reel about iiim, 
 and the earth to rock ; the very force of control he had 
 sustained made the reaction stronger ; he began to feel blind 
 and stupefied. How could he escape ? The railway statioa 
 would be guarded by those on the watch for him ; he had 
 but a few pounds in his pocket, hastily slipped in as he had 
 won them, 'money-down,' at icarU that day; all avenues 
 of escape were closed to him, and he knew that his limbs 
 would refuse to carry him with any kind of speed farther. He 
 had only the short precious hours remaining of the night m 
 which to make good his flight — and flight he must take to 
 save those for whom he had elected to sacrifice his life. Yet 
 how ? and where ? 
 
 A hurried, noiseless footfall came after him. Rake's voice 
 came breathless on his ear, while the man's hand went up in 
 the unforgotten soldier's salute — 
 
 ' Sir ! no words. Follow me, and I'll save you.' 
 
 The one well-known voice was to him like water in a desert 
 land ; he would have trusted the speaker's fidelity with his 
 lite, fie asked nothing, said nothing, but followed rapidly 
 and in silence, turning and doubling down a score of crooked 
 passages, and burrowing at the last like a mole in a still 
 deserted place on the outsldrts of the town, where some 
 close-set trees grew at the back of stables and outbuild- 
 ings. 
 
 In a streak of the white moonlight stood two hunters 
 saddled ; one was Forest King. With a cry, Cecil threw his 
 arms round the animal's neck ; he had no thought then except 
 tft&t he and the horse must part. 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 167 
 
 * Into saddle, sir ! quick as your life ! ' whispered Rake. 
 
 * We'll be far away from this d d den by morning.' 
 
 Cecil looked at him like a man in stupor — his arm still OY&t 
 Uie grey's neck. 
 
 ' He can have no stay in him ? He was deadbeat on the 
 course.' 
 
 ' I know he was, sir ; but he ain't now ; he was pisined ; 
 but I've a trick with a 'oss that'll set chat sort o' tbiug — if 
 it ain't gone too far, that is to say — right in a brace of shakes. 
 I doctored him ; he's hisself agen ; he'll take you till he 
 dbt^ijis.' 
 
 The King thrust his noble head closer in his master's 
 bosom, and made a little murmuring noise, as though he said, 
 
 * Try me ! ' 
 
 ' God bless you, Rake ! ' Cecil said, huskily. ' But 1 
 cannot take him ; he will starve with me. And — how did 
 you know of this ? ' 
 
 ' Beggin' your pardon, your honour, he'll eat chopped furze 
 with you befcter than he'll eat oats and hay along of a new 
 master, returned Rake, rapidly, tightening the girths. ' I 
 don't know nothin', sir, save that I heard you was in a 
 strait ; I don't want to know nothin' ; but I sees them cursed 
 eads a runnin' of you to earth, and thinks I to myself, 
 ** Come what will, the King will be the ticket for him." So 
 I ran to your room unbeknown, packed a little valise, and 
 got out the passports, then back again to the stables, and 
 saddled him Hke iightnin', and got 'em off, nobody knowing 
 but Bill there. I seed you go by into the Kursaal, and laid 
 in wait for you, sir. I made bold to bring Mother o' Pearl 
 for myself.' 
 
 And Rake stopped, breathless and hoarse with passion 
 and grief that he would not utter. He had heard more than 
 ke said. 
 
 ' For yourself ? ' echoed Cecil. * What do you mean ? My 
 good fellow, I am ruined. I shall be beggared from to-night 
 — utterly. I cannot even help you, or keep you, but Lord 
 Rockingham will do both for my sake.' 
 
 The ci-devant soldier struck his heel into the earth with a 
 fiery oath. -^ 
 
 * Sir, there ain't time for no words. Where you goes I ] 
 go. I'll follow you while there's a drop o' blood in me. y 
 You was good to me when I was a poor devil that every on« I 
 
 iUv, 
 
 ^^^ty^ 
 
168 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 scouted ; you shall have me with you to the last, if I die iot 
 it. There ! ' 
 \ Cecil's voice shook as he answered. The fidelity touched 
 |iim as adversity could not do. 
 
 * Eake, you are a noble fellow. I would take you, were 
 it possible ; but — in an hour I may be in a felon's prison. 
 If I escape that, I shall lead a life of such wretchedness 
 as * 
 
 ' That's not nothing to me, sir.' 
 
 * But it is much to me,' answered Cecil. * As things have 
 turned — life is over with me, Rake. What my own fate 
 may be I have not the faintest notion — but let it be what 
 it will, it must be a bitter one. I will not drag another 
 into it.' 
 
 * If you send me away, I'll shoot myself through the head, 
 sir, that's all.' 
 
 * You will do nothing of the kind. Go to Lord Rocking- 
 ham, and ask him from me to take you into his service. You 
 cannot have a kinder master.' 
 
 * I don't say nothing agen the Marquis, sir,' said Rake, 
 doggedly, ' he's a right-on generous gentleman, but he 
 aren't you. Let me go with you, if it's just to rub the King 
 down. Lord, sir ! you don't know what straits I've lived in 
 — what a lot of things I can turn my hand to — what a one I 
 am to fit myself into any rat-hole, and make it spicy. Why, 
 sir, I'm that born-scamp I am — I'm a deal happier on the 
 cross and getting my bread just anyhow, than I am when 
 I'm in clover like you've kep' me.* 
 
 j Rake's eyes looked up wistfully and eager as a dog's when 
 
 he prays to be let out of kennel to follow the gun ; his voice 
 'was husky and agitated with a strong excitement. Cecil 
 
 stood a moment, irresolute, touched and pained at the man's 
 
 spaniel-like afi'ection — yet not yielding to it. 
 
 'I thank you from my heart. Rake,' he said at length, 
 
 *but it must not be. I tell you my future life will be 
 
 beggary ' 
 
 * You'll want me anyways, sir,' retorted Rake, ashamed 
 of the choking in his throat. ' I ask your pardon for inter- 
 ruptin', but every second's that precious like. Besides, sir, 
 I've got to cut and run for my own sake. I've laid Willon's 
 head open down there in the loose-box ; and when he's come 
 to himself a pretty hue and cry he'll raise after me. He 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 169 
 
 painted the King, that's what he did ; and I told him so, and 
 I gev' it to him — one — two — amazin' 1 Get into saddle, 
 sir, for the Lord's sake ! and here. Bill — you run back, shut 
 the door, and don't let nobody know the 'osses are out till 
 the mornin'. Then look like a muff as you are, and say 
 nothin' 1 ' 
 
 The stable-boy stared, nodded assent, and sloped off. Rake 
 threw himself across the brown mare. 
 
 * Now, sir ! a steeplechase for our lives ! We'll be 
 leagues away by the day-dawn, and I've got their feed in the 
 saddlebags, so that tliey'U bait in the forests. Off, sir, 
 for God's sake, or the blackguards will be down on you 
 again ! ' 
 
 As he spoke the clamour and tread of men of the town 
 racing to the chase were wafted to them on the night wind, 
 drawing nearer and nearer ; Rake drew the reina tight in hia 
 hand in fury. 
 
 'There they come — the d d beaks 1 For the love of 
 
 mercy, sir, don't check now. Ten seconds more and they'll 
 be on you ; off, off I — or by the Lord Ha,rry, sir, you'll 
 make a murderer of me, and I'll kill the first man that lays 
 his hand on you I ' 
 
 The blaze of bitter blood was in the ex-Dragoon's fiery 
 face as the moon shone on it, and he drew out one of his 
 holster pistols, and swimg round in hia saddle facing the 
 narrow entrance of the lane, ready to shoot down the first of 
 the pursuit whose shadow should darken the broad stream of 
 white light that fell through the archway. ^^^^i 
 
 Cecil looked at him, and paused no more ; but vaulted -^ 
 into the old familiar seat, and Forest King bore him away", 
 through the starry night, with the brown mare racing her 
 best by his side. Away — through the sleeping shadows, 
 through the broad beaSlH'of the moon, through the odorous 
 scent of the crowded pines, through the soft breaking grey of 
 the dawn ; away — to mountain solitudes and forest silence, 
 and the shelter of lonely untracked ravines, and the woodland 
 lairs they must share with wolf and boar ; awaju-to flee with 
 the flight of the hunted fox, to race with me wakeful dread 
 of the deer ; away — to what fate, who could tell ? 
 
 Far and fasir they' rode* through the night, never drawing 
 rein. The horses laid well to their work ; their youth and 
 their mettle were roused, and they needed no touch of spur, 
 
17© UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 bnt neck and neck dashed down through the sullen grey ot 
 the dawn and the breaking flush of the first sunrise. On the 
 hard parched earth, on the dewladen moss, on the stretches 
 of wayside sward, on the dry white dust of the ducal roads, 
 their hoofs thundered, unfollowed, unechoed, the challenge of 
 no pursuit stayed them, and they obeyed the call that was 
 made on their strength with good and gallant willingness. 
 Far and fast they rode, happily knowing the country well ; 
 now through the darkness of night, now through the glim- 
 Biering daybreak. Tall walls of fir-crowned rocks passed by 
 them like a dream ; beetling clift's and summer foliage swept 
 past their eyes all fused and dim ; grey piles of monastic 
 buildings with the dull chimes tolling the hour flashed oa 
 their sight, to be lost in a moment ; corn lands yellowing for 
 the sickle, fields with the sheaves set-up, orchards ruddy with 
 fT'uit, and black barn-roofs lost in leafy nests, villages lying 
 among their hills like German toys caught in the hollow of 
 a guarding hand, masses of forests stretching wide, sombre 
 and silent and dark as a tomb ; the shine of water's silvery 
 line where it flowed in a rocky channel — they passed them 
 ^11 in the soft grey of the waning night, in the white veil 
 of the fragrant mists, in the stillness of sleep and of peace. 
 Passed them, racing for more than life, flying with the speed 
 of the wind. 
 
 * I failed him to-day through my foes and his,' Forest 
 King thought, as he laid his length out in his mighty 
 stride. * But I love him well ; I will save him to-night.' 
 And save him the brave brute did. The grass was so sweet 
 and so short, he longed to stop for a mouthful ; the brooks 
 looked so clear and so brown, he longed to pause for a drink ; 
 renewed force and reviving youth filled his loyal veins with 
 their fire ; he could have thrown himself down on that mossy 
 turf, and had a roll in its thyme and its lichens for sheer 
 joy that his strength had come back. But he would yield t» 
 none of these longings ; he held on for his master's sake, and 
 tried to think, as he ran, that this was only a piece of play — 
 only a steeplechase, for a silver vase and a lady's smile, suck 
 as he and his rider had so often run for, and so often won, im 
 those glad hours of the crisp winter noons of English Shirei 
 far away. He turned his eyes on the brown mare's and sh« 
 turned hers on his ; they were good friends in the stables at 
 home, and they understood one another now. * If 1 were 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 171 
 
 ▼hat I was yesterday, she wouldn't run even with w«/ 
 thought the King ; but they were doing good work together, 
 and he was too true a knight and too true a gentleman to be 
 jealous of Mother o' Pearl, so they raced neck and neck 
 through the dawn ; with the noisy clatter of watermiil 
 wheels, or the distant sound of a woodman's axe, or the 
 tolhng bell of a convent clock, the only sound on the air 
 aave the beat of the flying hoofs. 
 
 Away they went, mile on mile, league on league, tilF the 
 stars faded out in the blaze of the sun, and the tall pines 
 rose out of the gloom. Either his pursuers were baffled and 
 distanced, or no hue and cry was yet after him ; nothing 
 arrested them as they swept on, and the silent land lay in the 
 stillness of morning ere toil and activity awakened. It was 
 strangely still, strangely lonely, and the echo of the gallop 
 seemed to beat on the stirless, breathless solitude. As the 
 light broke and grew clearer and clearer, Cecil's face in it was 
 white as death as he galloped through the mists, a hunted 
 man, on whose head a price was set ; but it was quite calm 
 still, and very resolute — there was no Jmrking back in it. 
 
 They had raced nigh twenty English miles by the time the 
 chimes of a village were striking six o'clock ; it was the only 
 group of dwelhngs they had ventured near in their flight ; 
 the leaded lattices were thrust open with a hasty clang, and 
 women's heads looked out as the iron tramp of the hunters' 
 feet struck fire from the stones. A few cries were raised ; 
 one burgher called them to know their errand : they answered 
 nothing, but traversed the street with lightning speed, gone 
 from sight almost ere they were seen. A league farther on 
 was a wooded bottom, all dark and silent, with a brook mur- 
 muring through it under the leafy shade of lilies and the 
 tangle of water-plants ; there CecU checked the King and 
 threw himself out of saddle. 
 
 ' He is not quite himself yet,' he murmured, as he loosened 
 ttie girths and held back the delicate head from the perilous 
 €oid of the water to which the horse stretched so eagerly ; he 
 thought more of Forest King than he thought, even in that 
 hour, of himself. He did all that was needed with his own 
 hands ; fed him with the com from the saddlebags, cooled 
 him gently, led him to drink a cautious draught from the 
 bubbling little stream, then let him graze and rest under the 
 shade of the aromatic pines and the deep bronze leaves of the 
 
172 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 copper beeches ; it was almost dark, so heavy and thickly 
 laced were the branches, and exquisitely tranquil in the heart 
 of the hilly country, in the peace of the early day, with the 
 rushing of the forest brook the sole sound that was heard, 
 and the everlasting sighing of the pine-boughs overhead. 
 
 Cecil leaned awhile silently against one of the great gnarled 
 trunks, and Rake affected to busy himself with the mare ; in 
 his heart was a tumult of rage, a volcano of curiosity, a pent- 
 up storm of anxious amaze, but he would have let Mother o* 
 Pearl brain him with a kick of her iron plates rather than 
 press a single look that should seem like doubt, or seem like 
 insult in adversity to his fallen master. 
 
 Cecil's eyes, drooped and brooding, gazed a long half-hour 
 down in silence into the brook bubbling at his feet ; then he 
 lifted his head and spoke — with a certain formality and com- 
 mand in his voice, as though he gave an order on parade. 
 
 ' Rake, listen and do precisely what I bid you, neither 
 more nor less. The horses cannot accompany me, nor you 
 either; I must go henceforth where they would starve, and 
 you would do worse. I do not take the King into suffering, 
 nor you into temptation.' 
 
 Rake, who at the tone had fallen unconsciously into the 
 attitude of * attention,' giving the salute with his old mili- 
 tary instinct, opened his lips to speak in eager protestation. 
 Cecil put up his hand. 
 
 * I have decided ; nothing you can say will alter me. We 
 are near a by-station now ; if I find none there to prevent 
 me, I shall get away by the first train ; to hide in these woods 
 is out of the question. You will return by easy stages to 
 Baden, and take the horses at once to Lord Rockingham. 
 They are his now. Tell him my last wish was that he should 
 take you into his service ; and he will be a better master to 
 
 you than I have ever been. As for the King ' his lips 
 
 quivered, and his voice shook a little despite himself, * he 
 will be safe with him. I^hall go into some foreign service 
 — Ajiskmnj Russiajcu3-t6xican, whichever be open to me. I 
 would not risk such a horse as mine to be sold, ill treated, 
 tossed from owner to owner, sent in his old age to a knacker's 
 yard, or killed in a skirmish by a cannon-shot. Take both 
 him and the mare back, and go back yourself. BeHeve me, I 
 thank you from my heart for your noble oiier of fidelity, but 
 accept it I never shall.* 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 173 
 
 A dead pause came after his words ; Rake stood mute ; a 
 curious look, half-dogged, half- wounded, but very resolute, 
 had come on his face. Cecil thought him pained, and spoke 
 with an infinite gentleness : 
 
 * My good fellow, do not regret it, or fancy I have no 
 gratitude to you. I feel your loyalty deeply, and I know all 
 you would willingly suffer for me ; but it must not be. The ^ 
 mere offer of what you would do has been quite testimony v 
 enough of your truth and your worth. It is impossible for 
 me to tell you what has so suddenly changed my fortunes : it 
 is sufficient that for the future I shall be, if I live, what you -J 
 were— a private soldier in an army that needs a sword. But ^^ 
 let my fate be what it will, I go to it alojie. Spare me more o^ 
 speech, and simply obey my last command.* ^ 
 
 Quiet as the words were, there was a resolve in them nol^ 
 to be disputed, an authority not to be rebelled against. Rake | 
 stared, and looked at him blankly ; in this man who spoke to I 
 him with so subdued but so irresistible a power of command, / 
 he could scarcely recognise the gay, indolent, indulgent, / 
 'pococurante Guardsman, whose most serious anxiety had I 
 been the set of a lace tie, the fashion of his hunting- \ 
 dress, or the choice of the gold arabesques for his smoking- 
 slippers. 
 
 Rake was silent a moment, then his hand touched his cap 
 again. 
 
 ' Very well, sir,' and without opposition or entreaty he 
 turned to resaddle the mare. 
 
 Our natures are oddly inconsistent. Cecil would not have 
 taken the man into exile, and danger, and temptation, and 
 away from comfort and an honest life, for any consideration ; 
 yet it gave him something of a pang that Rake was so soon 
 dissuaded from following him, and so easily convinced of the 
 folly of his fidehty. But he had dealt himself a far deadlier 
 one when he had resolved to part for ever from the King. 
 He loved the horse better than he loved anything — fed from 
 his hand in foalhood, reared, broken, and trained under his 
 own eye and his own care, he had had a truer welcome from 
 those loving, lustrous eyes, than all his mistresses ever gave' 
 him. He had had so many victories, so many hunting runs, • 
 80 many pleasant days of winter and of autumn, with Forest 
 lung for his comrade and companion ! He could better bear 
 to sever from all other things than from the stable-monarch, 
 
174 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 whose brave heart never failed him, and whose honest lovt 
 was always his. 
 
 He stretched his hand out with his accustomed signal ; the 
 King Ufted his head where he grazed, and came to him with 
 the murmuring noise of pleasure he always gave at his master's 
 caress, and pressed his forehead against Cecil's breast, and 
 took such tender heed, such earnest soHcitude, not to harm 
 him with a touch of the mighty fore-hoofs, as those only who 
 care for and know horses well will understand in its 
 relation. 
 
 Cecil threw his arm over his neck, and leant his own head 
 down on it, so that his face was hidden. He stood motion- 
 less so many moments, and the King never stirred, but only 
 pressed closer and closer against his bosom, as though he knew 
 that this was his eternal farewell to his master. But little 
 light came there, the boughs grew so thickly ; and it was still 
 and solitary as a desert in the gloom of the meeting trees. 
 
 There have been many idols, idols of gold, idols of clay, 
 less pure, less true than the brave and loyal-hearted beast 
 from whom he parted now. 
 
 He stood motionless a while longer, and where his face was 
 hidden the grey silken mane of the horse was wet with great 
 slow tears that forced themselves through his closed eyes ; 
 then he laid his lips on the King's forehead, as he might have 
 touched the brow of the woman he loved ; and with a back- 
 ward gesture of his hand to his servant, plunged down into 
 the deep slope of netted boughs and scarce penetrable leafage, 
 that swung back into their places, and shrouded him from 
 sight with their thick unbroken screen. 
 
 'He's forgot me right and away in the King,' murmured 
 Rake, as he led Forest King away slowly and sorrowfully, while 
 the hunter pulled and fretted to force his way to his master. 
 
 * Well, it's only naturaJ hke. I've cause to care for him, 
 and plenty on it ; but he ain't no sort of reason to think 
 about me.' 
 
 That was the way the philosopher took his wound. 
 
 Alone, Cecil flung himself full length down on the turf 
 beneath the beech-woods, his arms thrown forward, his faoe 
 buried in the grass, all gay with late summer forest blossoms ; 
 for the hrst time the whole might of the ruin that had fallen 
 on him was understood by him ; for the first time it beat him 
 dov>'n beneath it as the overstrained tension of nerve and of 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 175 
 
 self-restraint had their inevitable reaction. He knew what 
 this thing was which he had done — he had given up his whole 
 future. 
 
 Though he had spoken lightly to his servant of his inten- 
 tion to enter a foreign army, he knew himself how few the 
 chances were that he could ever do so. It was possible that 
 Kockingham might so exert his influence that he would be 
 left unpursued ; but unless this chanced so (and Baroni had 
 seemed resolute to forego no part of his demands), the search 
 for him would be in the hands of the law ; and the wiles of 
 8ecret_pplice and of detectives* resources spread too far and 
 finely over the world for him tq_ have scarcely a hope of 
 altimate escape. 
 
 if he sought France, the Extradition Treaty would deliver 
 him up ; Russia — Austria — Prussia were of equal danger ; 
 he would be identified, and given up to trial. Into the 
 Italian service he knew many a scoundrel was received un- 
 questioned ; and he might try the Western world ; though he 
 had no means to pay the passage, he might work it ; he was 
 a good sailor ; yachts had been twice sunk under him, by 
 steamers, in the Solent and the Spezzia, and his own schooner 
 had once been fired at by mistake for a blockade runner, when 
 he had brought- to, and given them a broadside from his two 
 shotted guns before he would signal them their error. 
 
 As these things swept disordered and aimless through his 
 mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him ; lie, the 
 darling of Belgravia, the Guards' champion, the lover of Lady 
 Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless, wearily racking 
 his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to be 
 taken before the mast, or could stand before the tambour- 
 major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the same 
 flag. 
 
 For a while he lay there like a drunken man, heavy and 
 motionless, his brow resting on his arm, his face buried in the 
 grass ; he had parted more easily with the woman he loved 
 than he had parted with Forest King. The chimes of soma 
 far-off monastery, or castle-campanile, swung lazily in the 
 morning stillness ; the sound revived him, and recalled t« 
 him how little time there was if he would seek the flight that 
 had begun on impulse and was continued in a firm unshrink- 
 ing resolve : he must go on, and on, and on ; h© must burrow 
 like a fox, hide hke a beaien cur : he must put leagues 
 
176 ^ ..> '^ER TWO FLAGS :» w^^'*"'^'^ 
 
 between him and all who had ever known him ; he must s ink^V ' 
 his very name, and identity, and existence, under gome im- 
 penelrahle oHcurity, or'the burden he had taken up for others' 
 sake would be uselessly borne. There must be action of some 
 sort or other, instant and unerring. 
 
 * It don't matter,' he thought, with the old idle indiffer- 
 l ence, oddly beco ming in that extreme moment the very height 
 {of stoic ph'ilosophy, without any thought or effort to be such. 
 
 * I was going to the bad of my own accord ; I must have cut 
 and run for the debts, if not for this ; it would have been the 
 same thing, anyway, so it's just as well to do it for them. 
 Life's over, and I'm a fool that I don't shoot myself.' 
 
 But there was too imperious a spirit in the Royallieu blood 
 to let him give in to disaster and do this. He rose slowly, 
 staggering a little, and feeling blinded and dazzled with the 
 blaze of the morning sun as he went out of the beech-wood. 
 There were the marks of the hoofs on the damp, dewy turf ; 
 his lips trembled a little as he saw them — he would never 
 ride the horse again ! 
 
 Some two miles, more or less, lay between him and the 
 railway. He was not certain of his way, and he felt a sicken- 
 ing exhaustion on him ; he had been without food since his 
 breakfast before the race. A gamekeeper's hut stood near 
 the entrance of the wood ; he had much recklessness in him, 
 and no caution. He entered through the half-open door, and 
 asked the keeper, who was eating his sausage and drinking 
 his Lager, for a meal. 
 
 'I'll give you one if you'll bring me down that hen- 
 harrier,' growled the man in South German, pointing to the 
 bird that was sailing far off, a mere speck in the sunny 
 sky. 
 
 Cecil took the rifle held out to him, and without seemmg 
 even to pause to take aim, fired. The bird dropped like a 
 stone through the air into the distant woods. There was no 
 tremor in his wrist, no uncertainty in his measure. The 
 keeper stared ; the shot was one he had thought beyond any 
 man's range, and he set food and drink before his guest with 
 a crestfallen surprise, oddly mingled with veneration. 
 
 * You might have let me buy my breakfast, without making 
 me do murder,' said Bertie, quietly, as he tried to eat. The 
 meal was coarse — he could scarcely touch it, but he drank the 
 beer down thirstily, and took a crust of bread. He "sUnped 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 177 
 
 his ring, a great sapphire graven with his crest, off his finger, 
 and held it out to the man. 
 
 * That is worth fifty double-Fredericks ; will you take it in 
 exchange for your rifle and some powder and ball ? ' 
 
 The German stared again, open-mouthed, and clinched the 
 bargain eagerly. He did not know anything about gems, but 
 the splendour of this dazzled his eye, while he had guns more 
 than enough, and could get many others at his lord's cost. 
 Cecil fastened a shot-belt round him, took a powder-flask and 
 cartridge-case, and with a few words of thanks went on his 
 way. 
 
 Now that he held the rifle in his hand, he felt ready for the 
 work that was before him ; if hunted to bay, at any rate he 
 could now have a struggle for his liberty. The keeper stood 
 bewildered, gazing blankly after him down the vista of pines. 
 
 ' Hein 1 hein I ' he growled, as he looked at the sapphire 
 sparkling in his broad brown palm ; ' I never saw ■ such a 
 with-lavishness-wasteful - and - with - courteous - speech - laconic 
 gentleman ! I wish I had not let him have the gun ; he will 
 take his own life, belike ; ach, Gott I he will take his own hfe ! ' 
 
 But Cecil had not bought it for that end — though he had 
 called himself a fool for not sending a bullet through his brain, 
 to quench in eternal darkness this ruined and wretched life 
 that alone remained to him. He walked on through the still 
 summer dawn, with the width of the country stretching sun- 
 steeped around him. The sleeplessness, the excitement, the 
 misery, the wild running of the past night had left him 
 strengthless and racked with pam, but he knew that he must 
 press onward or be caught, sooner or later, like netted game 
 in the poacher's silken mesh. Where to go, what to do, he 
 knew no more than if he were a child ; everything had always 
 been ready to his hand ; the only thought required of him had 
 been how to amuse himself and avoid being bored ; now, 
 thrown alone on a mighty calamity, and brought face to face 
 with the severity and emergency of exertion, he was like a 
 pleasure-boat beaten under high billows, and driven far out 
 to sea by the madness of a raging nor- 'wester. He had no 
 conception what to do ; he had but one resolve — to keep hia 
 secret, if to do it he killed himself with the rifle his sapphire 
 ring had bought. 
 
 Carelessly daring always, he sauntered now into the station 
 for which he had made, without a sign on him that could 
 
178 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 attract observation ; he wore still the violet velvet Spanish- 
 like dress, the hessians, and the broad-leafed felt hat with an 
 eagle's feather fastened in it, that he had worn at the races ; 
 and with the gun in his hand there was nothing to distinguish 
 him from any tourist ' milor,' except that in one hand he 
 carried his own valise. He cast a rapid glance around ; no 
 warrant for his apprehension, no announcement of his per- 
 sonal appearance had preceded him here ; he was safe — safe 
 in that ; safer still in the fact that the train rushed in so im- 
 mediately on his arrival there, that the few people about had 
 no time to notice or speculate upon him. The coupe was 
 empty, by a happy chance ; he took it, throwing his money 
 down with no heed that when the little he had left was once 
 expended he would be penniless, and the train whirled on 
 with him, plunging into the heart of forest and mountain, and 
 the black gloom of tunnels, and the golden seas of corn- 
 harvest. He was alone ; and he leant his head on his hands, 
 and thought, and thought, and thought, till the rocking, and 
 the rushing, and the whirl, and the noise of the steam on 
 his ear and the giddy gyrations of his brain in the ex- 
 haustion of overstrung exertion, conquered thought. With 
 the beating of the engine seeming to throb like the great 
 swinging of a pendulum through his mind, and the whirling 
 of the country passing by him like a confused phantasmagoria, 
 his eyes closed, his aching limbs stretched themselves out to 
 rest, a heavy dreamless sleep fell on him, the sleep of intense 
 bodily fatigue, and he knew no more. 
 
 Gendarmes awoke him to see his visa. He showed it them 
 by sheer mechanical instinct, and slept again in that dead 
 weight of slumber the moment he was alone. When he had 
 taken his ticket and they had asked him to where it should 
 be, he had answered, to their amaze, * to the farthest place it 
 goes,' and he was borne on now unwitting where it went ; 
 through the rich champaign and the barren plains, through 
 the reddening vintage, and over the dreary plateaux ; through 
 antique cities, and across broad flowing rivers ; through the 
 cave of riven rocks, and above nestling, leafy valleys ; on and 
 on, on and on, while he knew nothing, as the opium-like sleep 
 of intense weariness held him in its stupor. 
 
 He awoke at last with a start ; it was evening ; the still 
 twiliglit was settling over all the land, and the train was 
 still rushing onward, fleet as the wind. His eyes, as they 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE 179 
 
 opened dreamily and blindly, fell on a face half obscured in 
 
 the gloaming ; he leaned forward bewildered and doubting 
 
 his senses. ^ 
 
 ' Rake I ' "*^ 
 
 Rake gave the salute hurriedly and in embarrassment. / 
 
 * It's I, sir ! — yes, sir.' / 
 Cecil thought himself dreaming still. \ 
 
 * You I You had my orders ? ' ^ 
 
 * Yes, sir, I had your orders,' murmured the ex-soldier, 
 more confused than he had ever been in the whole course of 
 his audacious life, ' and they was the first I ever disobeyed 
 —they was. You see, sir, they was just what I couldn't 
 swallow nohow — that's the real right down fact I Send me 
 to the devil, Mr. Cecil, for you, and I'll go at the first 
 biddin', but leave you just when things are on the cross for 
 you, damn ine if I will ! — beggin' your pardon, sir ! ' 
 
 And Rake, growing fiery and eloquent, dashed his cap 
 down on the floor of the coupe with an emphatic declaration 
 of resistance. Cecil looked at him in silence ; he was not 
 certain still whether this w-ere not a fantastic folly he was 
 dreaming. 
 
 'Damn me if I will, Mr. Cecil I You won't keep me — 
 very well ; bufc you can't prevent me follerin' of you, and 
 foUer you I will ; and so there's no more to be said about 
 it, sir, but just to let me have my own lark, as one may say. 
 You said you'd go to the station, I went there ; you took 
 your ticket, I took my ticket. I've been travelling behind 
 you till about two hours ago ; then I looked at you, you was 
 asleep, sir. *' I don't think my master's quite well," says I 
 to Guard ; *' I'd like to get in there along of him." •' Get in 
 with you, then," says he (only we was jabbering that wil- 
 lainous tongue 0' theirs), for he sees the name on my traps 
 is the same as that on your traps — and in I get. Now,^ 
 Mr. Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don't think I'm a/ 
 insolent ne'er-do-well for having been and gone and disobeyedj 
 you ; but you was good to me when I was sore in want of] 
 it ; you was even good to my dog — rest his soul, the poor I 
 beast ! there never were a braver ! — and stick to you I will, ) 
 till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it's only* 
 being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight ; if I was to' 
 leave you I should become a bad 'un again, right and away; 
 Don't send me from you, sir, as yon took mercy on me once.*\ 
 
i8o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Rake's Toice shook a little toward the close of his harangue, 
 and in the shadows of evening light, as the train plunged 
 through the gathering gloom, his ruddy bright bronzed face 
 looked veiy pale and wistful. 
 
 Cecil stretched out his hand to him in silence that spoke 
 better than words. 
 
 Rake hung his head. 
 
 ' No, sir ; you're a gentleman, and I've been an awful 
 scamp 1 It's enough honour for me that you luoulcl do it. 
 When I'm more worth it, p'raps — but that won't never 
 be.' 
 
 * You are worth it now, my gallant fellow.' His voice 
 was very low; the man's loyalty touched him keenly. 'It 
 was only for yourself, Rake, that I ever wished you to leave 
 me.' 
 
 * God bless you, sir,' said Rake, passionately ; * them 
 words are better nor ten tosses of brandy ! You see, sir, I'm 
 so spry and happy in a wild life, I am ; and if so be as you 
 go to them American parts as you spoke orf, why I know 'em 
 ji;ist as well as I know Newmarket Heath, every bit ! They're 
 terriHe rips in them parts, kill you as soon as look at you ; 
 it makes things uncommon larky out there, uncommon spicy. 
 You aren't never sure but what there's a bowie-knife a waiting 
 
 Vior you.' 
 
 With which view of the delights of Western life. Rake, 
 * feeling like a fool,' as he thought to himself, for which 
 reason he had diverged into Argentine memories, applied 
 himself to the touching and examining of the rifle with that 
 tenderness which only gunnery love and lore produce. 
 
 Cecil eat silent awhile, his head drooped down on his 
 hands, while the evening deepened to night. At last he 
 looked up. 
 
 ' The King ? Where is he ? ' 
 
 Rake blushed shamefacedly under his tanned skin. 
 
 ' Beggin' your pardon, sir, behind you.' 
 
 ' Behind me ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, sir ; him and the brown mare. I couldn't do not 
 nothin' else with 'em, you see, sir, so I shipped him along 
 with us ; they don't care for the train a bit, bless their hearts, 
 and I've got a sharp boy a minding of 'em. You can easily 
 send 'em on to England from Paris if you're determined to 
 part with 'em, but you know the King always was fond of 
 
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE i8i 
 
 drums and trumpets and that like. You remember, sir 
 when he was a colt we broke him into it and taught him a 
 bit of manceuvring, 'cause till you found what pace he had 
 in him, you'd thought of making a charger of him. He loves 
 the noise of soldiering — he do ; and if he thought you was 
 goin' away without him, he'd break his heart, Mr. Cecil, sir. 
 It was all I could do to keep him from follerin' of you this 
 morning, he sawed my arms off a'most.' 
 
 With which. Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of 
 unpardonable disobedience and outrageous interference, hung 
 his head over the gun, a little anxious and a good deal 
 ashamed. 
 
 Cecil smiled a little despite himself. 
 
 ' Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid ; you are 
 terribly insubordinate ! ' 
 
 He had not the heart to say more ; the man's fidelity was 
 too true to be returned with rebuke ; and stronger than all 
 surprise and annoyance was a strange mingling of pain and 
 pleasure in him to think that the horse he loved so well was 
 still so near him, the comrade of his adversity, as he had been 
 the companion of his happiest hours. 
 
 * These things will keep him a few days,' he thought, 
 as he looked at his hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in 
 each of his wristband-studs. He would have pawned every ' 
 atom he had about him to have had the King with him a i 
 week longer. 
 
 The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a 
 coming tempest drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward 
 through the thickening darkness, through the spectral country 
 — it was like his life, rushing headlong down into impene- 
 trable gloom. The best, the uttermost that he could look 
 for was a soldier's grave, far away under some foreign soil. 
 
 A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in 
 her own boudoir in her Baden suite ; she was going to dine 
 with an Archduchess of Russia, and the splendid jewels of 
 her House glittered through the black shower of her laces, 
 and crowned her beautiful glossy hair, her dehcate imperial 
 head. In her hands was a letter — oddly written in pencil 
 on a leaf torn out of a betting-book, but without a tremor or 
 a change in the writing itself. And as she stood a shiver 
 
r82 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Bhook her frame ; in the solitude of her lighted and luxurious 
 chamber her cheek grew pale, her eyes grew dim. 
 
 * To refute the charge,' ran the last words of what was 
 at best but a fragment, ' I must have broken my promise to 
 you, and have compromised your name. Keeping silence 
 myself, but letting the trial take place, law-inquiries, so exe- 
 crable and so minute, would soon have traced through others 
 that I was with you that evening. To clear myself I must 
 have attainted your name with public slander, and drawn 
 this horrible ordeal on you before the world. Let me be 
 thought guilty. It matters little. Henceforth I shall be 
 dead to all who know me, and my ruin would have exiled me 
 without this. Do not let an hour of grief for me mar your 
 peace, my dearest ; think of me with no pain, Beatrice, only 
 with some memory of our past love. I have not strength yet 
 to say — forget me ; and yet — if it be for your happiness — blot 
 out from your remembrance all thought of w^hat we have been 
 to one another ; all thought of me and of my life, save to 
 remember now and then that I was dear to you.' 
 
 The words grew indistinct before her sight, they touched 
 
 the heart of the world-worn coquette, of the victorious sove- 
 
 i reign, to the core ; she trembled greatly as she read them. 
 
 \ For — in her hands was hisj^kt^ Though no hint of this 
 
 I was breathed^n his"f are well letter, she knew that with a 
 
 word she could clear him, free him, and call him back from 
 
 exile and shame, give him once more honour and guiltlessness 
 
 in the sight of the world. With a word she could do this : 
 
 his life was in the balance, that she held as utterly as though 
 
 ; it were now hers to sign, or to destroy his death-warrant. It 
 
 '\rested with her to speak, and to say he had no guilt. 
 
 But to do this she must sacrifice herself. She stood mute, 
 irresolute, a shudder running through her till her diamonds 
 shook in the light ; the heavy tears stole slowly down one by 
 one and fell upon the blurred and blackened paper ; her heart 
 ached with an exceeding bitterness. Then, shudderingly still, 
 and as though there were a coward crime in the action, her 
 hand unclosed, and let the letter fall into the spirit flame of a 
 silver lamp burning by ; the words that were upon it merited 
 a better fate, a fonder cherishing, but — they would have com- 
 promised her. She let them fall, and burn, and wither. 
 With them she gave up his life to its burden of shame, to its 
 fate of exile. 
 
IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS 183 
 
 She would hear his crime condemned, and her lips would 
 not open ; she would hear his name aspersed, and her voice 
 would not be raised ; she would know that he dwelt in misery, 
 or died under foreign suns unhonoured and unmourned, while 
 tongues around her would babble of his disgrace — and she 
 would keep her peace. 
 
 She loved him — yes ; but she loved better the dignity in 
 which the world held her, and the diamonds from which the 
 law would divorce her if their love were known. 
 
 Shejacrificed him for her reputation and her jewels ; the 
 choice was thoroughly a woman's. 
 
 CHAPTER Xm 
 
 IN THE CAF^ OF THE CHASSEUBS 
 
 The red-hot light of the afterglow still burn d on the 
 waters of the bay, and shed its Egyptian-like lustre on the 
 city that lies in the circle of the Sahel, with the Mediter- 
 ranean so softly lashing with its violet waves the feet of the 
 white sloping town. The sun had sunk down in fire — the 
 sun that once looked over those waters on the legions of 
 Scipio, and the iron brood of Hamilcar, and that now gave its 
 lustre on the folds of the French flags as they floated above ; 
 the shipping of the harbour, and on the glitter of the French ■ 
 arms, as a squadron of the army of Algeria swept back over '' 
 the hills to their barracks. Pell-mell in its fantastic confii^, 
 sion, its incongruous blending, its forced mixture of two races, \ 
 that will touch but never mingle, that will be chained together 
 but will never assimilate, the Gallic-Moorish life of the city 
 poured out ; all the colouring of Haroun al Raschid scattered 
 broadcast among Parisian fashion and French routine. Away, 
 yonder on the spurs and tops of the hills, the green sea-pines 
 seemed to pierce the transparent air ; in the Cabash old 
 dreamy Arabian legends poetic as Hafiz seem still to linger 
 here and there under the foliage of hanging gardens or the 
 picturesque curves of broken terraces ; in the distance the 
 brown rugged Kabyl mountains lay like a couched camel, and 
 far off against the golden haze a single palm rose, at a few 
 
r84 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 rare intervals, with its drooped curled leaves, as though to 
 <^ recall, amid the shame of foreign domination, that this was 
 r once the home of Hannibal, the Africa that had made Rome 
 ' tremble. 
 
 J^ In the straight white boulevarts, as in the winding ancient 
 
 ^ ? streets, under the huge barn -like walls of barracks, as beneath 
 
 the marvellous mosaics of mosques, the strange bizarre con- 
 
 • j flict of European and Oriental life spread its panorama. Staff 
 
 I I officers, all a-glitter with crosses, galloped past ; mules, laden 
 
 :n,] with green maize and driven by lean brown Bedouins, swept 
 
 ' j past the plate-glass windows of bonbon shops ; grave white- 
 
 j bearded sheiks drank petits verres in the guinguettes ; sapeurs, 
 
 j Chasseurs, Zouaves, cantini^res, all the varieties of French 
 
 i 1 military life, mingled with jet-black Soudans, desert kings 
 
 j wrathful and silent, eastern women shrouded in haick and 
 
 serroual, eagle-eyed Arabs flinging back snow-white burnous, 
 
 and handling ominously the jewelled hilts of their cangiars. 
 
 Alcazar chansons rang out from the caf6s, while in their 
 
 midst stood the mosque, that had used to resound with the 
 
 , Muezzin ; Bijou-blondine, and Bebee La-la, and all the sister- 
 
 I heroines of demi;monde dragged their voluminous Paris-made 
 
 I dresses side by side with Moorish beauties, who only dared 
 
 I show the gleam of their bright black eyes through the yasmak ; 
 
 I the r&verhercs ^ were lit in the Place du Gouvernement, and a 
 
 i group fit for the days of Bolyman the Magnificent sat under 
 
 ''■ the white marble beauty of the Mohammedan church ; * Bieii 
 
 n'est sacri pourun sapeur 1 ' was being smig to a circle of sous- 
 
 officiers,^ close in the ear of a patriarch serenely majestic as 
 
 Abraham ; gas-lights were flashing, cigar shops were filling, 
 
 nev/spapers were being road, the Rigolboche was being danced, 
 
 commis-voyageurs ^ were chattering with grisettes, drums were 
 
 'beating, trumpets were sounding, bands were playing, and, 
 
 amid it all, grave men were dropping on their square of carpet 
 
 to pray, brass trays of sweetmeats were passing, ostrich eggs 
 
 were dangling, henna-tipped fingers were drawing the envious 
 
 veil close, and noble Oriental shadows were gliding to and fro 
 
 through the open doors of the mosques, like a picture of the 
 
 "Arabian Nights," like a poem of dead Islamism — in a 
 
 word; it was Algiers at evening. 
 
 ' Lamps. - Non-commissioned officers. 
 
 • Oommeroial travellers. 
 
IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS 185 
 
 In one of the oafes there, a mingling of all the nations 
 under the sun were drinking demi-tasses, absinthe, Vermont, 
 or old wines, in the comparative silence that had succeeded 
 to a song, sung by a certain favourite of the Spahis, known as 
 Loo-Loo-j'n-m'en soucie-guere from Mile. Loo-Loo's well- 
 known habits of independence and bravado, which last had 
 gone once so far as shooting a man through the chest in the 
 Rue Bab-al-Oued, and setting all the gendarmes and sergeants- 
 de-ville at defiance afterwards. Half a dozen of that famous 
 regiment the Chasseurs d'Afrigue were gathered together, 
 some with their feet resting ^n the little marble-topped tables, 
 some reading the French papers, all smoking their inseparable 
 companions — the briHe-guezUes ; ^ — fine, stalwart, sunburnt 
 fellows, with faces and figures that the glowing colours of 
 their uniform set off to the best advantage. 
 
 ' Loo-Loo was in fine voice to-night,' said one. 
 
 ' Yes, she took plenty of cognac before she sang ; that 
 always clears her voice,' said a second, 
 
 ' And I think that did her spirits good, shooting that 
 Kabyl,' said a third. ' By the way, did he die ? * 
 
 'N'sais pas,' said the third, with a shrug of his shoulders ; 
 * Loo-Loo's a good aim.' 
 
 ' Sac k papier, yes ! Rire-pour-tout taught her.* 
 
 'Ah t There never was a shot like Rire-pour-tout. When 
 he went out, he always asked his adversary, " Where will you 
 like it ? your lungs, your heart, your brain ? It is quite a 
 matter of choice " — and whichever they chose, he shot there. 
 Le pauvre Rire-pour-tout ! he was always good-natured.' 
 
 ' And did he never meet his match ? ' asked a sous-officier 
 of the line. 
 
 The speaker looked down on the piou-^iou ^ with superb 
 contempt, and twisted his moustaches. * Monsieur ! how 
 could he ? He was a Chasseur.' 
 
 * But, if he never met his match, how did he die ? ' pur- 
 sued the irreverent piou-pioii — a little wiry man, black as a 
 berry, agile as a monkey, tough and short as a pipe-stopper. 
 
 The magnificent Chasseur laughed in his splendid disdain. 
 *A piou-pimi never killed him, that I promise you. He 
 spitted half a dozen of you before breakfast, to give him h 
 relish. How did Rire-pour-tout die ? I will tell you.' 
 
 ' Short pipes. * Infantry soldier. 
 
i86 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He dipped his long moustaches into a beaker of still cham- 
 pagne : Claude, Viscomte de Chanrellon, though in the ranks, 
 could afford those luxuries. 
 
 * He died this way, did Rire-pour-tout ? Dieu de Dieu ! a 
 very good way too. Send us all the like when our time 
 comes ! We were out yonder ' (and he nodded his handsome 
 head outwards to where the brown seared plateaux and the 
 Kabyl mountains lay). ' We were hunting Arabs, of course 
 — pot-shooting rather, as we never got nigh enough to their 
 main body to have a clear charge at them. Rire-pour-tout 
 grew sick of it. " This won't do," he said ; " here's two weeks 
 gone by, and I haven't shot anything but kites and jackals. 
 I shall get my hand out." For Rire-pour-tout, as the army 
 knows, somehow or other, generally potted his man every 
 day, and he missed it terribly. Well, what did he do ? He 
 rode off one morning and found out the Arab camp, and he 
 waved a white flag for a parley. He didn't dismount, but 
 he just faced the Arabs and spoke to their Sheik. " Things 
 are slow," he said to them. ** I h^^ve come for a little amuse- 
 ment. Set aside six of your best warriors, and I'll fight 
 them one after another for the honour of France, and a drink 
 of brandy to the conqueror." They demurred ; they thought 
 it unfair to him to have six to one. " Ah ! " he laughed, " you 
 have heard of Rire-pour-tout, and you are afraid ! " That put 
 their blood up : they said they would fight him before all his 
 Chasseurs. " Come, and welcome," said Rire-pour-tout ; *' and 
 not a hair of your beards shall be touched except by me." So 
 the bargain was made for an hour before sunset that night. 
 Mort de Dieu ! that was a grand duel ! ' 
 
 He dipped his long moustaches again into another beaker 
 of still. Talking was thirsty work ; the story was well 
 known in all the African army, but the piou-piou, having 
 served in China, was new to the soil. 
 
 * The General was ill pleased when he heard it, and half 
 foi arresting Rire-pour-tout ; but — sacr6 ! — the thing was 
 done ; our honour was involved ; he had engaged to fight these 
 men, and engaged for us to let them go in peace afterwards ; 
 there was no more to be said, unless we had looked like 
 cowards, or traitors, or both. There was a wide level 
 plateau in front of our camp, and the hills were at our backs 
 — a fine field for the duello ; and, true to time, the Arabs 
 filed on to the plain, and fronted us in a long line, with their 
 
IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS i8y 
 
 standards, and their crescents, and their cymbals and reed- 
 pipes, and kettle-drums, all glittering and sounding. Sac a 
 "papicr I there was a show, and we could not fight one of 
 them ! We were drawn up in line — Horse, Foot, and Artil- 
 lery — Rire-pour-tout all alone, some way in advance, mounted 
 of course. The General and the Sheik had a conference ; 
 then the play began. There were six Arabs picked out — the 
 flower of the army — all white and scarlet, and in their 
 handsomest bravery, as if they came to an aoucla. They were 
 fine men — diahle ! — they were fine men. Now the duel was 
 to be with swords ; these had been selected ; and each Arab 
 was to come against Rire-pour-tout singly, in succession. 
 Our drums rolled the 'pas de charge, and their cymbals clashed ; 
 they shouted "Fantasia ! '' and the first Arab rode at him. 
 Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went his steel 
 through the Bedouin's lung before you could cry hol^ ! — a 
 death-stroke, of course. Rire-pour-tout always killed : that 
 was his perfect science. Another and another and another 
 came, just as fast as the blood flowed. You know what the 
 Arabs are — vous autres ? How they v^heel and swerve and 
 fight flying, and pick up their sabre from the ground, while 
 their horse is galloping ventre d terre, and pierce you here and 
 pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks ? 
 You know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after 
 another, more like devils than men. Mort de Dieu ! it was a 
 magnificent sight I He was gashed here and gashed there ; 
 but they could never unseat him, try how they would ; and 
 one after another he caught them sooner or later, and sent 
 them reeling out of their saddles, till there was a great red 
 lake of blood all round him, and five of them lay dead or 
 dying down in the sand. He had mounted afresh twice, 
 three horses had been killed underneath him, and his jacket 
 all hung in strips where the steel had slashed it. It was 
 grand to see, and did one's heart good ; but — ventre hleii I — 
 how one longed to go in too. 
 
 ' There was only one left now — a young Arab, the Sheik's 
 son, and down he came like the wind. He thought with the 
 dhock to unhorse Rire-pour-tout, and finish him then at his 
 leisure. Y'^ou could hear the crash as they met like two huge 
 cymbals smashing together. Their chargers bit and tore at 
 each other's manes ; they were twined in together there as if 
 khey were but one man and one beast ; they shook and they 
 
r88 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 swayed and they rocked ; the sabres played about their heads 
 so quick that it was like lightuing as they flashed and twirled 
 in the sun ; the hoofs trampled up the sand till a yellow 
 cloud hid their struggle, and out of it all you could see waa 
 the head of a horse tossing up and sponting with foam, or a 
 sword-blade lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled 
 down a little, the sand-mist cleared away, the Arab's saddle 
 was empty, but Eire -pour- tout sat like a rock. The old 
 Chief bowed his head. *' It is over 1 Allah is great ! " And 
 he knew his son lay there dead. Then we broke from the 
 ranks, and we rushed to the place where the chargers and 
 men were piled like so many slaughtered sheep. Rire-pour- 
 tout laughed such a gay ringing laugh as the desert never 
 / 'had heard. '* Vive la Erance 1 " he cried. " And now bring 
 j me my toss of' brandy." Then down headlong out of his 
 I stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse ; and when we 
 lifted him up there were two broken sword-blades buried in 
 him, and the blood was pouring fast as water out of thirty 
 wounds and more. That was how Rire-pour-tout died, pio2i- 
 pioti, laughing to the last. Sacrebleu ! it was a splendid end ; 
 \J. wish I were sure of the like.' 
 
 And Claude de Cbanrellon drank down his third beaker, 
 for over-much speech made him thirsty. 
 
 The men around him emptied their glasses in honour of the 
 dead hero. 
 
 * Rire-pour-tout was a croqtie-mitaine,' ^ they said solemnly, 
 with almost a sigh, so tendering by their words the highest 
 funeral oration. 
 
 * You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose '? ' 
 asked a voice in very pure French. The speaker was leaning 
 against the open door of the caf6 ; a tall, lightly built man, 
 dressed in a velvet shooting tunic, much the worse for wind 
 and weather, a loose shirt, and jack-boots splashed and 
 worn out. 
 
 ' When we are at it, monsieur,' returned the Chasseur. 
 ' I only wish we had more.' 
 
 * Of course. Are you in need of recruits ? ' 
 
 * They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves,' smiled 
 Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed 
 him with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. ' Still, 
 
 ' Fire-eater. 
 
IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS 189 
 
 a good sword brings its welcome. Do you ask sericusly, 
 monsieur ? * 
 
 The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little 
 piou-piou drowning his mortiiication in some cura9oa, the 
 idlers reading the Ahhah or the Presse, the Chasseurs lounging 
 over their drink, the ecarte players lost in their game, all 
 looked up at the new-comer. They thought he looked a 
 likely wearer of the dead honours of Rire- pour-tout. 
 
 He did not answer the questions Uterally, but came over 
 from the doorway and seated himself at the little marble 
 table opposite Claude, leaning his elbows on it. 
 
 * I have a doubt,' he said. * I am more inclined to your 
 foes.' 
 
 Dieu de Dieu ! ' ejaculated Chanrellon, pulling at his 
 tawny moustaches. * A bold thing to say before five 
 Chasseurs.' 
 
 He smiled a little contemptuously, a little amusedly. 
 
 * I am not a croq_ue-mitaine, perhaps ; but I say what I 
 think, with little heed of my auditors usually.' 
 
 Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. 
 
 * He is a croque-mitaine, he thought. * He is not to be 
 lost.' 'K?^ 
 
 M -ptefer your foes,' went on the other, quite quietly ,'^!i7< 
 quite listlessly, as though the glittering, gaslit caf6 were not' i^ ^ 
 full of French soldiers. ' In the first place, they are on the 
 losing side ; in the second they are the lords of the soil ; in 
 the third, they Uve as free as air ; and in the fourth, they 
 have undoubtedly the right of the quarrel ! ' * 
 
 * Monsieur ! ' cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on 
 their swords, fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily 
 up from under the long lashes of his lids, and went on, as 
 though they had not spoken. 
 
 * I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours, 
 Rire-pour-tout, did, but I don't think it's worth while,' he 
 said, carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. 
 
 * Brawling's bad style ; we don't do it. I was saying, I like 
 your foes best ; mere matter of taste ; no need to quarrel over 
 it — that I see. I shall go into their service or into yours, 
 monsieur — will you play a game of dice to decide ? ' 
 
 * Decide ?— but how ? ' 
 ' Why — this way,' said the other, with the weary list- 
 
 lessness of one who cares not two straws how things turn. 
 
190 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 • If I win I go to the Arabs ; if you win I come to your 
 
 ranks.' 
 
 ' Mort de Dieu ! it is a droll gambling/ murmured Chan- 
 rellon. * But — if you do win, do you think we shall let you 
 go off to our enemies 1 Pas si bete, monsieur I * ^ 
 
 * Yes, you will '' said the other, quietly. * Men who 
 knew what honour meant enough to redeem Rire-pour-tout's 
 ]Dledge of safety to the Bedouins, will not take advantage of 
 an openly confessed and unarmed adversary.* 
 
 A murmur of ratification ran through his listeners. 
 Chanrellon swore a mighty oath. 
 
 * Pardieu, No. You are right. If you want to go, you 
 shall go. HoltL there ! bring the dice. Champagne, monsieur ? 
 Vermont? Cognac?' 
 
 * Nothing, I thank you,' 
 
 He leant back with an apathetic indolence and indifference, 
 oddly at contrast with the injudicious daring of his war- 
 pro voldng words, and the rough campaigning that he sought ; 
 the assembled Chasseurs eyed him curiously ; they liked hia 
 manner, and they resented his first speeches ; they noted every 
 particular about him — his delicate white hands, his weather- 
 worn and travel- stained dress, his fair aristocratic features, 
 his sweeping abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless 
 way ; and they were uncertain what to make of him. 
 • The dice were brought. 
 
 ' What stakes, monsieur ? ' asked Chanrellon. 
 
 * Ten napoleons a side — and — the Arabs.' 
 
 He set ten napoleons down on the table ; they were the 
 only coins he had in the world ; it was very characteristic 
 that he risked them. 
 
 They threw the main — two sixes. 
 
 * You see,' he murmured, with a half smile, * the dice 
 know it is a drawn duel between you and the Arabs.' 
 
 ' C'est un drole, c'est un brave ! ' "^ muttered Chanrellon ; 
 and they threw again. 
 
 The Chasseur cast a five ; his was a five again. 
 
 ' The dice cannot make up their minds,' said the other 
 listlessly, * they know you are Might and the Arabs are 
 Right.' 
 
 The Frenchmen laughed ; they could take a jest good- 
 
 ' Not such fools, monsieur. 
 
 * An odd fellow 1 A brave fellow I 
 
IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS 191 
 
 humouredly, and alone amid so many of them he was made 
 sacred at once by the very length of odds agamst him. 
 
 They rattled the boxes and threw again — Chanrellon's was 
 three ; his two. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' he murmured. ' Right kicks the beam and loses ; 
 it always does, poor devil 1 ' 
 
 The Chasseur leaned across the table, with his brown, 
 fearless, sunny eyes full of pleasure. 
 
 ' Monsieur 1 never lament such good fortune for France, 
 you belong to us now ; let me claim you I ' 
 
 He bowed more gravely than he had borne himself hitherto. 
 
 * You do me much honour ; fortune has willed it so. One 
 word only in stipulation.' 
 
 Chanrellon assented courteously. 
 
 * As many as you choose.' 
 
 'I have a companion who must be brigaded with me, and 
 I must go on active service at once.' 
 
 * With infinite pleasure. That doubtless can be arranged. 
 You shall present yourself to-morrow morning; and for" to- 
 night, this is not the season here yet, and we are triste d 
 fairefremir} Still I can show you a little fun, though it is 
 not Paris ! ' 
 
 But he rose and bowed again. 
 
 * I thank you, not to-night. You shall see me at your 
 barracks with the morning.' 
 
 ' Ah, ah I monsieur ! ' cried the Chasseur, eagerly, and a 
 little annoyed. ' What warrant have we that you will not 
 dispute the decree of the dice, and go off to your favourites, 
 the Arabs ? ' 
 
 He turned back and looked full in Chanrellon's face, his 
 own eyes a little surprised, and infinitely weary. 
 
 * WIl2iL'v^'^'"- ^nt ? ,J\lj promise.' 
 
 Then, without another syllable, he lounged slowly out 
 through the soldiers and the idlers, and disappeared in the 
 confused din and chiar'oscuro of the gaslit street without, 
 through the press of troopers, grisettes, merchants, beggars, 
 sweetmeat-sellers, lemonade-sellers, cura9oa-sellers, gaunt 
 Bedouins, negro boys, shrieking muleteers, laughing lorettes, 
 and glittering staff-officers. 
 
 ' That is done ! ' he murmured to his own thoughts. 
 ' Ns5y.jQr Jlfe_ under another flag ! ' 
 
 ' Frightfully dull. 
 
192 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Claude de Chanrellon sat mute and amazed awhile, gazing 
 at the open door ; then he drank a fourth beaker of cham- 
 pagne and flung the emptied glass down with a mighty crash. 
 p- ' Ventre -bleu I Whoever he is,_that man will eat fire. bo7is 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 *DB PEOPUNDIS ' BEPOEE ' PLUNGINO * 
 
 Three months later, it was guest-night in the mess-room of 
 a certain famous light cavalry regiment, who bear the repu- 
 tation of being the fastest corps in the English service. Of 
 a truth, they do ' plunge ' a little too wildly ; and stories 
 are told of bets over ^carte in their ante-room that have been 
 prompt extinction for ever and aye to the losers, for they 
 rarely play money down, their stakes are too high, and mode- 
 rate fortunes may go in a night with the other convenient but 
 fatal system. But, this one indiscretion apart, they are a 
 model corps for blood, for dash, for perfect social accord, for 
 the finest horseflesh in the kingdom, and the best president 
 at a mess-table that ever drilled the cook to matchlessness, 
 and made the iced dry, and the old burgundies, the admired 
 of all new-comers. 
 
 Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had 
 a couple of hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were 
 showing the Ridings that they could * go like birds,' and 
 were using up their second horses with every day out, in the 
 first of the season. A cracker over the best of the ground 
 with the York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate 
 things quick as lightning, and both closed with a kill, had 
 filled the day ; and they were dining with a fair quantity of 
 county guests, and all the splendour of plate, and ceremony, 
 and magnificent hospitalities which characterise those beaux 
 sahreurs wheresoever they go. At one part of the table a 
 discussion was going on as the claret passed around ; wines 
 were perfection at the mess, but they drank singularly little : 
 it was not their * form * ever to indulge in that way ; and the 
 Chief, as dashing a sabreur as ever crossed a saddle, though 
 lenient to looseness in all other matters, and very young for 
 
-DE PROFUNDIS' BEFORE 'PLUNGING' 193 
 
 his command, would have been down like steel on * the boys,' 
 had any of them taken to the pastime of overmuch drinking 
 in any shape. 
 
 * I can't get the rights of the story,' said one of the guests, 
 a hunting Baronet, and M.F.H. ' It's something very dark, 
 isn't it ? ' 
 
 * Very dark,' assented a tall handsome man, with an 
 habitual air of the most utterly exhausted apathy ever at- 
 tained by the human features, but who, nevertheless, had 
 been christened, by the fiercest of the warrior nations of the 
 Punjaub, as the Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil 
 One, so terrible had the circling sweep of one back stroke of 
 his, when he was quite a boy, become to them. 
 
 ' Guards cut up fearfully rough,' murmured one near him, 
 known as the ' Dauphin,' * such a low sort of thing, you 
 know, that's the worst of it. Seraph's name, too.' 
 
 * Poor old Seraph ! he's fairly bowled over about it,' added 
 a third. Feels it awfully — by Jove he does ! It's my belief 
 he paid those Jew fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit 
 slackened.' 
 
 * So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a 
 cracker by it. I dare say ! Jews always do,' muttered a 
 fourth. * First Life would have given Beauty a million 
 sooner than have him do it. Horrible thing for the Household.' 
 
 ' Eiii is he dead ? ' pursued their guest. 
 
 * Beauty ? Yes ; smashed 'm that express, you know.' ^ 
 
 * But there was no evidence ? ' 
 
 * I don't know what you call evidence,' murmured ' the 
 Dauphin.' * Horses are sent to England from Paris ; clearly 
 shows he went to Paris. Marseilles train smashes ; twenty 
 people ground into indistinguishable amalgamation; two of 
 the amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage alone ; 
 only traps in carriage with them. Beauty's traps, with name 
 clear on the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things in- 
 side ; two men ground to atoms, but traps safe ; two men, of 
 course Beauty and servant ; man was a plucky fellow, sure to 
 stay with him.' 
 
 And having given the desired evidence in lazy Uttle in- 
 tervals of speech, he took some Rhenish. 
 
 * Well — yes ; nothing could be more conclusive, certainly,* 
 assented the Baronet, resignedly convinced. ' It was the 
 best thing that could happen under the unfortunate oircun?.- 
 
 o 
 
 
194 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 stances, so Lord Royallieu thinks, I suppose. He allowed 
 no one to wear mourning, and had his unhappy son's portrait 
 taken down and burnt.' 
 
 * HoT^JSl^Qdramatic 1 ' reflected Leo Charteris. ' Now 
 what the deuce can it hurt a dead man to have his portrait 
 made into a bonfire? Old Lord always did hate Beauty, 
 though. Rock does all the mourning; he's cut up no end; 
 never saw a fellow so knocked out of time. Vowed at first 
 he'd sell out, and go into the Austrian service ; swore he 
 couldn't stay in the Household, but v/ould get a command of 
 some Heavies, and be changed to India.' 
 
 'Duke didn't like that — didn't want him shot; nobody 
 else, you see, for the title. By George ! I wish you'd seen 
 Rock the other day on the Heath ; little Pulteney came up 
 to him.' 
 
 * What Pulteney ? — Jimmy, or the Earl ? ' 
 
 * Oh, the Earl. Jimmy would have known better. These 
 new men never know anything. " You purchased that famous 
 steeplechaser of his from Mr. Cecil's creditors, didn't you ? " 
 asks Pulteney. Rock just looks him over. Such a look, by 
 George ! " I received Forest King as my dead friend's last 
 gift." Pulteney never takes the hint — not he. On he blun- 
 ders : " Because, if you were inclined to part with him, I 
 want a good new huntmg strain, with plenty of fencing power, 
 and I'd take him for the stud at any figure you liked." I 
 thought the Seraph would have knocked him down — I did, 
 upon my honour ! He was red as this wine in a second with 
 rage, and then as white as a woman. " You are quite right," 
 he says quietly, and I swear each word cut like a bullet, " you 
 do want a new strain with something like breeding in it, but 
 — I hardly think you'll get it for the three next generations. 
 You must learn to know what it means first." Then away he 
 lounges, leaving Pulteney ])lantc Id. By Jove ! I don't think 
 the Cotton-Earl will forget this Cambridgeshire in a hun-y, 
 or try horse-dealing on the Seraph again.' 
 
 Laughter loud and long greeted the story. 
 
 ' Poor Beauty ! ' said the Dauphin, * he'd have enjoyed 
 that. He always put down Pulteney himself. I remember 
 his telling me he was on duty at Windsor once when Pulteney 
 was staying there. Pulteney's always horribly funked at 
 Court ; frightened out of his life when he dines with any 
 royalties ; makes an awful figure, too, in a public ceremony ; 
 
•DE PROFUNDIS' BEFORE ♦PLUNGING' 195 
 
 can't walk backward for any money, and at liis first levee 
 tumbled down rigbt in the Queen's face. Now at the Castle 
 one niglit he jnst happened to come down a corridor as Beauty 
 was smoking. Beauty made believe to take him for a servant ; 
 took out a sovereign, and tossed it to him. " Here, keep a 
 still tongue about my cigar, my good fellow ! " Pulteney 
 turned hot and cold, and stammered out God knows what 
 about his mighty dignity being mistaken for a valet. Bertie 
 just laughed a Uttie, ever so softly. "Beg your pardon — 
 thought you were one of the people ; wouldn't have done it 
 for worlds. I know you're never at ease with a sovereign ! " 
 Now Pulteney wasn't likely to forget that. If he -svanted 
 the King, I'U lay any money it was to give him to some 
 wretched mount who'd break his back over a fence in a sell- 
 ing race.' 
 
 ' Well, he won't have him ; Seraph don't intend to have 
 the horse ever ridden or hunted at all.' 
 
 * Nonsense ! * 
 
 * By Jove, he means it I Nobody's to cross the King's back ; 
 he wants weight carriers himself, you know, and precious 
 strong ones too. The King's put in the stud at Lyonnesse. 
 Poor Bertie ! Nobody ever managed a close finish as he did at 
 the Grand National— last but two — don't you remember ? ' 
 
 * Yes ; waited so beautifully on Fly-by-Night, and shot by 
 him like lightning just before the run-in. Pity he went to 
 the bad ! ' 
 
 ' Ah ! what a hand he played at ^carte ; the very best of 
 the French science.' 
 
 * But reckless at w^hist ; a wild game there — uncommonly 
 wild. Drove Cis Delareux half mad one night at RoyalHeu 
 with the way he threw his trumps out. Old Cis dashed his 
 cards down at last, and looked him full in the face. " Beauty, 
 do you know, or do you not know, that a whist table is not 
 to be taken as you take timber in a hunting-field, on the 
 principle of clear it or smash it?" — "Faith!" said Bertie, 
 "clear it or smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a 
 trifle too energetic for me." * 
 
 'The deuce, he's had enough of "smashing" at last! I 
 wish he hadn't come to grief in that style ; it's a shocking 
 bore for the Guards — such an ugly story.' 
 
 ' It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he 
 did — best possible taste.' 
 
 02 
 
196 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Only thing he oould do.* 
 
 * Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always 
 wondered he stopped for the row.' 
 
 ' Oh, never thought it would turn up ; trusted to a fluke.' 
 He whom thePunjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, 
 but who held in polite society the title of Lord Kergenven, 
 drank some hock slowly, and murmured as his sole quota to 
 the conversation very lazily and languidly : 
 
 * Beiyou he isn't dead at all.' 
 
 * The deuce you do ? And why ? * chorused the table ; 
 'when a fellow's body's found with all his traps round 
 him I ' 
 
 I don't believe he's dead,* murmured Kergenven with 
 closed slumberous eyes. 
 
 * But why ? Have you heard anything ? ' 
 'Not a word.' 
 
 ' "Why do you say he's alive, then ? ' 
 
 My lord lifted his brows ever so little. 
 
 ' I think so, that's all.' 
 
 ' But you must have a reason, Ker ? ' 
 
 Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, 
 and dropped out slowly in the mellowest voice in the world 
 the following : 
 
 ' It don't follow one has reasons for anything : pray don't 
 get logical. Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier ; 
 central France. Perhaps you don't know their work ? It's 
 uncommonly queer. Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter 
 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack 
 to hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for coming 
 to grief ; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, 
 you'll get blinded for life by a branch ; that if you don't get 
 flattened under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching 
 your rifle-trigger. Uncommonly good sport.' 
 
 Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms 
 of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a wal- 
 nut into some Regency sherry. 
 
 ' Hang it, Ker I ' cried the Dauphin. ' What's that to do 
 with Beauty ? ' 
 
 My lord let fall a flieepy glance of surprise and of rebuke 
 from under his black lashes, that said mutely, * Do I, who 
 hate talking, ever talk wide of any point ? ' 
 
 ' Why this,' he murtpwred. ' He was with us down at 
 
»DE PROFUNDIS' BEFORE 'PLUNGING' 197 
 
 Veilleroo, Louis d'Auvrai's place, you know ; and w« were 
 out after an old boar — not too old to race, but still tough 
 enough to be likely to turn and trust to his tusks if the pace 
 got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the finish. Wg 
 hadn't found, till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to 
 the work, and the November day was short, of course. The 
 pack got on the slot of a roebuck, too, and were off the boar's 
 scent a little while, running wild. Altogether we got scat- 
 tered, and in the forest it grew almost as dark as pitch : you 
 followed just as you could, and could only guide yourself by 
 your ear when the hounds gave cry, or the horns sounded. 
 On you blundered, hit or miss, headlong down the rocks and 
 through the branches ; horses warmed wonderfully to the 
 business, scrambled like cats, slid down like otters, kept their 
 footing where nobody'd have thought anything but a goat 
 could stand. Our hunting bloods knock up over a cramped 
 country like Monmouthshire ; they wouldn't live an hour in 
 a French forest : you see we just look for pace and strength 
 in the shoulders, we don't much want anything else — except 
 good jumping power. What a lot of fellows — even in the 
 crack packs — will always funk water I Horses will fly, but 
 they can't swim. Now to my fancy, a clever beast ought to 
 take even a swelling bit of v^^ater like a duck. How poor 
 Standard breasted rivers till that fool staked him ! ' 
 
 He dropped more walnuts into his wine, wistfully recalling 
 a mighty hero of Leicestershire fame, that had given him 
 many a magnificent day out, and had been the idol of his 
 stables, till in his twelfth year the noble old sorrel had been 
 killed by a groom's recklessness ; recklessness that met with 
 such chastisement, as told how and why the hill-tribes' so- 
 briquet had been given to the hand that would lie so long 
 in indolent rest, to strike with such fearful force when once 
 raised. 
 
 ' Well,* he went on once more. ' We were all of us 
 scattered ; scarcely two kept together anywhere ; where the 
 pack was, where the boar was, where the huntsmen were, 
 nobody knew. Now and then I heard the hounds giving 
 tongue at the distance, and I rode after that to the best of 
 my science, and uncommonly bad was the best. That forest 
 work perplexes one after the grass-country. You can't view 
 the beauties two minutes together ; and as for sinning by 
 overriding 'em, you're very safe not to do that ! At last I 
 
198 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 heard a crashing sound, loud and furious ; I thought they had 
 got him to bay at last. There was a great oak thicket as 
 hard as iron, and as close as a net, between me and the place ; 
 the boughs were all twisted together, God knows how, and 
 grew so low down that the naked branches had to be broken 
 through at every step by the horse's fore-hoofs before he could 
 force a step. We did force it somehow at last, and came into 
 a green open space, where there were fewer trees, and the 
 moon was shining in. There, without a hound near, true 
 enough was the boar rolling on the ground, and somebody 
 rolling under him, they were locked in so close they looked 
 just like one huge beast, pitching here and there, as you've 
 seen the rhinos wallow in Indian jheels. Of course, I levelled 
 my rifle, but I waited to get a clear aim ; for which was man 
 and which was boar, the deuce a bit could I tell ; just as I 
 had pointed, Beauty's voice called out to me : " Keep your 
 fire, Ker 1 I want to have him myself." It was he that was 
 under the brute. Just as he spoke they rolled towards me, 
 the boar foaming and spouting blood, and plunging his tusks 
 into Cecil. He got his right arm out from under the beast, 
 and, crushed under there as he was, drew it free with the 
 knife well gripped. Then down he dashed it three times into 
 the veteran's hide, just beneath the ribs. It was the coup de 
 grd-ce — the boar lay dead, and Beauty lay half-dead, too, the 
 blood rushing out of him where the tusks had dived. Two 
 minutes, though, and a draught of my brandy brought him 
 all round ; and the first words he spoke were, '* Thanks, Ker, 
 you did as you would be done by — a shot would have spoilt 
 it all." The brute had crossed his path far away from the 
 pack, and he had fluiig himself out of saddle and had a neck- 
 and-neck struggle. And that night we played baccarat by his 
 bedside to amuse him ; and he played just as well as ever. 
 /' TSlow this is why I don't think he's dead : a fellow who 
 ] served a wild boar like that won't have let a train knock him 
 I over. And I don't believe he forged that stiff, though all the 
 evidence says so. Beauty hadn't a touch of the blackguard 
 in him.' 
 L-- With which declaration of his views, Kergeuven lapsed 
 into immutable silence and slumberous apathy, from whose 
 shelter nothing could tempt him afresh ; and the Colonel, with 
 all the rest, lounged into the ante-room, where the tables 
 wore set, and began • plunging ' in earnest at sums that 
 
*L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 199 
 
 might sound fabulous, were they written here. The players 
 staked heavily ; but it was the galerie who watched around, 
 making their bets, and backing their favourites, that lost on 
 the whole the most. 
 
 * Horse Guards have heard of the plunging ; think we're 
 going too fast,* murmured the Chief to Kergenven, his Major, 
 who lifted his brows, and murmured back with the demure- 
 ness of a maiden : 
 
 * Tell 'em it's our only vice ; we're models of propriety.' 
 Which possibly would not have been received with the 
 
 belief desirable by the sceptics of Pall Mall. 
 
 So the ' De Profundis ' was said over Bertie Cecil; and 
 * Beauty of the Brigades ' ceased to be named in the service, 
 and soon ceased to be even remembered. In the steeple-^ 
 chase of life there is no time to look back at the failures, wli/ 
 have broken down over a * double and drop,' and fallen oat 
 of the pace. / 
 
 CHAPTER XY 
 
 * L'AMIE DU DBAPEAU ' 
 
 * Did I not say he would eat fire ? ' 
 
 ' Pardieu ! C'est un brave.' 
 
 ' Rides like an Arab.* 
 
 ' Smokes like a Zouave.' 
 
 * Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep — ah^ — 
 h — h I magnificent ! ' 
 
 ' And dances like an Aristocrat ; not hke a tipsy Spahis ! ' 
 
 The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the 
 circle of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of 
 inimitable canteen -slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker 
 who had perched astride on a broken fragment of wall, with 
 her barrel of wine set up on end on the stones in front of her, 
 and her six soldiers, her gros bdbds,^ as she was given mater- 
 nally to calhng them, lounging at their ease on the arid dusty 
 turf below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though 
 
 ' Big babies. 
 
\ 200 v'AV^^ under two flags 
 
 1 ,her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair 
 
 \ was cut as short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular 
 
 feature in it. But then — regularity 1 — who wanted it, who 
 
 would have thought the most pure classic type a change for 
 
 the better, with those dark, dancing, challenging eyes, with 
 
 j that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and 
 
 [ those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never so 
 
 1 handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or, sooth to 
 
 i say, not seldom a brdie-gueule ^ itself ? 
 
 She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably 
 coquettish, she was mischievous as a marmoset, she would 
 swear if need be like a Zouave, she could fire galloping, she 
 could toss off her brandy or her vermout like a trooper, she 
 would on occasion clinch her little brown hand and deal a 
 blow that the recipient would not covet twice, she was an 
 enfant de Paris, and had all its wickedness at her fingers, she 
 would sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with 
 laughter, and she would dance the cancan at the Salle de 
 Mars with the biggest giant of a Cuirassier there. And yet 
 with all that she was not wholly unsexed, with all that she 
 had the delicious fragrance of youth, and had not left a 
 certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a vivan- 
 di^re's uniform, and had been born in a barrack, and meant 
 to die in a battle ; it was the blending of the two that made 
 her piquante, made her a notoriety in her own way ; kno'v\Ti 
 at pleasure, and equally, in the army of Africa, as ' Cigarette,' 
 "*^d * L'Amie du Drapeau.' 
 
 ' Not like a tipsy Spahis I * It was a cruel cut to iier gros 
 Mh&Sy mostly Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the 
 foot of the wall, singing their praises — with magnanimity 
 beyond praise — of a certain Chasseur d'Afrique. 
 
 ' Ho, Cigarette I * growled a little Zouave, known as Tata 
 Leroux. * That is the way thou forsakest thy friends for the 
 first fresh face.' 
 
 * Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, 
 Tata I * responded Cigarette with a puff of her namesake ; 
 the repartee of the camp is apt to be rough. * He is Bel-d 
 faire-peur, as you nickname him.' 
 
 ' A woman's face 1 ' growled the injured Tata, whose own 
 countenance was of the colour and weilnigh of the flatness of 
 one of the red bricks of the wall. 
 
 ' Short pipe. 
 
«L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 90i 
 
 ' Ouf I ' said the Friend of the Flag with more expression 
 in that single ejaculation than could be put in a volume. 
 
 * He does woman's deeds, does he ? He has, woman's hands ; 
 but they can fight, I fancy ? Six Arabs to his own sword the 
 other day in that skirmish ! Superb ! ' 
 
 ' Sapristi ! And what did he say, this droll, when he 
 looked at them lying there ? Just shrugged his shoulders and 
 rode away. " I'd better have killed myself ; less mischief on 
 the whole I *' Now who is to make anything of such a man 
 as that ? ' 
 
 ' Ah 1 he did not stop to cut their gold buttons off, and 
 steal their cangiars, as thou wouldst have done, Tata? 
 Well ! he has not learnt la guerre,'^ laughed Cigarette. 
 
 * It was a waste ; he should have brought me their sashes at 
 least. By-the-way — when did he join ? ' 
 
 ' Ten — twelve — years ago, or thereabouts.' 
 
 ' He should have learnt to strip Arabs by this time, then,* 
 said the Amie du Drapeau, turning the tap of her barrel to 
 replenish the wine- cup ; ' and to steal from them, too, living 
 or dead. Thoic must take him in hand, Tata ! ' 
 
 Tata laughed, considering that he had received a compli- 
 ment. 
 
 * Diable ! I did a neat thing yesterday. Out on the 
 hills, there, was a shepherd ; he'd got two live geese swing- 
 ing by their feet. They were screeching — screeching — 
 screeching ! — and they looked so nice and so plump, that I 
 could smell them, as if they were stewing in a casserole, till 
 I began to get as hungry as a gamin. A lunge would just 
 have cut the question at once ; but the orders have got so 
 strict about potting the natives, I thought I wouldn't have 
 any violence, if the thing would go nice and smoothly. So I 
 just walked behind him, and tripped him up before he knew 
 where he was ; — it was a picture ! He was down with his 
 face in the sand before you could sing Tra-la-la I Then I 
 just sat upon him ; but gently—very gently : and what with 
 the sand and the heat, and the surprise, and, in truth, perhaps, 
 a little too, my own weight, he was half suffocated. He had 
 never seen me ; he did not know what it was that was sitting 
 on him ; and I sent my voice out with a roar — '* I am a 
 demon, and the fiend hath bidden me take him thy soul 
 
 » The art of war. 
 
202 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 to-night t " Ah ! how he began to tremble, and to kick, and to 
 quiver. He thought it was the devil a-top of him ; and he 
 began to moan as well as the sand would let him, that he was 
 a poor man, and an innocent, and the geese were the only 
 things he ever stole in all his life. Then I went through a 
 little pantomime with him, and I was very terrible in my 
 threats, and he was choking and choking with the sand, 
 though he never let go of the geese. At last, I relented a 
 little, and told him I would spare him that once, if he gave 
 up the stolen goods, and never lifted his head for an hour. 
 Sapristi ! How glad he was of the terms ! I dare say my 
 weight was unpleasant ; so the geese made us a divine stew 
 that night, and the last thing I saw of my man was his 
 lying flat as I left him, with his face still down in the sand- 
 hole.' 
 
 Cigarette nodded and laughed. 
 
 ' Pretty fair, Tata ; but I have heard better. Bah ! a 
 grand thing certainly, to fright a peasant, and scamper off 
 with a goose ! ' 
 
 ' Sacrebleu ! * grumbled Tata, who was himself of opinion 
 that his exploit had been worthy of the feats of Harlequin ; 
 * thy heart is all gone to the Enghshman.' 
 
 Cigarette laughed saucily and heartily, tickled at the joke. 
 Sentiment has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a 
 vivandidi'e aux yeux noirs,^ perched astride on a wall, and 
 dispensing brandy-dashed wine to half a dozen sun-baked 
 Bpahis. 
 
 Vivandi^re du regiment, 
 C'est Catin qu'on me nomme ; 
 
 Je vends, je donne, je bois gigment, 
 Mon vin et mon rogomme ; 
 
 J'ai le pied leste et I'ooil mutin, 
 
 Tintin, tintin, tintin, r'lin tintin, 
 
 Soldats, voil^ Catin ! ' 
 
 she sang with the richest, freshest, mellowest voice that ever 
 chanted the deathless refrains of the French Lucilius. 
 
 * My heart is a reveille-matin, Tata ; it wakes fresh every 
 day. An Englishman,_perdie 1 Why d ost thou think him 
 that?' " 
 
 '^ Because ho is a giant,* said Tata. ^ 
 
 Cigarette snapped her fingers : 
 
 ' A black-eyed wine-seller. 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 203 
 
 * I have danced with grenadiers and cuirassiers quite as tali, 
 and twice as heavy. A2:)rds ? ' 
 
 ' Because he bathes — splash ! Like any water-dog.* 
 
 * Because he is silent.' ^ 
 ' Because he rises in his stirrups.' ^ 
 'Because he likes the sea.' «^ 
 
 * Because he knows la boxe.' ^ ^ 
 
 * Because he is so quiet, and blazes like the devil under- 
 neath.' 
 
 Under which mass of overw^ielming proofs of nationality \^ 
 the Amie du Drapeau give in. 
 
 ' Yes, like enough. Besides, the other one is English 
 Lour-i-loo, of the Chasse-7narais,^ tells me that the other 
 one waits on him like a slave when he can — cleans his 
 harness, litters his horse, saves him all the hard work, when 
 ho can do it without being found out. Where did they come 
 from ? * 
 
 ' They will never tell.' 
 
 Cigarette tossed her nonchalant head, with a pout of her j 
 cherry lips, and a slang oath, light as a bird, wicked as a I 
 rigolbochade. 
 
 ' Paf I—they will tell it to me ! ' 
 
 ' Chut ! Thou mayest make a lion tame, a vulture leave 
 blood, a drum beat its own rataplan, a dead man fire a 
 clarmette ^ d six pieds ; but thou wilt never make an English- 
 man speak when he is bent to be silent.' 
 
 Cigarette launched a choice missile of barrack-slang at an 
 array of metaphors, which their propounder thought stupen- 
 dous in their brilliancy. 
 
 'Becasse! When you stole your geese, you did but take 
 your brethren home ! Englishmen are but men. Put the 
 wine in their head, make them whirl in a waltz, promise 
 them a kiss, and one turns such brains as they have inside 
 out, as a irlou-piou ^ turns a dead soldier's wallet. When a 
 woman is handsome, she is never denied. He shall tell me 
 where he comes from. I doubt that it is from England ; see 
 here — why not ? ' — and she checked the Noes off on her lithe 
 brown fingers : * First, he never says God-damn ; second, he 
 don't eat his meat raw ; third, he speaks very soft ; fourthj 
 
 ' Boxing. ^ Chasseurs d'Afrique. 
 
 ' A musket. * Infantry aoldier. 
 
«04 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 he waltzes so light, so light 1 fifth, he never grumbles in hig 
 throat like an angry bear ; sixth, there is no fog in him. 
 How can he be English with all that ? * 
 
 * There are English, and English,' said the philosophic 
 Tata, who piqued himself on being serenely cosmopolitan. 
 
 Cigarette blew a contemptuous puff of smoke. 
 
 ' There was never one yet that did not growl ! Pauvres 
 diahles I If they don't use their tusks, they sit and sulk I — an 
 Englishman is always boxing or grumbling — the two make 
 up his life.' 
 
 Which view of Anglo-rabies she had derived from a pro- 
 found study of various vaudevilles, in which the traditional 
 God-damn was pre-eminent in his usual hues ; and having 
 delivered it, she sprang down from her wall, strapped on her 
 little barilletf^ nodded to her gros beb^s, where they lounged 
 full length in the shadow of the stone wall, and left them to 
 resume their game at Boc, while she started on her way, as 
 Bwift and as light as a chamois, singing, with gay ringing 
 emphasis, that echoed all down the hot and silent air, the 
 second verso of Beranger : 
 
 ' Je fus chere a tou3 no3 h^ros ; 
 H^las ! combien j'en pleure! 
 Aussi soldats et g^neraux 
 
 Me comblaient, k toute heiire, 
 D'amour, de gloire et de butin, 
 Tintin, tintin, tintin, r'lin tintin, 
 D'amour, de gloire et de butin : 
 Soldats, voiU Catin I ' 
 
 The song was not altogether her song, however, for she had 
 wept for none — wept not at all : she had never shed tears 
 in her life. A dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its 
 youth, loving plunder, and mischief, and mirth ; caring for 
 nothing, and always ready with a laugh, a song, a slang 
 repartee, or a shot from the dainty pistols thrust in her sash, 
 that a general of division had given her, whichever best suited 
 tho moment. 
 
 Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who, 
 a spoilt child of the Army from her birth, with a heart aa 
 bronzed as her cheek, and her respect for the laws of meum 
 and tuum nil, yet with odd stray, nature-sown instincts here 
 
 > Lilile barrel. 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPE AU' 205 
 
 and there, of a devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace 
 that nothiiig could kill — Cigarette was the pet^jtheLArmy of 
 Africa, and was as lawless as most of her patrons. 
 
 She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier 
 because it had been a soldier's * loot ; ' she would wear the 
 gold plunder off dead Arabs' dress, and never have a pang 
 of conscience with it ; she would dance all night long, w^ien 
 she had a chance, like a little Bacchante ; she would shoot a 
 man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the world. She 
 had had a thousand lovers, from handsome marquesses of the 
 Guides to tawny black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and 
 she had never loved anything, except the roll of the jpas de 
 charge, and the sight of her own arch defiant face, with its _ 
 scarlet lips and its short jetty hair, when she saw it by' 
 chance in some burnished cuirass, that served her for a mirror, i 
 She was more like a handsome saucy boy than anything else j 
 under the sun, and yet there" was~tHat In the pretty, impudent \ 
 little Friend of the Flag that was feminine with it all — ' 
 generous and graceful amid all her boldness and her licence, 
 her revelries, and the unsettled life she led in the barracks 
 and the camps, under the shadow of the eagles. 
 
 Away she went, now singing — 
 
 • Mais je ris en sage, 
 
 Bon I 
 La farira dondaine, 
 
 Gai! 
 La farira dond^e I ' 
 
 down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of 
 the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah, the hilts of the tiny 
 pistols glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning 
 sunlight pouring down unheeded on the brave bright hawk 
 eyes that had never, since they first opened to the world, 
 diooped or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or the gaze of a 
 lover, for the menace of death, or the presence of war. 
 
 Of course, she was a little Amazon ; of course, she was a \ 
 little Guerilla ; of course, she did not know what a blush \ 
 meant ; of course, her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as | 
 her mutinous mischief was in its act ; but she was * bon j 
 soldat,' as she was given to say, with a toss of her curly / 
 head, and she had some of the virtues of soldiers. Soldiers 
 had been about her ever since she first remembered having a 
 
2o6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 wooden casserole for a cradle, and sucking down red wine 
 through a pipe-stem. Soldiers had been her books, her 
 teachers, her models, her guardians, and, later on, her lovers 
 all the days of her life. She had had no guiding star, except 
 the eagles on the standards ; she had had no cradle-song, 
 except the rataplan and the r^veil ; she had had no sense 
 of duty taught her, except to face fire boldly, never to betray 
 a comrade, and to worship but two deities, ' la Gloke ' and 
 * la France.' 
 
 Yet there were tales told in the barrack-yards and under 
 canvas of the little Aniie du Drapeau that had a gentler side. 
 Of how softly she would touch the wounded ; of how deftly 
 she would cure them. Of how carelessly she would dash 
 through under a raking fire, to take a draught of water to a 
 dying man. Of how she had sat by an old Grenadier's death - 
 couch, to sing to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at 
 Chalons, and she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of 
 how she had ridden twenty leagues on a saddleless Arab 
 horse, to fetch the surgeon of the Spahis to a Bedouin perish- 
 ing in the desert of shot-wounds. Of how she had sent 
 every sou of her money to her mother, so long as that mother 
 lived — a brutal, drunk, vile-tongucd old woman, who had 
 beaten her oftentimes, as the sole maternal attention, when 
 she was but an infant. These things were told of Cigarette, 
 and with a perfect truth. She was * mauvais sujet, 7nais hon 
 soldatf' ^ as she classified herself. Her own_sex would have 
 seen no good in her ; but her comrades^^-arms could and did. 
 Of a suiety, she missed virtues that women prize; but, not 
 less of a surety, Tiad she caught. some that they miss. 
 
 Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a grey- 
 hound, light as a hare, glancing here and glancing there as 
 she bounded over the picturesque desolation of the Cashbah. 
 It was just noon, and there were few could brave the noon- 
 heat as she did. It was very still, there was only from a little 
 distance the roll of the French kettle-drums where the 
 drummers of the African regiments were practising. * Hoh\ ! 
 le v*lh\ ' cried Cigarette to herself, as her falcon eyes darted 
 right and left ; and, like a chamois, she leaped down over 
 the great masses of Turkish ruins, cleared the channel of a 
 dry watercourse, and alighted just in front of a Chasseur 
 
 ' A tjQorougb soamp, but a thorough soldier. 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 207 
 
 d'AfriqiiG, who was sitting aloiio on a broken fragment of 
 white marble, reUc of some Moorish mosque, wboso delicate 
 columns, crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, 
 against the deep intense blue of the cloudless sky. 
 
 He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing \ 
 figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scab- , -j, 
 bard ; vet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French' » 
 soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service. ^-^ 
 He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, 
 and black of the Zouaves and the Turco, for his skin was 
 naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft — 
 for which Monsieur Tata had growled contemptuously, ' a 
 woman's face ' — a long silken chestnut beard swept over his 
 chest ; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and 
 scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform, with his spurred 
 heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, 
 was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a 
 superb cavalry rider, light, supple, long of limb, wide of 
 chest, with every sinew and nerve firm -knit as links of steel. ^ 
 She glanced at his hands, which were very white, despite J Jw 
 the sun of Algiers, and the labours that fall to a private ofj 
 Chasseurs. y 
 
 ' Beau lion ! ' ^ she thought, ' and noble, whatever he is.' ^ 
 
 But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of 
 the Algerian regiments. She had known so many of them — 
 those gilded butterflies of the (3haussee d'Antin, those lordly 
 spendthrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the bat- 
 talions of the demi-cavalerie, or the squadrons of the French 
 Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonoured, into a sandhole 
 hastily dug with the bayonets in the hot hush of an African 
 night. 
 
 She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a j 
 challenge to wine. 1 
 
 * Ah ! ah ! mon Roumi ! ^ Tata Leroux says you are English ; 
 by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing 
 there like an owl in the sunlight ! Take a draught of my 
 burgundy ; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines — not I ! 
 I know better than to drink them myself.' 
 
 He started and rose ; and before he took the bidon,^ bowed 
 
 ' A handsome dandy. ^ Soldier. 
 
 • Little wooden drinking-cup. 
 
2o8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 to her, raising his cap with a grave courteous obeisanoe, a 
 bow that had used to be noted in throne rooms for its perfec- 
 tion of grace. 
 
 * Ah, ma belle, is it you ? ' he said, wearily. You do me 
 much honour.' 
 
 Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine 
 barrel. She was not used to that style of salutation. She 
 half liked it — half resented it. It made her wush, with an 
 impatient scorn for the wish, that she knew how to read, and 
 had not her hair cut short like a boy's — a weakness the little 
 vivandiere had never been visited with before. 
 
 * Morbleu I ' she said, pettishly. * You are too fine for 
 us, mon hrave. In what country, I should wonder, does one 
 learn such dainty ceremony as that ? ' 
 
 * Where should one learn courtesies if not in France ? ' he 
 answered, wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the 
 night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, 
 for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since 
 the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten napo- 
 leons and the Bedouins to Claude de Chanrellon ; but his 
 thoughts were far from her in this moment. 
 
 * Ouf ! you have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue 1 ' 
 cried Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment 
 than that. From generals and staff-officers, as from drummers 
 and trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, 
 luscious as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a 
 barrack flavour about it, commonly is. She would, as often as 
 not, to be sure, finish it with the butt-end of her pistol, or 
 the butt-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still for all 
 
 / that she liked it, and resented its omission. ' They say you 
 are English, but I don't believe it ; you speak too soft, and 
 you sound the double L's too well. A Spaniard, eh ? ' 
 
 * Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so ? ' 
 She laughed. ' A Greek, then ? ' 
 
 * Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards ? ' 
 
 * An Austrian ? You waltz like a White Coat ? 
 He shook his head. 
 
 She stamped her little foot into the ground — a foot fit for 
 a model, with its shapely military boot; spurred, too, for 
 Cigarette rode like a circus-rider. 
 
 ' Bicasse t ^ Say what you are, then, at once.' 
 
 ' Literally ' yojj pnipo 1 ' Equivalent to ' you goose I * 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 209 
 
 * A soldier of France. - Can you wish me more ? ' 
 
 For the first time her eyes flashed and softened — her one 
 love was the tricolor. 
 
 * True ! ' she said simply. * But you were not always a 
 soldier of France? You-.joined,'4hey~say, twelvByear? ago ? 
 What were you before then ? ' 
 
 She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her 
 elbows on the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him 
 with all the frank curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imagi- 
 nable, as she launched the question point-blank. 
 
 * Before]/ he said slowly. * Well — a fooL' . 
 
 'Xou belonged to the majority, then 1 ' said Cigarette, 
 with a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the 
 camp slang she spoke in. * You should not have had to 
 come into the ranks, mon ami ; majorities — specially that 
 majority — have very smooth sailing generally I ' 
 
 He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him. 
 
 * Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette ? You are 
 so young.' 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 * Bah ! one is never young, and always young in camps. ; 
 Young ? Pardieu ! When I was four, I could swear like a i 
 grenadier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink ' 
 like a Bohemian.' 
 
 Yet — with all that — and it was the truth, the brow was so 
 open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear 
 under the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth l__ 
 
 * Why did you come into the service ? ' she went on, \ 
 before he had a chance to answer her. * You were born in [ 
 the Noblesse — bah ! I know an aristocrat^at a glance ! Ceux 
 qui ont pris la peine de naitre ! *— don't you like Figaro ? My 
 men played it last winter, and I was Figaro myself. Now 
 many of those aristocrats come — shoals of them ; but it is 
 always for something. TEey all come for something ; most 
 of them have been ruined by the lionnes, a hundred million of 
 francs gone in a quarter I Ah-bah ! what blind bats the best 
 of you are ! They have gambled, or bet, or got into hot 
 water, or fought too many duels, or caused a court scandal, or 
 something — all the aristocrats that come to Africa are ruined. 
 What ruined you, Monsieur 1' Aristocrat ? ' __, 
 
 * Those who have given themselves the trouble to be born ! 
 
210 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Aristocrat ? I am none. I am a corporal of the Chas- 
 seurs.' 
 
 ' Diable I I have known a Duke a Corporal 1 What ruined 
 you ? ' 
 
 * What ruins most men, I imagine — folly.* 
 
 * Folly sure enough ! ' retorted Cigarette, with scornful 
 acquiescence. She had no patience with him. He danced 
 so deliciously, he looked so superb, and he would give her 
 nothing but these absent answers. ' Wisdom don't bring 
 men who look as you look into the ranks of the volunteers for 
 Africa. Besides, you are too handsome to be a sage ! ' 
 
 He laughed a little. 
 
 * I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty 
 to be a cynic' 
 
 * A what ? ' She did not know the word. * Is that a good 
 cigar you have ? Give me one. Do women smoke in your 
 old country ? ' 
 
 * Oh, yes — many of them.' 
 ' Where is it, then ? ' 
 
 * I have no country — now.' 
 
 * But the one you had ? ' 
 
 * I have forgotten I ever had one.* 
 
 * Did it treat you ill, then ? ' 
 ' Not at all.' 
 
 * Had you anything you cared for in it T * 
 
 * Well— yes.' 
 
 ' What was it ? A woman ? ' 
 
 * No — a horse.' 
 
 He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more 
 figures slowly in the sand. 
 
 'Ahl' 
 
 She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that. 
 She would only have laughed at him had it been a woman. 
 Cigarette was more veracious than complimentary in her esti- 
 mate of her own sex. 
 
 ' There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew,* she went on 
 softly, ' loved a horse hke that — he would have died for Cos- 
 sack ; but he was a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what 
 I like play myself. Well, one day he played and played till 
 he was mad, and everything was gone ; and then in his rage 
 he staked the only thing he had left — staked and lost the 
 horse I He never said a word ; but he just slipped a pistol in 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 2ii 
 
 his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once — twice — 
 thrice — and shot himself through the heart I ' 
 
 ' Poor fellow ! ' murmured the Chasseur d'Afrique, in hia 
 chestnut beard. 
 
 Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her 
 falcon eyes. 'He has i gambled away a good deal, too,' sho 
 thought. * It is always the same old story with them.' 
 
 'Your cigars are good, mon lion,' she said impatiently, as 
 she sprang up, her lithe elastic figure in the bright vivandiere 
 uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly grey of 
 the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and 
 the intense light of the noon. * Your cigars are good, but it 
 is more than your company is ! Ma cantche ! If you had 
 been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a 
 single turn with you in the cancan I * 
 
 And with a bound To which indignation lent wings like a 
 swallow's, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the 
 apathy with which her advances to friendship had been re- 
 ceived, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder 
 out of bravado. ' To have nothing more to say to me after 
 dancing with me all night I ' thought Cigarette, with fierce 
 wrath at such contumely — the first neglect the pet of tLo 
 Spahis had ever experienced. 
 
 She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that 
 momentary wish that she knew how to read, and looked less 
 like a boy — just because a Chasseur with white hands and 
 silent ways had made her a grave bow 1 She was more in- 
 censed still because she could not get at his history, and felt, 
 despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those 
 cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. 
 * Gare d lui I ' * muttered the soldier-coquette, passionately, 
 in her little white teeth, so small and so pearly, though they 
 had gripped a bridle tight before then, when each hand was 
 filled with a pistol. * Gare d kii ! If he offend me there 
 are five hundred swords that will thrust civility into him, five 
 hundred shots that will teach him the cost of daring to provoke 
 Cigarette ! ' 
 
 En route through the town her wayward way took the 
 pretty brunette. Friend of the Flag, as many devious meander- 
 ings as a bird takes in a summer's day flight, when it stops 
 
 * Let him take care. 
 
 V2 
 
212 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 here for a berry, there for a grass seed, here to dip its beak 
 into cherries, there to dart after a dragon-fly, here to shake its 
 wings in a brook, there to poise on a lilybell. 
 
 She loitered in a thousand places, for Cigarette knew every- 
 body ; she chatted with a group of Turcos, she emptied her 
 barrel for some Zouaves, she ate sweetmeats with a lot of 
 negro boys, she boxed a little drummer's ear for slurring over 
 the * r'lin tintin ' at his practice, she drank a demi-tasse with 
 some officers at a cafe, she had ten minutes' pistol- shooting, 
 where she beat hollow a young dandy of the Guides who had 
 come to look at Algiers for a week, and made even points 
 with one of the first shots of the * Cavalerie a pied,* ^ as the 
 Algerian antithesis runs. Finally, she paused before the open 
 French window of a snow-white villa, half buried in tamarisk 
 and orange and pomegranate, with the deep-hued flowers 
 glaring in the sun, and a hedge of wild cactus fencing it in. 
 Through the cactus she made her way as easily as a rabbit 
 burrows. It would have been an impossibility to Cigarette to 
 enter by any ordinary means ; and balancing herself lightly 
 on the sill for a second, stood looking in at the chamber. 
 
 * Ho, M. le Marquis ! the Zouaves have drunk all my 
 wine up ; fill me my keg with yours for once — the very best 
 burgundy, mind. I am half afraid your cellar will hurt my 
 reputation.* 
 
 The chamber was very handsome, hung and furnished in 
 the very best Paris fashion, and all glittering with amber and 
 ormolu and velvets ; in it half a dozen men — officers of the 
 cavalry — were sitting over their noon breakfast, and playing 
 at lansquenet at the same time. The table was crowded with 
 dishes of every sort, and wines of every vintage, and the fra- 
 grance of their bouquet, the clouds of smoke, and the heavy 
 scent of the orange-blossom without, mingled together in an 
 intense perfume. He whom she addressed, M. le Marquis de 
 Chateauroy, laughed, and looked up. 
 
 * Ah, is it thee, my pretty brunette ? Take what thou 
 wantest out of the ice-pails.' 
 
 ' Premier cni ? ' ^ asked Cigarette, with the dubious air 
 and caution of a connoisseur. 
 
 * Comet 1 ' said M. le Marquis, amused with the precau- 
 
 * Literally, • Horse-foot ; ' a name given to the Zephyrs and Zouaves 
 lor their excessive swiftness of limb. 
 
 * The best growths ? 
 
•L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 213 
 
 tions taken with his cellar, one of the finest in Algiers. 
 ' Come in and have some breakfast, ma belle* Only pay the 
 toll.' 
 
 Where he sat between the window and the table he caught 
 her in his arms and drew her pretty face down. Cigarette, 
 with the laugh of a saucy child, whisked her cigar out of her 
 mouth, and blew a great cloud of smoke in his eyes. She had 
 no particular fancy for him, though she had for his wines. 
 Shouts of mirth from the other men completed the Marquis's 
 discomfiture, as she swayed away from him, and went over to 
 the other side of the table, emptying some bottles unceremo- 
 niously into her wine-keg — iced, ruby, perfumy claret that 
 she could not have bought anywhere for the barracks. 
 
 * Hol^ I ' cried the Marquis, * thou art not generally so coy 
 with thy kisses, petite.' , 
 
 Cigarette tossed her head. 
 
 ' I don't like bad clarets after good ! I've just been with 
 your Corporal, " Bel-^-faire-peur." You are no beauty after 
 him, M. le Colonel.' 
 
 Chateauroy's face darkened. He was a colossal-limbed man, 
 whose bone was iron, and whose muscles were like oak-fibres. 
 He had a dark, keen head like an eagle's ; the brow narrow but 
 very high, looking higher because the close-cut hair was worn 
 off the temples ; thin lips hidden by heavy curling moustaches, 
 and a skin burnt black by long African service. Still he was 
 fairly handsome enough not to have muttered so heavy an oath 
 as he did at the vivandiere's jest. 
 
 * Sacrebleu 1 I wish my corporal were shot I One can 
 never hear the last of him.' 
 
 Cigarette darted a quick glance at him. * Oh ho, jealous, 
 mon brave ! ' thought her quick wits. * And why, I 
 wonder ? * 
 
 * You haven't a finer soldier in your Chasseurs, mon cher. 
 Don't wish him shot, for the good of the service,* said the 
 Viscount de Chanrellon, who had now a command of his own 
 in the Light Cavalry of Algiers. * Pardieu ! If I had to 
 choose whether I'd be backed by *' Bel-f\-faire-peur," or by six 
 other men in a skirmish, I'd choose him, and risk the odds.' 
 
 Chateauroy tossed off his burgundy with a contemptuous 
 impatience. 
 
 * Diable 1 That ia the galimatias ^ one always hears about 
 
 ' Exaggerated nonsense. 
 
214 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 this fellow — as if he were a second Roland, or a revivified 
 Bayard 1 I see nothing particular in him, except that he's too 
 fine a gentleman for the ranks.' 
 
 * Fine ? Ah I ' laughed Cigarette. * He made me a bow 
 this morning like a court chamberlain ; and his beard is like 
 carded silk, and he has such woman's hands, mon Dieu 1 But 
 he is a croqiie-mitaine too. 
 
 * Rather ! ' laughed Claude de Chanrellon, as magnificent 
 a soldier himself as ever crossed swords. * I said he would 
 eat fire the very minute he played that queer game at dice 
 with me years ago. I wish I had him instead of you, Cha- 
 tcauroy ; hke lightning in a charge ; and yet the very man 
 for a dangerous bit of secret service that wants the softness of 
 a panther. We all let our tongues go too much, but he says 
 BO little — just a word here, a word there — when one's wanted 
 — no more ; and he's the devil's own to fight.' 
 
 The Marquis heard the praise of his Corporal, knitting his 
 heavy brows. It was evident the private was no favourite with 
 him. 
 
 ' The fellow rides well enough,' he said, with an affecta- 
 tion of carelessness. * There — for what I see — is the end of 
 his marvels. I wish you had him, Claude, with all my 
 Boul.* 
 
 * Oh h^ 1 * cried Chanrellon, wiping the Rhenish off his 
 tawny moustaches, * he should have been a captain by this if 
 I had. Morbleu I He is a splendid sabreur — kills as many 
 men to his own sword as I could myself, when it comes to a 
 hand-in -hand fight ; breaks horses in like magic ; rides theri^ 
 like the wind ; has a hawk's eye over open country ; obeys 
 like clockwork ; what more can you want ? ' 
 
 1^ ' Obeys I Yes,' said the Colonel of Chasseurs, with a snarl. 
 , * He'd obey without a word if you ordered him to walk up 
 j to a cannon's mouth, and be blown from it ; but he gives you 
 
 I Buch a d d languid grand seigneur ' glance as he listens that 
 
 I one would think he commanded the regiment.' 
 ^ * But he's very popular with your men, too ? ' 
 
 * Monsieur, the worst quality a Corporal can have. His 
 idea of maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and 
 give them tobacco.' 
 
 ' Pardieu 1 not a bad way either with our French fire- 
 
 W^^ .\^Sf3^\ • Fine gentleman. 
 
'UAMIE DU DRAPEAU* 215 
 
 eaters. 11 connait son monde, ce braved Your squadrons 
 would go to the devil after him.* 
 
 The Colonel gave a grim laugh. 
 
 ' I dare say nobody knows the way better.' 
 
 Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking cham- 
 pagne by great glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping 
 another's soup, pulling the limbs of a succulent ortolan to 
 pieces with a reUsh, and devouring truffles with all the zest 
 of a bon-\avant, did not lose a word, and catching the inflec- 
 tion of Chateauroy's voice, settled with her own thoughts that I 
 ' Bel"^-f aire-peur ' had not a fair field or a smooth course with 
 his Colonel. The weathercock heart of the little * Friend of 
 the Flag ' veered round, with her sex's common custom, to 
 the side that was the weakest, 
 
 * Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel ! ' she cried, while she ate 
 M. le Colonel's foie gras with as little ceremony and as much 
 enjoyment as would be expected from a young plunderer 
 accustomed to think a meal all the better spiced by being-^t 
 stolen " by the rules of war.'* * Whatever else your hand- \ 
 some Corporal is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ah, I know the 
 aristocrats^rr-I do ! Their touchTs so gentle, and their speech 
 is so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they 
 are such diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing all 
 so quiet and nonchalant. Give me the aristocrats — the real 
 thing, you know. Not the ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are 
 ashamed of being honest bread — but the old blood like Bel-^- i^ 
 faire-peur.' ~«'' 
 
 The Colonel laughed, but restlessly ; the little ingrate had 
 aimed at a sore point in him. He was of the First Empire 
 Nobility, and he was weak enough, though a fierce, daunt- 
 less, iron-nerved soldier, to be discontented with the great 
 fact that his father had been a hero of the Army of Italy, and 
 scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because impatient of the 
 minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to have his 
 first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a 
 postillion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais. 
 
 ' Ah, my brunette 1 ' he answered with a rough laugh, 
 * have you taken my popular Corporal for your lover ? You 
 should give your old j&'iends warning first, or he may chance 
 to get an ugly spit on a sabre.' 
 
 • He knows them he has to deal with—that brave fellow. 
 
2i6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Tho Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of cham- 
 pagne. She felt for the first time in her life a flush of hot 
 blood on her brown clear cheek, well used as she was to such 
 jests and such lovers as these. 
 
 ' Ma foi ! ' she said coolly. * He would be more likely to 
 spit than be spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to 
 see him in a duel ; there is not a prettier sight in the world 
 when both men have science. As for fighting for me ! Mor- 
 bleu I I will thank nobody to have the impudence to do it, 
 unless I order them out. Coquehne got shot for me, you 
 remember ; — he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they 
 killed him so clumsily, that they disfigured him terribly — 
 it was quite a pity. I said then I would have no more 
 handsome men fight about me. You may, if you like, M. le 
 Faucon Noir.' ^ 
 
 Which title she gave with a saucy laugh, hitting with 
 a chocolate bonbon the black African-burnt visage of the 
 omnipotent chief she had the audacity to attack. High or 
 low, they were all the same to Cigarette. She would have 
 ' slanged ' the Emperor himself with the self-same coolness, 
 and the Army had given her a passport of immunity so wide, 
 that it would have fared ill with any one who had ever at- 
 tempted to bring the vivandiere to book for her uttermost 
 loiischief. 
 
 * By-the-way I ' she went on, quick as thought, with her 
 reckless devil-may-care gaiety. ' One thing ! — Your Corporal 
 ■will demoralise the Army of Africa, m'sieu ? ' 
 
 * Eh ? He shall have an ounce of cold lead before he does. 
 Whatm?' 
 
 * He will demoralise it,' said Cigarette, with a sagacious 
 shake of her head. * If they follow his example we shan't 
 have a Chasseur, or a Spahis, or a Piou-piou, or a Sapeur 
 worth anything * 
 
 * Sacr6 I What does he do ? ' The Colonel's strong teeth 
 bit savagely through his cigar ; he would have given much 
 to have been able to find a single thing of insubordination or 
 laxity of duty in a soldier who irritated and annoyed him, 
 but who obeyed him implicitly, and was one of the most 
 brilliant * fire-eaters ' of his regiment. 
 
 * He won't only demoralise the army,' pursued Cigarette, 
 
 > Blaok Hawk. 
 
*L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU' 217 
 
 \vitli vivacious eloquence, * but if his example is followed, he'll 
 ruin the Pr^fets, close the Bureaux, destroy the Exchequer, 
 beggar all the officials, make African life as tame as milk and 
 water, and rob you, M. le Colonel, of your very highest and 
 dearest privilege ! ' 
 
 * Sacrebleu I ' cried her hearers, as their hands instinctively 
 Bought their swords, * what does he do ? ' 
 
 Cigarette looked at them out of her arch black lashe?. 
 
 * Why, he never thieves from the Arabs ! If the fashion 
 come in, adieu to our occupation. Court-martial him 
 Colonel ! ' 
 
 With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curlg 
 back off her temples, and launched herself into lansquenet 
 with all the ardour of. a gambler and the vivacity of a child, 
 her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushing, her little teeth set, her 
 whole soul in the whirl of the game, made all the more riotoua 
 by the peals of laughter from her comrades, and the wines 
 that were washed down like water. Cigarette was a terrible 
 little gamester, and had gaming made very easy to her, for it 
 was the creed of the Army that her losses never counted, but 
 her gains were paid to her often double or treble. Indeed, 
 so well did she play, and so well did the goddess of hazard 
 favour her, that she might have grown a millionaire on the 
 fruits of her dice and her cards, but for this fact, that what- 
 ever the little Friend of the Flag had in her hands one hour, 
 was given away the next, to the first wounded soldier, or 
 ailing veteran, or needy Arab woman that required the 
 charity. 
 
 As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the 
 Jockey Club ; but Cigarette was never the richer for it. 
 
 * Bah ! ' she would say, when they told her of her heedlessness, 
 
 * money is like a mill, no good standing still. Let it turn, 
 turn, turn, as fast as ever it can, and the more bread will 
 come from it for the people to eat.* 
 
 The vivandi^re was by instinct a fine political economist. 
 
 Meanwhile where she had left him among the stones of the 
 ruined mosque, the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-^- 
 faire-peur, in a double sense, because of his ' woman's face,' 
 as Tata Leroux termed it, and because of the terror his sword 
 had become through North Africa, sat motionless with his 
 right arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust 
 into the sand, the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce 
 
\ 
 
 2i8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 burning glare on the chestnut masses of his beard, and the 
 bright gHtter of his uniform. 
 
 He was a dashing cavalry soldier, -who had had a dozen 
 wounds cut over his body by the Bedouin swords, in many 
 and hot skirmishes ; who had waited through sultry African 
 nights for the lion's tread, and had fought the desert-king and 
 conquered ; who had ridden a thousand miles over the great 
 sand waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept under the 
 stars with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his 
 hand, all through the night ; who had served, and served well, 
 in fierce, arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and 
 in close discipline ; who had blent the verve^ the brilliance, 
 the daring, the eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of 
 the French Chasseur, with something that was very different, 
 and much more tranquil. 
 
 Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French 
 Service, he sat alone here in the shadow of the column, 
 thoughtful, motionless, lost in silence. 
 
 In his left hand was Q>Galignani, six months old, and hia 
 eyes rested on a line in the obituary : 
 
 * On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. 
 Denzil, Viscount Royallieu ; aged 90.' 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 
 
 Vanitas vanitatum I The dust of death lies over the fallen 
 altars of Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the floo4 
 of glowing Nile, and Herodotus mused under the shadowy 
 foliage, looking on the lake-like rings of water. The Temple 
 of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath beguiled the 
 Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment, lies 
 in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of drago- 
 men and chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian 
 Palace of Julian saw the Legions rush, with torches and with 
 wine-bowls, to salute their darling as Augustus, the sledge- 
 hammer and the stucco of the Haussmann fiat bear desolation 
 in their wake. Levr-ntine dice are rattled, where Hypatia'a 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 219 
 
 voice was heard. Bills of exchange are trafficked in, wliere 
 Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose gardens. 
 Drummers roll their caserne-calls, where Drusus fell and Sulia 
 laid down dominion. 
 
 And here — in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of 
 Scipio, in the Phoenicia, whose lovehness used to flash in the 
 burning, sea-mirrored sun, while her fleets went eastward and 
 westward for the honey of Athens and the gold of Bpain— - 
 here Cigarette danced the cancan I 
 
 An auberge^ of the harrUre swung its sign of the As de 
 Pique where feathery palms once had waved above mosques 
 of snowy gleam, with marble domes and jewelled arabesques, 
 and the hush of prayer under columned aisles. * Debits de 
 vin, liqueurs et tabac'"^ was written, where once verses of the 
 Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along porphyry 
 cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its 
 impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, 
 Phoenician warriors had watched the galleys of the gold- 
 haired favourite of the gods bear down to smite her against 
 whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry to Konie v/as 
 quoted. 
 
 The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the 
 tent of Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic 
 head that towered in youth above the tempestuous seas of 
 Gothic armies, as when, silvered with age, it rose as a rock 
 against the onsweeping flood of Bulgarian hordes. The 
 grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners, flower-girls, 
 lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie flaunted 
 themselves in the gaslight, where the lustrous sorceress eyes 
 of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her 
 wanton's heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and 
 shameless licence, heroism and brutahty, cruelty and self- 
 devotion, swelled under the purples of her dehcate vest, at 
 the glory of the man she at once dishonoured and adored. 
 
 Vamtaa vanitatum ! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill- 
 paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with 
 the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty 
 pressure of their phalanx ; and the Byzantine ranks were 
 dust side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer. And here, 
 
 ' Little hostelry. 
 
 ' Here are sold wine, liqn<?r and tobacco. 
 
120 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light 
 feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the 
 Living, who never remember that they also are dancing 
 onward to the tomb. 
 
 It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily-decked, smoke- 
 dried mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long 
 room, that was an imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilli- 
 putian scale, had some bunches of lights flaring here and 
 there, and had its walls adorned with laurel wreaths, stripes 
 of tricolored paint, vividly coloured medallions of the Second 
 Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that 
 flashed into brightness under the jets of flame — trumpery, yet 
 trumpery which, thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, 
 harmonised, and did not vulgarise ; a gift French instinct 
 alone possesses. The floor was bare and well polished ; the 
 air, full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy odours, and an 
 overpowering scent of oil, garlic, and pot au feu. Riotous 
 music pealed through it, that even in its clamour kept a 
 certain silvery ring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were 
 smoked, barrack-slang, camp-slang, barri^re-slang, temple- 
 slang, were chattered volubly. Theresa's songs were sung by 
 bright-eyed, sallow- cheeked Parisiennes, and chorused by the 
 lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humour prevailed, 
 though of a wild sort ; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had 
 just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the 
 tumult of the most headlong music that ever set spurred heels 
 stamping and grisettes' heels flying; and now, where the 
 crowds of soldiers and women stood back to leave her a clear 
 place. Cigarette was dancing alone. 
 
 She had danced the cancan ; she had danced since sunset ; 
 she had danced till she had tired out cavalrymen, w^ho could 
 go days and nights in the saddle without a sense of fatigue, 
 and made Spahis cry quarter, who never gave it by any 
 chance in the battlefield ; and she was dancing now like a 
 little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from 
 a long summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only 
 now and then, when caprice took her, and her wayward 
 vivacity was at its height, on the green space before a tent 
 full of general ofiicers, on the bare floor of a barrack-room, 
 under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, 6r as here, in the 
 music-hall of a caf6. 
 
 Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 221 
 
 little Friend of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed ; 
 but, for a set of soldiers, war-worn, dust covered, weary with 
 toil and stiff with wounds, she would do it, till they forgot 
 their ills, and got as intoxicated with it as with champagne. 
 For her gros bebSs, if they were really in want of it, she 
 would do anything. She would flout a star-covered general, 
 box the ears of a brilUant aid, send killing missiles of slang 
 at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refuse point-blank a 
 Russian grand duke ; but to * mes enfants,' as she was given 
 to calling the rough tigers and grizzly veterans of the Army of 
 Africa, Cigarette was never capricious, however mischievously 
 she would rally, or contemptuously would rate them, when 
 they deserved it. 
 
 And she was dancing for them now. 
 
 Her soft short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright 
 with a scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night, and full of 
 fire, her gay little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making 
 her look like a fuchsia-bell tossed by the wind to and fro, 
 ever so lightly, on its delicate swaying stem, Cigarette danced 
 with the wild grace of an Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch 
 girl, as untutored and instinctive in her as its song to a birf 
 as its swiftness to a chamois. To see Cigarette was liSe 
 drinking light fiery wines, whose intoxication was gay as 
 mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of 
 Africa, all the wit of France, all the bohemiam5m of the 
 Flagi. all the caprices of her sex, were in that bewitching 
 dancing. Flashing, fluttering, circling, whirling, glancing, ; 
 like a sabre's gleam, tossing like a flower's head, bounding 
 like an antelope, launching like an arrow, darting like a 
 falcon, skimming like a swallow ; then for an instant resting 
 as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lily 
 rests on the water's breast — Cigarette e?t Bacchante no man \ 
 could resist. ^.^ 
 
 When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of that 
 dance delirium, she did with her beholders what she would. 
 The famous Cachucha, that made the reverend cardinals of 
 Spain fling off their pontifical vestments, and surrender them- 
 selves to the witchery of the castanets and the gleam of the 
 white twinkling feet, was never more irresistible, more en- 
 chanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It 
 was a poem of motion and colour, an ode to Venus and Bacchus. 
 
 All her heart was in it — that heart of a girl and a soldier, 
 
222 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 of a hawk and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a 
 Lascar and a child, which beat so brightly and so boldly under 
 the dainty gold aiglettea with which she laced her dashing 
 little uniform. 
 
 Li the Chambree of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, 
 on sandy soil under African stars, above the heaped plunder 
 brought in from a razzia, in the yellow light of candles fastened 
 to bayonets stuck in the earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal 
 table of a barrack-room full of black-browed conscrits indi- 
 genes,^ amid the thundering echoes of the Marseillaise des 
 Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves, Ciga- 
 rette had danced, danced, danced, till her whole vivacious life 
 seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief 
 of her little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utter- 
 ance in those tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that 
 never looked to touch the earth which they lit on hghtly as a 
 bird alights, only to leave it afresh, with wider, swifter bound, 
 with ceaseless airy flight. 
 
 So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. 
 
 She had a famous group of spectators, not one of whom knew 
 
 how to hold himself back from springing in to seize her m 
 
 his arms, and whirl with her down the floor. But it had 
 
 been often told them by experience, that, unless she beckoned 
 
 one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her 
 
 impromptu jpas seul would be the immediate result. Her 
 
 spectators were renowned croque-mitaines ; men, whose names 
 
 rang like trumpets in the ear of Kabyle and Marabout ; men 
 
 ( who had fought under the noble colours of the day of Maza- 
 
 \gran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions ; men who 
 
 ihad the salient features of all the varied species that make up 
 
 (the soldiers of Africa. " / i\ fi-r^. > r '•• ■v^ ■^ < ^ '•^' ~ I h v '\ Vn t 
 
 \iy \ There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson turnous wrapped 
 
 ^ .v^ound~"His towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, 
 
 ^'i as before a pestilence, the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous 
 
 ^ of all the Spahis ; ^ brutalised in his drink, merciless in his 
 
 '^ loves ; all an Arab when once back in the desert, with a blow 
 
 of a scabbard his only payment for forage, and a thrust of 
 
 his sabre his only apology to husbands, but to the service a 
 
 slave, and in the combat a lion. 
 
 There was Beau -Bruno, a dandy of Turcos,^ whose snowy 
 
 ' Conscripts drawn from the native population. 
 f^ ^ Arab cavalry. ' Native infantry. 
 
 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 223 
 
 turban and olive beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria, 
 who himself affected to neglect his conquests, with a supreme 
 contempt for those indulgences, but who would have been 
 led out and shot rather than forego the personal adornings, 
 for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled 
 unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone. 
 
 There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo,^ the wittiest, v^ 
 gayest, happiest, sunniest- tempered droll in all the army, who 
 would sing the camp-songs so joyously through a burning 
 march, that the whole of the battalions would break into one 
 refrain as with one throat, and press on laughing, shouting, 
 running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and as full of 
 monkey-like jests as any gamins. 
 
 There was En-ta-naboull,^ so nicknamed from his love for ,y 
 that unceremonious slang phrase — a Zouave who had the his- 
 tory of a Gil Bias, and the talent of a Crichton, the morals of 
 an Abruzzi brigand, and the wit of a Falstaff : aquiline-nosed, 
 eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an African, with adventures 
 enough in his life to outvie Munchausen, with a purse always 
 pleine de vide,^ as the camp sentence runs ; who thrust his 
 men through the body as coolly as others kill wasps ; who 
 roasted a shepherd over a camp-fire for contumacy in conceal- 
 ing Bedouin whereabouts ; yet who would pawn his last shirt 
 at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt, and had once substi- 
 tuted himself for, and received fifty blows on the loins in the 
 stead of, his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of 
 David for Jonathan, which, in Caserne life, is readier found 
 than in Club life. 
 
 There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small wiry supple-limbed fire- y 
 eater, with a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the 
 live coal's flame, a veteran of the Joyeux, who could discipline 
 his roughs as a sheep-dog his lambs, and who had one curt 
 martial law for his detachment, brief as Draco's, and trimmed 
 to suit either an attack on the enemy or the chastisement of 
 an indiscipline,'^ lyiiig in one simple word — * Fusillez.' ^ 
 
 There was Barbe-Grise, a grizzly ancien ^ of Zephyrs, who 
 held the highest repute of' any in his battalion for rushing on 
 to a foe with a foot-speed that could equal the canter of an 
 Arab's horse ; for having stood alone once the brunt of thirty 
 
 ' Soldier of the commissariat and of the baggage-trains. 
 
 ' Est-ce que tu eg fou ? in ordinary French. ' Penniless. 
 
 * A mutineer. ' Fire 1 « Veteran. 
 
224 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them back, though a 
 
 dozen spearheads were launched into his body, and his panta- 
 
 Ions garance were filled with his own blood ; and for framing 
 
 a matchless system of night plunder that swept the counti^y 
 
 bare as a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender 
 
 every hidden treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from 
 
 a cauldron of couscoussou to a tom-cat. 
 
 ^ There was Alcide Echauftourees, also a Zephyr,^ who had 
 
 his nickname from the marvellous changes of costume with 
 
 -r- which he would pursue his erratic expedition, and deceive 
 
 !^ the very Arabs themselves into believing him a born Mussul- 
 
 \v man ; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion, 
 
 ^ the Brummel of his Caserne ; coquette with his kepi on one 
 
 ^ side of his graceful head, and his moustaches soft as a lady's 
 
 ^ hair, whose paradise was a score of dangerous intrigues, and 
 
 ^ whose seventh heaven was a duel with an infuriated husband ; 
 
 incorrigibly lazy, but with the Itahan laziness, as of the 
 
 panther who sleeps in the sun, and with such episodes of 
 
 romance, mischief, love, and devilry in his twenty-five years 
 
 of existence as would leave behind them all the invention of 
 
 Dumas, pere oufils. 
 
 All these and many more like them were the spectators of 
 Cigarette's ballet, applauding with the wild hurrah of the 
 desert, with the clashing of spurs, with the thunder of feet, 
 with the demoniac shrieks of irrepressible adoration and 
 delight. 
 
 And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over 
 the ring of familiar faces, and glance from them with an im- 
 patient disappointment as she danced ; her gros heh&s were 
 not enough for her. She wanted a Chasseur with white hands 
 and a grave smile to be among them ; and she shook back her 
 curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and went 
 on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild resistless 
 abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little 
 desert-hawk that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne 
 down upon the wind, and wheeling like a mad thing in the 
 transparent ether and the hot sun-glow. 
 
 L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the cJiasse- 
 marais. He was in the house ; she knew it ; had she not 
 Been him drinking with some others, or rather paying for all, 
 
 ' Zephyr is a name given to the 'Battalion of the Rebellius' ia 
 Algeria. 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 225 
 
 but taking little himself, just as she entered ? He was in the 
 house, this mysterious Bel-^-faire-peur — and was not here to 
 see her dance ! Not here to see the darhng of the Douars ; 
 the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa ; 
 the Amie du Drapeau who was adored by every one, from 
 Chefs do Bataillon to fantassms, and toasted by every drinker, 
 from Algiers to Oran, in the Champagne of Messrs. les Gene- 
 raux as in the Oric of the Loustics round a camp-fire ! 
 
 He was not there ; he was leaning over the little wooden 
 ledge of a narrow window in an inner room, from which one 
 by one some Spahis and some troopers of his own tribu,^ with 
 whom he had just been drinking such burgundies andbrandiea 
 as the place could give, had sloped away one by one under the 
 irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction, how- 
 ever, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were 
 emptied, bottles more in number and higher in cost than wag 
 prudent in a corporal who had but his pay, and that scant 
 enough to keep himself, and who had known what it was to 
 find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a luxury beyond 
 all reach, and to have to f aire la lessive ^ up to the last thing 
 in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wme when he was dying 
 of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with 
 African fever. 
 
 But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the" 
 reckless life of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank 
 brotherly fellowship that bound the soldiers of each battalion, 
 or each squadron, so closely in a fraternity of which every 
 member took as freely as he gave ; its gay, careless carpepj^y*'^ 
 diem camp-philosophy, the unconscious philosophy of men' ' fxQ^" 
 who enjoyed heart and soul if they had a chance, because ^^ 
 they knew they might be shot dead before another day broke ; '''^" 
 and its swift and vivid changes that made tirailleurs and 
 troopers one hour rich as a king in loot, in wine, in dark- 
 eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to be the next day 
 famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urging y,,!>'^J 
 their sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, 
 glad to sell a cartouche, if they dared so break regimental 
 orders, or to rifle a henroost if they came near one, to get a 
 mouthful of food, changing everything in their haversack for 
 a sup of dirty water, and driven to pay with the thrust of a 
 
 * Squadron. ' Sell bis whole effects. 
 
 it 
 
226 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 sabre for a lock of wretched grass to keep their beasts alive 
 through the sickliness of a sirocco. 
 ^ All these taught no caution to any nature normally without 
 it ; and the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him 
 whom they named Bel-^-faire-peur from the first day that he 
 had bound his red waist-sash about his loins, and the officers 
 of the bureau had looked over the new volunteer murmuring 
 admiringly in their teeth ' Ce gaillard ira loin I ' ^ had been 
 that all he had was given, free as the winds, to any who 
 asked or needed. 
 
 The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the in- 
 genuity of his own manufactures, or by thieving or intimi- 
 dating the people of the country, a French soldier has but 
 barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and poverty ; 
 and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest 
 in the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in 
 wringing out by force or threat the possessions of the native 
 population. The one reproach that made his fellow- /ascars ^ 
 impatient and suspicious of him was that he refused any 
 share in those rough arguments of blows and lunges with 
 which they were accustomed to persuade every victim they 
 came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or 
 drink, or riches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to 
 Morocco carpets and skins of brandy and coins hid in the 
 &a,nd, that the Arabs might be so unhappy as to own in their 
 reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin was as 
 sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let 
 him be ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an 
 eccentricity, and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which 
 not even his daring and his popularity could wholly procure 
 him pardon. 
 
 But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavish- 
 ness with which his ddcoinpte^ was lent, given, or spent 
 in the very moment of its receipt. If a man of his trihic 
 wanted anything, he knew that Bel-^-faire-peur would ofit'er 
 his last sou to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would 
 sell the last trifle he possessed to the Riz-pain-sels,'' to get 
 enough to assist his comrade. It was a virtue wliicli went far 
 to vouch for all others in the view of his lawless, onen-handed 
 
 1 • This gallant will do great things 1 ' LnV ^ ^O' 
 
 « Soldiers. « Pay, ' 
 
 * Working- soldiers of the adminietration. . . ) 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 227 
 
 brethren of the Chambr^e ^ and the Camp, and made them 
 forgive him many moments, when the mood of silence and the 
 habit of soHtude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise 
 have incensed a fraternity with whom * tu fais Suisse / ' ^ ia 
 the deadliest charge, and the sentence of excommunication 
 against any who dare to provoke it. 
 
 One of those moods was on him now. 
 
 He had had a drinking bout with the men, who had left 
 him, and had laughed as gaily and as carelessly, if not as 
 riotously, as any of them at the wild mirth, the unbridled 
 licence, the amatory recitations, and the Bacchic odes in their 
 lawless saim\ that had ushered the night in while his wines 
 unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the 
 fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalry-men. But now he 
 leaned out of the pent-up casement, with his arms folded on 
 the sill and a short pipe in his teeth, thoughtful and sohtary 
 pcf cer the orgie, whose heavy fumes and clouds of smoke still 
 hung heavily on the air within. 
 
 The wmdow looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where 
 the yellow leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the 
 grey uneven stones. The clamour of the applause and the 
 ring of the music from the dancing-hall echoed with a whirling 
 din in his ear, and made, in sharper, stranger contrast, the 
 quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry sky above its 
 four high w^alls. 
 
 He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the 
 noise about him ; there was always noise of some sort in the 
 clangour and tumult of barrack or bivouac life, and he had 
 grown to heed it no more than he heeded the roar of desert 
 beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the hills ; 
 but looking dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with 
 the sear gourd leaves and the rough misshapen stones. His 
 present and his future were neither much brighter than the 
 gloomy walled-in den on which he gazed. 
 
 Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the 
 champ de manceuvre ^ for the first time, to see of what mettle 
 he was made, the instructor had watched him with amazed 
 eyes, muttering to himself, * Tiens ! ce n'est pas un " hleu " — 
 ccci I ' ^ What a rider 1 Dieu de Dieu ! He knows more than 
 
 * Sleeping-room in a barrack. * You live alone, or apart. 
 
 * Exercise-ground. 
 
 * ♦ Whew 1 This is no raw recruit— this fellow I ' , 
 
 q2 
 
228 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 we can teach. He has served before now — served in some 
 emperor's picked guard ! ' 
 
 And when he had passed from the exercismg-gromid to the 
 campaign, the Army had found in him one of the most 
 splendid of its many splendid soldiers ; and in the folios matri- 
 cides ^ there was no page of achievements, of exploits, of 
 services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array of 
 military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been 
 passed by unnoticed : he had now not even the cross on his 
 chest, and he had only slowly and with infinite difficulty 
 been promoted so far as he stood now — a Corporal in the 
 Chasseurs d'Afrique — a step only just accorded him because 
 woands innumerable and distinctions without number in 
 countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him 
 wholly aside any longer, 
 f" The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man — his 
 ,. i^Chief. 
 
 0" Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they 
 could come in actual contact, that merciless weight of ani- 
 mosity from the great man to his soldier had laid on the 
 other like iron, and clogged him from all advancement. His 
 thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at an inspection, the ac- 
 cidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript had furnished 
 pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent oppro- 
 brium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute 
 in his saddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath 
 tlio outrage than the blood that would, despite himself, flush 
 the pale bronze of his forehead. His thoughts were on it now. 
 ' There are many losses that are bitter enough,' he mused ; 
 ' but there is not one so bitter as the loss of the right to 
 resent ! ' 
 
 A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the musio 
 
 of the shrill violins and thundering drums, echoed through 
 
 ^ the rooms and shook him from his reverie. 
 
 y jy 'They are hons enfants,' he thought, with a half smile, as 
 
 -^/he listened; * they are more honest in their mirth, as in their 
 
 (v , wrath, than we ever were in that old world of mine.' 
 
 ■ ^"^ Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay ringing 
 
 voice of Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused 
 
 in her dancing to exchange one of those passes of arms which 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 Paily register of the troopers' conduct. 
 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 229 
 
 were her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the 
 regiments of Africa, had known as her mother tongue. 
 
 * II fait Suisse ? ' she cried, disdainfully. ' Paf! et tu 
 as hit de sa gourde, chena,pan ? ' ^ 
 
 The grumbled assent of the accused Tvas inaudible. 
 
 ' Ingrat ! ' pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the 
 vivandiere ; *you would bazarder^ your mother's grave- 
 clothes ! You would eat your children, en fricassde ! You 
 would sell your father's bones for a draught of tord-hoyaud /' 
 Va VcUy chien I ' 
 
 The screams of mirth redoubled ; Cigarette's style of wither- 
 ing eloquence was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and, under 
 the chorus of laughs at his cost, her infuriated adversary 
 plucked up courage and roared forth a defiance. 
 
 ' Ma cantche ! white hands and a brunette's face are fine 
 things for a soldier. He kills women — he kills women with 
 his lady's grace ! Grand' clwse ca I ' 
 
 * He does not pull their ears to make them give him their 
 style,^ and beat them with a matraqiie * if they don't fry hi3 
 eggs fast enough, as you do, Barbe-Grise,' retorted the con- 
 temptuous tones of the champion of the absent. * White 
 hands, morbleu ! Well, his hands are not always in other 
 people's pockets as yours are, sacripajit ! ' 
 
 This forcible tuquoque recrimination is in high relish in the 
 Caserne ; the screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise wag 
 a redoubtable authority vrhom the wildest daredevil in his 
 brigade dared not contradict, and he was gettmg the worst of 
 it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the infinite glee of 
 the whole ball-room. 
 
 * Damn ! — his hands cannot work as mine can I ' growled 
 her opponent. 
 
 *0h, hoi' cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; 
 * they don't twist cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have 
 thieved, perhaps like yours, but they would wring your neck 
 before breakfast to get an appetite, if they could touch such 
 canaille.* 
 
 * Canaille ?* thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise; * Ma 
 cantche t — if you were but a man I ' 
 
 ' You call him a misanthrope ? and you have been drinking at his 
 expense, you rascal ? 
 ' Pawn. • Brandy. 
 
 * Money. » Stick. 
 
230 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * What would you do to me, brigand ? ' screamed Cigarette, 
 in fits of laughter ; * give me fifty blows of a matraquey as 
 your officers gave you last week for stealing his jambon ^ from 
 the hlanc hec ? ' ^ 
 
 A growl like a lion from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook 
 the walls. She had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a 
 very sore point ; the unhappy young conscript's rifle having 
 been first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously 
 sold to an Arab. 
 
 * Sacrebleu ! ' he roared ; ' you are in love, au grand galojJ, 
 with this Vainqueur des belles ^ — this loustic aristocrat ! ' * 
 
 The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder 
 tumult of laughter ; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths 
 from Barbe-Grise. Cigarette had launched a bottle of \in 
 ordinaire at him, blinded his eyes, and drenched his beard 
 with the red torrent and the shower of glass shivers, and was 
 back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and singing at the 
 top of her sweet lark-like voice — 
 
 Turcos! Lignavdsl 
 Bon Zigs 1 Trufifards I 
 Autour des couscoussou, 
 Sont tous mes chers zou-zoas I 
 Roumia 
 Spahis 
 
 Mime les Arbis, 
 Joyeux 
 Et Bleus, 
 Mime les Recrues, 
 Ont pour moi 
 Quand on boit 
 L'air des rois, 
 L'air des rois I 
 ! A mon cceur le chemin 
 1 N'est qu' par le vin I 
 j Le bidon qu'on savoure 
 ' Est le titre k m'amour I 
 
 With which doggerel declaration of her own mercenary and 
 cosmopolitan sentiments chanted in Sabir slang, the little 
 Friend of the Flag resumed her wildest bounds and her most 
 airy fantasias. At the sound of the animated altercation, not 
 knowing but what one of his own troopers might be the de- 
 linquent, he who leaned out of the little casement moved 
 
 ' Gun. i- r> ,v>rv . ) 2 Newly joined soldier. 
 
 * Conqueror of woman. * Soldier-fine gentleman. 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE 231 
 
 forward to the doorway of the dancing-room ; he did not guesa 
 that it was himself whom she had defended against the on- 
 slaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise. 
 
 His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above 
 most even of the lofty- statured Spahis, and her rapid glance 
 flashed over him at once. ' Did he hear ? * she wondered. 
 The scarlet flush of exercise and excitement deepened on her 
 clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at the coarsest 
 jests or the broadest love- words of the barrack life that had 
 been about her ever since her eyes first opened in their infancy 
 to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among the 
 baggage-waggons that her mother followed. She thought he 
 had not heard ; his face was grave, a little weary, and his 
 gaze, as it fell on her, was abstracted. 
 
 ' Oh-he I Beau Boumi I ' thought Cigarette, with a flash of 
 hot wrath superseding her momentary and most rare embar- 
 rassment. * You are looldng at me and not thinking of me ? 
 We will soon change that I ' 
 
 Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the 
 first day when she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a 
 great drum when she was three years old, in the middle of a 
 circular camp of Tirailleurs. It sent fresh nerve into her 
 lithe limbs, it made her eyes flash like so much fire, it gave 
 her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more heedless- 
 ness, more piqued and reckless cUsinvolture, She stamped 
 her tiny spurred foot petulantly. 
 
 * Plus vUe I Plus vite /' ^ she cried; and as the musician 
 obeyed her, she whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed 
 to live in air, while her soft curls blew off her brow, and her 
 white teeth glanced, and her cheeks glowed with a carmine 
 glow, and the little gold aiglettes broke across her chest with 
 the beating of her heart that throbbed like a bird's heart when 
 it is wild with the first breath of Spring. 
 
 She had pitted herself against him ; and she won— so 
 far. 
 
 The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the 
 voluptuous repose that now and then broke the ceaseless, 
 sparkling movement of her dancing, caught his eyes, and fixed 
 them on her ; it was bewitching, and it bewitched him for the 
 moment ; he watched her as in other days he had watched 
 
 1 ( 
 
 Quicker ! quicker 1 ' 
 
232 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charms 
 of opera dancers. 
 
 This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky 
 glare and the tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of 
 soldiers in their shirt-sleeves with their short black pipes in 
 their mouths, with as matchless a grace as ever the first 
 ballerina ^ of Europe danced before sovereigns and dukes on 
 
 I the boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It was the eastern 
 hamhoula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic 
 
 I joyaunce, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France. 
 Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head. 
 
 * A moiy Boumis t ' 
 
 It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to 
 join in that wild vertigo for which every one of her spectators 
 was panting ; their pipes were flung away, their kepis tossed 
 off their heads, the music clashed louder and faster, and more 
 fiery with every sound, the chorus of the Marseillaise des 
 Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices — they danced as 
 only men can dance who serve under the French flag and 
 live under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on — the 
 Chasseur d'Afrique and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed 
 for life at Mazagran. 
 
 ' En ta mahoull ? Tu ne danses pas — toi ? ' ^ muttered the 
 veteran Zephyr to his silent companion. 
 
 The Chasseur turned and smiled a little. 
 
 * I prefer a hamhoula whose music is the cannon, bonpdrc' 
 
 * Bravo 1 Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you ? ' 
 
 * Yes ; too pretty to be unscxed.by~fiuch aLlife.* 
 His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well, a young 
 
 Arab, with eyes like the softness of dark waters, who had 
 fallen to him once in a razzia as his share of spoil, and for 
 whom he had denied himself cards, or wine, or tobacco, or an 
 hour at the Cafe, or anything that alleviated the privation 
 and severity of his lot as * simjjle soldat,' which he had been 
 then, that she might have such few and slender comforts aa 
 he could give her from his miserable pay. She was dead. 
 Her death had been the darkest passage in his life in Africa 
 — but the flute-hke music of her voice seemed to come on his 
 ear now. This girl-soldier had little charm for him after the 
 Bweet, silent, tender grace of his lost Zelme. 
 
 ' Dancing girl. 
 
 * ♦ Are you a stupid ? Don't you dance— eh ? ' 
 
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE ^33 
 
 He turned and touched on the shoulder a Chasseur who 
 had paused a moment to get breath m the headlong whh'l : 
 
 * Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn ! * 
 
 The trooper obeyed instantly ; they were ordered to visit 
 and remain with a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on 
 the naked plateau; a camp professedly submissive, but not 
 so much so but that the Bureau deemed it well to profit 
 themselves by the services of the corporal, whose knowledge 
 of Arabic, whose friendship with the tribes, and whose 
 superior intelligence in all such missions rendered him 
 pecuHarly fitted for errands that required diplomacy and 
 address as well as daring and fire. 
 
 He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ball-room 
 into the warm lustre of the Algerian night; as he went, 
 Cigarette, who had been nearer than he knew, flashed full 
 in his eyes the fury of her own sparkling ones, while with a 
 contemptuous laugh she struck him across the lips with the 
 cigar she hurled at him. 
 
 ' Unsexed ? Pouf 1 If you have a woman's face, may I 
 not have a man's soul ? It is only a fair exchange. I am 
 no kitten, hon zig ; take care of my talons ! ' 
 
 The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa ; she 
 had too much in her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the 
 Chacals, with whom her youth had been spent from her 
 cradle up, not to be dangerous when roused ; she was off at a 
 bound, and in the midst of the mad whirl again before he 
 could attempt to soften or efface the words she had overheard, 
 and the last thing he saw of her was in a cloud of Zouavea 
 ftnd Spahis with the wild tintamarre ^ of the music shaking 
 riotous echoes from the rafters. 
 
 But when he had passed out of sight, Cigarette shook her- 
 self free from the dancers with petulant impatience ; she wag 
 not to be allured by flattery or drawn by entreaty back 
 amongst them. She set her delicate pearly teeth tight, and 
 vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous oath that 
 she was tired, that she was sick of them, that she was no 
 strolling player to caper for them with a tambourine, and 
 with that declaration made her way out alone into the little 
 open court, under the stars, so cool, so still after the heat and 
 riot and turbulence within. 
 
 ' Uproar. 
 
134 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 There she dropped on a broad stone step and leant hei? 
 head on her hand. 
 
 ' Unsexed ! unsexed I What did he mean ? ' she thought, 
 while for the first time, with a vague sense of his meaning, 
 tears welled hot and bitter into her sunny eyes, while the 
 pained colour burned in her face. Those tears were the first 
 that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones, though 
 they lasted but a Httle time ; there was too much fire in the 
 young Bohemian of the Army not to scorch them as they 
 rose. She stamped her foot on the stones passionately, and 
 her teeth were set like a little terrier's as she muttered : 
 
 * Unsexed ! unsexed I Bah, M'sieu I'Aristocrate I If you 
 think so, you shall find your thought right ; you shall find 
 Cigarette can hate asmenh^te and take her revenge as 
 soldiers take theirs 1 *^^ — -^ 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 UNDER THE HOUSES OP HAIR 
 
 It was just sunset. 
 
 The far-off summits of the Djurjura were tinted with the 
 intense glare the distant pines and cypresses cut sharply 
 against the rose-warmed radiance of the sky. On the slopes 
 of the hills white cupolas and terraced gardens, where the 
 Algerine haouach still showed the taste and luxury of Algerine 
 corsairs, rose up among their wild olive shadows on the 
 groves of the lentiscus. In the deep gorges that were chan- 
 nelled between the riven rocks, the luxuriance of African 
 vegetation ran riot, the feathery crests of tossing reeds, the 
 long floating leaves of plants, filling the dry watercourses of 
 vanished streams ; the broad foliage of the wild fig, and the 
 glowing, dainty blossoms of the oleander, wherever a trace 
 of brook, or pool, or rivulet let it put forth its beautiful 
 coronal, growing one in another in the narrow valleys, and 
 the curving passes, wherever broken earth or rock gave 
 shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day. 
 
 Farther inland the bare sear utretcbes of bro^sn plain were 
 studded with the dwarf palm ; the vast shadowless plateaux] 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 235 
 
 were desolate as the great desert itself far beyond ; and the 
 Bun, as it burned on them a moment in the glory of its last 
 glow, found them naked and grand by the sheer force of 
 immensity and desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken 
 into refts and chasms, as though to make fairer by their own 
 barren soUtude the laughmg luxuriance of the sea-face of the 
 Sahel. 
 
 A moment, and the lustre of the light flung its own magic 
 brilliancy over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full 
 on the heights of El Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, 
 delicate form of the Italian pines that here and there, Sicilian- 
 like, threw out their graceful heads against the amber sun- 
 glow and the deep azure of the heavens. Then swiftly, 
 suddenly, the sun sank ; twilight passed like a grey gliding 
 shade, an instant, over earth and sea ; and night, the balmy, 
 sultry, star-studded night of Africa, fell over the thirsty 
 leafage longing for its dews, the closed flowers that slumbered 
 at its touch, the seared and blackened plains to which its 
 coolness could bring no herbage, the massive hiils that seemed 
 to lie so calmly in its rest. 
 
 Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha 
 Road was a circle of Arab tents ; the circle was irregularly 
 kept, and the Kriimas were scattered at will ; here a low one 
 of canvas, there one of goatskin ; here a white towering canopy 
 of teleze, there a low striped little nest of shelter, and, loftier 
 than all, the stately hcit el shar of the Sheik, with his standard 
 struck into the earth in fi'ont of it, with its heavy folds hanging 
 listlessly in the sultry, breathless air. 
 
 The encampment stretched far over the level arid earth, 
 and there was more than one tent where the shadowing 
 folds of the banner marked the abode of some noble Djied. 
 Disorder reigned supreme, in all the desert freedom ; horses 
 and mules, goats and camels, tethered, strayed among the 
 conical houses of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the 
 tossed- down hay ; and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood 
 fires, whose lurid light was flung on the eagle features and 
 the white haiks of the wanderers who watched the boiling of 
 their mess, or fed the embers with dry sticks. Round other 
 fires, having finished the eating of their couscoussou, the 
 Bedoums lay full length, enjoying the solemn silence which 
 they love so little to break, and smoking their long pipes, 
 while through the shadows about them glided the lofty 
 
«36 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Mgures of their brethren, with the folds of their sweeping 
 burnous floating in the gloom. It was a picture. Rem- 
 brandt in colour. Oriental in composition, with the darkness 
 Kurroundiug it stretching out into endless distance that led to 
 the mystic silence of the great desert, and above the intense 
 blue of the gorgeous night, with the stars burning through 
 white transparent mists of slowly drifting clouds. 
 
 In the central tent, tall and crimson striped, with its 
 mighty standard reared in front, and its opening free to the 
 night, sat the Khalifa, the head of the tribe, with a circle of 
 Arabs about him. He was thrown on his cushions, rich 
 enough for a sera^gho, while the rest squatted on the morocco 
 carpet that covered the bare ground, and that was strewn 
 with .round brass Moorish trays, and little cups emptied of 
 their coffee. The sides of the tent were hung with guns and 
 swords, lavishly adorned, and in the middle stood a tall Turkish 
 candle-branch in fretted work, whose light struggled with the 
 white flood of the moon, and the ruddy, fitful glare from a 
 wood fire without. 
 
 Beneath its light, which fell full on him, flung down upon 
 another pile of cushions facing the open front of the tent, 
 was a guest whom the Khalifa delighted to honour. Only a 
 Corporal of Chasseurs, and once a foe, yet one with whom 
 the Arab found the brotherhood of brave men, and on whom 
 he lavished, in all he could, the hospitalities and honours of 
 the desert. 
 
 The story of their friendship ran thus : 
 
 The tribe was now allied with I'rance, or, at least, had 
 accepted French sovereignty, and pledged itself to neutrality 
 in the hostilities still rife ; but a few years before, far in the 
 interior and leagued with the Kabailes, it had been one of the 
 fiercest and most dangerous among the enemies of France. 
 At that time the lOialifa and the Chasseur met in many a 
 skirmish ; hot, desperate struggles, where men fought horse 
 to horse, hand to hand ; midnight frays, when, in the heart of 
 lonely ravines, Arab ambuscades fell on squadrons of French 
 cavalry ; terrible chases through the heat of torrid suns, when 
 the glittering ranks of the charging troops swept down after 
 the Bedouins' flight ; fiery combats, when the desert sand 
 and the smoke of musketry circled in clouds above the close- 
 locked struggle, and the Leopard of France and the Lion of 
 Sahara wrestled in a death-grip. 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 237 
 
 In these, through four or five seasons of warfare, the Sheik 
 and the Chasseur had encountered each other, till each had 
 grown to look for the other's face as soon as the standards of 
 the Bedouu3s flashed m the sunshine opposite the guidons of 
 the Imperial forces ; till each had watched and noted the 
 other's unmatched prowess, and borne away the wounds of 
 the other's home strokes, with the admiration of a bold soldier 
 for a bold rival's dauntlessness and skill ; till each had learned 
 to long for an hour, hitherto always prevented by waves of 
 battle that had swept them too soon asunder, when they should 
 meet in a duello once for all, and try their strength together 
 till one bore off victory and one succumbed to death. 
 
 At last it came to pass that after a lengthened term of this 
 chivalrous antagonism, the tribe were sorely pressed by the 
 French troops, and could no longer mass its fearless front to 
 face them, but had to flee southward to the desert, and en- 
 cumbered by its flocks and its women, was hardly driven and 
 greatly decimated. Now among those women was one whom 
 the Sheik held above all earthly things except his honour in 
 war, a beautiful antelope -eyed creature, lithe and graceful as 
 a palm, and the daughter of a pure Arab race, on whom he 
 could not endure for any other sight than his own to look, and 
 whom he guarded in his tent as the chief pearl of all his trea- 
 sures ; herds, flocks, arms, even his horses, all save the honour 
 of his tribe, he would have surrendered rather than surrender 
 Djelma. It was a passion wdth him ; a passion that not even 
 the iron of his temper and the dignity of his austere calm 
 could abate or conceal ; and the rumour of it and of the beauty 
 of its object reached the French camp, till an impatient 
 curiosity was roused about her, and a raid that should bear 
 her off became the favourite speculation round the picket fires 
 at night, and the scorching noons, when the men lay stripped 
 to their waist, panting hke tired dogs under the hot, withering 
 breath that stole to them from sweeping over the yellow seas 
 of sand. 
 
 Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great 
 Djied as something beyond all that her sex had ever given 
 them, and to snare her in some unwary moment was the chief 
 thought of Zephyr and Spahis when they went out on a 
 scouting or foraging party. But it was easier said than done. 
 The eyes of no Frank ever fell on her, and when he was most 
 closely driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and 
 
238 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 sheep, but with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, 
 fell more and more backward and southward, drawing the 
 French on and on farther and farther across the plains in the 
 sickliest times of hottest drought. 
 
 Reinforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as 
 they were thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was 
 a man the less to their numbers for ever, and the lightning- 
 like pursuit began to tell terribly on them ; their herds had 
 fallen into their pursuers' hands, and famine menaced them. 
 Nevertheless, they were fierce in attack as tigers, rapid in 
 swoop as vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the 
 cavalry lost more in this fruitless, worthless work than they 
 would have done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz. 
 
 Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very 
 rare, dysentery came with the scorch and the toil of this end- 
 less charge ; the chief in command, M. le Marquis de Chateau- 
 roy, swore heavily as he saw many of his best men dropping 
 off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two hundred napo- 
 leons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik's head 
 or the livmg beauty of Djelma. 
 
 One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp whore a few 
 barren, withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little 
 thread of brackish water oozed through the yellow earth. 
 
 It was high noon ; the African sun was at its fiercest ; far as 
 the eye could reach there was only one boundless, burning, 
 unendurable glitter of parching sand, and cloudless sky, brazen 
 beneath, brazen above, till the desert and the heavens touched, 
 and blent in one tawny fiery glow in the measureless distance. 
 The men lay under canvas, dead beat, half naked, without the 
 power to do anything except to fight like thirst-maddened 
 dogs for a draught at the shallow stream that they and their 
 breathless horses soon drained dry. 
 
 Even Raoul de Ch^teauroy, though his frame was like an 
 Arab's, and knit into Arab endurance, v/as stretched like a 
 great bloodhound, chained by the sultry oppression. He was 
 ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to the core, and sharp and swift 
 as steel in his rigour, but he was a fine soldier, and never spared 
 himself any of the hardships that his regiment had to endure 
 under him. 
 
 Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken ; a 
 trumpet-call rang through the stillness ; against the amber 
 transparency of the horizon line the outlines of half a dozen 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 239 
 
 horsemen were seen looming nearer and nearer with every 
 moment ; they were some Spahis who had been out, * sondant 
 le terrain aiix environs.' ^ The mighty frame of Chateauroy, 
 almost as unclothed as an athlete, started from its slumberous, 
 panting rest ; his eyes lightened hungrily ; he muttered a fiery 
 oath ; ♦ Mort de Dieu I— they have the woman 1 ' 
 
 They had the woman. She had been netted near a water- 
 spring, to which she had wandered too loosely guarded, and 
 too far from the Bedouin encampment. The delight of the 
 haughty Sidi's eyes was borne off to the tents of his foes, and 
 the Colonel's face flushed darkly with an eager, lustful warmth, 
 as he looked upon his captive. Rumour had not outboasted the 
 Arab girl's beauty ; it was lustrous as ever was that when, 
 far yonder to the eastward, under the curled palms of Nile, 
 the sorceress of the Caesars swept through her rose- strewn 
 palace -chambers. Only Djelmawas as innocent as the gazelle, 
 whose grace she resembled, ^nd loved her lord with a great 
 love. 
 
 Of her suffering her captor took no more heed than if she 
 were a young bird dying of shot-wounds ; but, with one 
 triumphant, admiring glance at her, he wrote a message in 
 Arabic, to send to the Khahfa, ere her loss was discovered — a 
 message more cruel than iron. He hesitated a second, where 
 he lay at the opening of his tent, whom he should send with 
 it. His men were almost all half-dead with the sun-blaze. 
 His glance chanced to light in the distance on a soldier to 
 whom he bore no love — causelessly, but bitterly all the same. 
 He had him summoned, and eyed him with a curious amuse- 
 ment : Chateauroy treated his squadrons with much the 
 same sans-faqon familiarity and brutality that a chief of 
 filibusters uses to his. 
 
 • So ! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of 
 water to a drummer, they say ? ' | 
 
 The Chasseur gave the salute with a calm deference. A 
 faint flush passed over the sun-bronze of his forehead. He 
 had thought the Sydney-like sacrifice had been unobserved. 
 
 ' The drummer was but a child, mon Commandant.' 
 
 ' Be so good as to give us no more of those melodramatic 
 acts ! * said M. le Marquis, contemptuously. * You are too 
 fond of trafficking in these showy fooleries. You bribe your 
 
 * Sweeping the country for food. 
 
240 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 comrades for their favouritism too openly. Ventre bleu ! I 
 forbid it — do you hear ? ' 
 
 * I hear, mon Colonel.' 
 
 The assent was perfectly tranquil and respectful. He was 
 too good a soldier not to render perfect obedience, and keep 
 perfect silence, under any goad of provocation to break both. 
 
 * Obey, then I ' said Chateauroy, savagely. * Well, since 
 you love heat so well, you shall take a flag of truce and my 
 scroll to the Sidi Ilderim. But tell me, first, what do you 
 think of this capture ? ' 
 
 ' It is not my place to give opinions, M. le Colonel.' 
 
 * Pardieu ! it is your place when I bid you. Speak, or I 
 will have the matraq^te cut the words out of you ! ' 
 
 ' I may speak frankly ? ' 
 
 * Ten thousand curses — yes ! * 
 
 ' Then, I think that those who make war on women are no 
 longer fit to fight with men.' 
 
 For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateau- 
 roy started from the skins on which he lay at full length, like 
 a lion starting from its lair. His veins swelled like black 
 cords ; under the mighty muscle of his bare chest his heart 
 beat visibly in the fury of his wrath. 
 
 * By God I I have a mind to have you shot like a dog 1 * 
 The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but 
 
 with a serene deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief. 
 
 * You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel. It may be 
 as well to do it, or the army may think you capricious.' 
 
 Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through 
 his clinched teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonio 
 laugh, which his men dreaded more than his wrath. 
 
 ' No ; I will send you instead to the Khalifa. He often 
 saves me the trouble of killing my own curs. Take a flag of 
 truce and this paper, and never draw rein till you reach him, 
 if your beast drop dead at the end.' 
 
 The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain 
 languid easy grace that oamp-hfe never cured him of, and 
 went. He knew that the man who should take the news of 
 his treasure's loss to the Emir Ilderim would, a thousand to 
 one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could frame, despite 
 the cover of the white banner. 
 
 Chateauroy looked after him, as he and his horse passed 
 from the French camp in the full burning tide of noon. 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR a^i 
 
 * If the Arabs kill him,* he thought, ' I will forgive Ilderim 
 five seasons of rebellion.' 
 
 The Chasseur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein 
 across the scorching plateoAi. He rode to what he knew waa 
 hke enough to be death, and death by many a torment, as 
 though he rode to a midnight love-tryst. His horse was of 
 Arab breed — young, fleet, and able to endure extraordinary 
 pressure, both of spur and of heat. He swept on, far and 
 fast, through the sickly lurid glitter of the day, over the 
 loose sand, that flew in puffs around him as the hoofs struck 
 it flying right and left. At last, ere he reached the Bedouin 
 tents, that were still but slender black points against the 
 horizon, he saw the Sheik and a party of horsemen returning 
 from a foraging quest, and in ignorance as yet of the abduc- 
 tion of Djelma. He galloped straight to them, and halted 
 across their line of march, with the folds of the little white 
 flag fluttering in the sun. The Bedouins drew bridle, and 
 Ilderim advanced alone. He was a magnificent man, of middle 
 age, with the noblest t}^e of the eagle-eyed aquiline desert 
 beauty. He was a superb specimen of his race, without the 
 lean, withered, rapacious vulture look which often mars it. 
 His white haik floated round limbs fit for a colossus ; and 
 under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of his 
 bold forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the 
 piercmg luminance of his eyes had a grand and kingly majesty. 
 
 A glance of recognition flashed from him on the Lascar, 
 who had so often crossed swords with him ; and he waved 
 back the scroll with dignified courtesy. 
 
 * Read it me.' 
 
 It was read. Bitterly, blackly, shameful, the few brutal 
 words were. They netted him as an eagle is netted in a 
 Bhepherd's trap. 
 
 The moment that he gave a sign of advancing against his 
 ravishers, the captive's life would pay the penalty ; if he 
 merely remained in arms, without direct attack, she would 
 be made the Marquis's mistress, and abandoned later to the 
 army. The only terms on which he could have her restored 
 w-ere instant submission to the imperial rule, and personal 
 homage of himself and all his Djouad to the Marquis as the 
 representative of France — homage in which they should confess 
 themselves dogs and the sons of dogs. 
 
 So ran the message of peace. 
 
«42 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 The Chasseur read on to the end calmly. Then he lifted 
 his gaze, and looked at the Emir — he expected fifty swords 
 to be buried in his heart. 
 
 As he gazed, he thought no more of his own doom ; he 
 thought only of the revelation before him, of what passion 
 and what agony could be — things unknown in th^ world 
 where the chief portion of his life had passed. He was a 
 war-hardened campaigner, trained in the ruthless school of 
 African hostilities, who had seen every shape of mental and 
 physical suffering, when men were left to perish of gun- 
 wounds, as the rush of the charge swept on ; when writhing 
 horses died by the score of famine and of thirst ; when the 
 firebrand was hurled among sleeping encampments, and de- 
 fenceless women w^ere torn from tbeir rest by the unsparing 
 hands of pitiless soldiers. But the torture which shook for a 
 second the steel-knit frame of this Arab passed all that he had 
 dreamed as possible ; it was mute, and held in bonds of iron, 
 for the sake of the desert pride of a great ruler's majesty ; but 
 it spoke more than any eloquence ever spoke yet on earth. 
 
 With a wild, shrill yell, the Bedouins whirled their naked 
 sabres j^ove their heads, and rushed down on the bearer of 
 this shame to their chief and their tribe. The Chasseur did 
 not seek to defend himself. He sat motionless. He thought 
 the vengeance just. 
 
 The Sheik raised his sword, and signed them back, as he 
 pointed to the white folds of the flag. Then his voice rolled 
 out like thunder over the stillness of the plains. 
 
 * But that you trust yourself to my honour, I would rend 
 you limb from limb. Go back to the tiger who rules you, 
 and tell him that — as Allah liveth — I will fall on him and 
 smite him as he hath never been smitten. Dead or living, I 
 will have back my own. If he take her life, I will have ten 
 thousand lives to answer it ; if he deal her dishonour, I will 
 light such a holy war through the length and breadth of the 
 land that his nation shall be driven backward like choked 
 dogs into the sea, and perish from the face of the earth for 
 evermore. And this I swear by the Law and the Prophet ! ' 
 
 The menace rolled out, imperious as a monarch's thrilling 
 through the desert hush. The Chasseur bent his head, as the 
 words closed. His own teeth were tightly clinched, and hia 
 face was dark. 
 
 ' Emir, listen to on© word,' he said briefly. ' Shame has 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 243 
 
 been done to me as to you. Had I been told what words I 
 bore, they had never been brought by my hand. You know 
 me. You have had the marks of my steel, as I have had the 
 marks of yours. Trust me in this, Sidi. I pledge you my 
 honour that, before the sun sets, she shall be given back to 
 you unharmed, or I will return here myself, and your tribe 
 shall slay me in what fashion they will. So alone can she be 
 saved uninjured. Answer — will you have faith in me ? ' 
 
 The desert chief looked at him long ; sitting motionless as 
 a statue on his stallion, with the fierce gleam of his eyes fixed 
 on the eyes of the man who so long had been his foe in con- 
 tests whose chivalry equalled their daring. The Chasseur 
 never wavered once under the set, piercing, ruthless gaze. 
 
 Then the Emir pointed to the sun, that was now at its 
 zenith : 
 
 ' You are a great warrior : such men do not lie. Go ; and 
 if she be borne to me before the sun is half-way sunk toward 
 the west, all the branches of the tribes of Ilderim shall be as 
 your brethren, and bend as steel to your bidding. If not — as 
 God is mighty— not one man in all your host shall live to tell 
 the tale ! ' 
 
 The Chasseur bowed his head to his horse's mane ; then, 
 without a word, wheeled round, and sped back across the 
 plain. 
 
 When he reached his own cavalry camp, he went straight- 
 way to his chief. "What passed between them none ever 
 knew. The interview was brief: it was possibly as stormy. 
 Pregnant and decisive it assuredly was ; and the squadrons 
 of Africa marvelled that the man who dared beard Raoul de 
 Chateauroy in his lair came forth with his life. Whatever the 
 spell he used, the result was a marvel. 
 
 At the very moment that the s\m touched the lower half of 
 the western heavens, the Sheik Ilderim, where he sat in his 
 saddle, with all his tribe stretching behind him, full armed, 
 to sweep down like falcons on the spoilers, if the hour passed 
 with the pledge unredeemed, saw the form of the Chasseur re- 
 appear between his sight and the glare of the skies ; nor did 
 he ride alone. That night the Pearl of the Desert lay once 
 more in the mighty sinuous arm's of the great Emir. 
 
 But, with the dawn, his vengeance fell in terrible fashion 
 on the sleeping camp of the Franks ; and from that hour 
 dated the passionate, savage, unconcealed hate of Raoul de 
 
 k2 
 
244 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Chateauroy to the most daring soldier of all his fiery Horse, 
 known in his troop as ' Bel-^-faire-peur.' 
 
 It was in the tent of Ilderim now that he reclined, looking 
 outward at the night where flames were leaping ruddily under 
 a large caldron, and far beyond was the dark immensity of 
 the star-studded sky ; the hght of the moon strayed in and 
 fell on the chestnut waves of his beard, out of which the long 
 amber stem of an Arab pipe ghttered like a golden line, and 
 on the delicate feminine cast of his profile, which, with the 
 fairness of the skin — fair despite a warm hue of bronze — and 
 the long slumberous softness of the hazel eyes, were in so 
 marked a contrast of race with the eagle outlines of the 
 Bedouins around. 
 
 From the hour of the restoration of his treasure the Sheik 
 had been true to his oath ; his tribe in all its branches had 
 held the French lascar in closest brotherhood. Wherever they 
 w^ere he was honoured and welcomed ; was he in war, their 
 swords were drawn for him ; was he in need, their houses of 
 hair were spread for him ; had he want of flight, the swiftest 
 and most precious of their horses was at his service ; had he 
 thirst, they would have died themselves, wringing out the 
 last drop from the waterskin for him. Through him their 
 alliance, or more justly to speak, their neutrahty, was secured 
 to France, and the Bedouin Chief loved him with a great, 
 silent, noble love that was fast rooted in the granite of his 
 nature. Between them there was a brotherhood that beat 
 down the antagonism of race, and was stronger than the 
 instinctive hate of the oppressed for all who came under the 
 abhorred standard of the usurpers. He liked the Arabs, and 
 they liked him : a grave courtesy, a preference for the fewest 
 words and least demonstration possible ; a marked opinion that 
 silence was golden, and that speech was at best only silver- 
 washed metal ; an instinctive dread of all discovery of emotion, 
 and a limitless power of resisting and suppressing suffering, 
 were qualities the nomads of the desert and the lion of the 
 Chasseurs d'Afrique had in common ; as they had in unison a 
 ^ild passion for war, a dauntless zest in danger, and a love 
 for the hottest heat of fiercest battle. 
 
 Bilence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, 
 Bcreened by a heavy curtain of goat's-hair, the beautiful young 
 Djelma pla3'ed with her only son, a child of three or four 
 Bummere ; the Sheik lay mute, the Djouad and Marabouta 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 245 
 
 aronnd never spoke in his presence unless their lord bade 
 them, and the Chasseur was stretched motionless, his elbow 
 resting on a cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking 
 outward at the restless changing movement of the firelit, 
 starlit camp. 
 
 After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay 
 elastic good humour of his French comrades, the silence and 
 the calm of the Emir's * house of hair ' were welcome to 
 him. He never spoke much himself: of a truth his gentle 
 immutable laconism was the only charge that his Chambree 
 ever brought against him. That a man could be so brief in 
 words, while yet so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all 
 nature to the vivacious Frenchmen ; that unchanging stillness 
 and serenity in one who was such a reckless, resistless croqite- 
 mitaine, swift as fire in the field, was an enigma that the 
 Cavalerie and the Demi-cavalerie of Algeria never solved. 
 His corps would have gone after him to the devil, as Claude 
 de Chanrellon had averred ; but they would sometimes wax a 
 little impatient that he would never grow communicative or 
 thread many phrases together, even over the best wine which 
 ever warmed the hearts of its drinkers or loosened all rein 
 from their lips. 
 
 * I wish I had come straight to you, Sidi, when I first set 
 foot in Africa,' he said at last, while the fragrant smoke un- 
 curled from under the droop of his long pendant moustaches. 
 
 ' Truly it had been well, ' answered the Khalifa, who 
 would have given the best stallions in his stud to have had 
 this Frank with him in warfare, and in peace. * There is no 
 life like our life.' 
 
 ' Faith ! I think not,' murmured the Chasseur, rather to 
 himself than the Bedouin. * The desert keeps you and your 
 horse, and you can let all the rest of the world '* slide." * 
 
 * But we are murderers and pillagers, say your nations,';, 
 resumed the Emir, with the shadow of a sardonic smile flicker-- 
 ing an instant over the sternness and composure of his features.'^ 
 ' To rifle a caravan is a crime, though to steal a continent is > 
 glory.' 
 
 Bel-^-faire-peur laughed slightly. 
 ' Do not tempt me to rebel against my adopted flag.' 
 The Sheik looked at him in silence ; the French soldiera 
 had spent twelve years in the ceaseless exertions of an amused 
 ixiQuisitiveness to discover the antecedents of their volunteer : 
 
246 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the Arabs with their loftier instincts of courtesy ha3 neveu 
 hinted to him a question of whence or why he had come upon 
 African soil. 
 
 * I never thought at all in those days ; else, had I thought 
 twice, I should not have gone to your enemies,' he answered 
 as he lazily watched the Bedouins without squat on their 
 heels round the huge brass bowls of couscoussou, which they 
 kneaded into round lumps and pitched between their open 
 bearded lips in their customary form of supper. * Not but 
 what our Boumis are brave fellows enough ; better comrades 
 no man could want.' 
 
 The Khalifa took the long pipe from his mouth and spoke ; 
 his slow sonorous accents falling melodiously on the silence 
 in the lingua sapir of the Franco- Arab tongue. 
 ^ * Your comrades are gallant men ; they are lascars kdhirs ^ 
 . and fearless foes ; against such my voice is never lifted, how- 
 ever my sword may cross with them. But the locust-swarma 
 
 . that devour the land are the money-eaters, the petty despots, 
 the bribe-takers, the men who wring gold out of infamy, who 
 traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official seals, who 
 curse Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with 
 the hell-spawn of civilisation. It is the "Bureaucratic," as 
 your tongue phrases it, that., is the spoiler and the oppressor 
 of the soil. But-rrlnshallah !— we endure only for awhile. A 
 
 . little, and the shame of the invader's tread will be washed 
 
 \ put in blood. Allah is great ; we can wait.' 
 
 And with Moslem patience that the fiery gloom of his 
 burning eyes belied, the Djied stretched himself once more 
 into immovable and silent rest. 
 
 The Chasseur answered nothing; his sympathies were 
 heartfelt with the Arabs, his allegiance i and his esprit de corps 
 were with the service in which he was enrolled. He could 
 not defend French usurpation ; but neither could he condemn 
 the Flag that had now become his Flag, and in which he had 
 grown to feel much of national honour, to take much of national 
 pride. 
 
 * They will never really win again, I am afraid,' he 
 thought, as his eyes followed the wraith-like flash of the 
 white burnous, as the Bedouins glided to and fro in the 
 chiaroscuro of the encampment, now in the flicker of the 
 
 ' Great warriors. 
 
 ^V"^"^ 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 247. 
 
 flame, now in the silvered lustre of the moon. ' It is the con- 
 flict of the races, as the cant runs, and their day is done. It 
 is a bolder, freer, simpler type than anything we get in the 
 world yonder. Shall we ever drift back to it in the future, 
 I wonder ? ' 
 
 The speculation did not stay with him long ; Semitic, Latirif ^ 
 or Teuton race was very much the same to him, and intel- 
 lectual subtleties had not much attraction at any time for the 
 most brilliant soldier in the French cavalry. He preferred the 
 ring of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun's play along the 
 line of steel as his regiment formed in line on the eve of a 
 life-and-death struggle, the wild breathless sweep of a mid- 
 night gallop over the brown swelling plateau under the light 
 of the stars, or — in some brief interval of indolence, and 
 razzia-won wealth — the gleam of fair eyes and the flush 
 of sparkling sherbet when some passionate darkling glance 
 beamed on him from some Arab mistress whose scarlet lips 
 murmured to him through the drowsy hush of an Algerine 
 night the sense if not the song of Pelagia — 
 
 ,yCh> 
 
 r ■■ Life 13 so short at best I 
 ^ Take while thou canst thy rest, 
 
 Sleeping by me I 
 
 His thoughts drifted back over many varied scenes and 
 changing memories of his service in Algiers, as he lay there at 
 the entrance of the Sheik's tent, with the night of looming 
 shadow, and reddened firelight, and picturesque movement 
 before him. Hours of reckless headlong delight, when men 
 grew drunk with bloodshed as with wine ; hours of horrible 
 unsuccoured suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his 
 throat, and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his 
 flesh, while above head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting 
 their meal ; hours of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when 
 the word was given to slay and yield no mercy ; where in the 
 great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent rocks the doomed 
 were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in the 
 warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel 
 was the sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of 
 the tricolor, and to aim a dead shot or to receive one was the 
 only alternative left, as the challenging eyes of ' Zephir ' or 
 * Chasse-marais * flashed death across the barrUre, in a combat 
 where only one might live, though the root of the quarrel had 
 
248 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 been nothing more than a toss too much of brandy, a pnff of 
 tobacco-smoke construed into insult, or a fille de joie's ma- 
 liciously cast firebrand of taunt or laugh. Hours of severe 
 discipline, of relentless routine, of bitter deprivation, of cam- 
 paigns hard as steel in the endurance they needed, in the 
 miseries they entailed ; of military subjection, stern and un- 
 bending, a yoke of iron that a personal and pitiless tyranny 
 weighted with persecution that was scarce less than hatred ; 
 of an implicit obedience that required every instinct of liberty, 
 every habit of early life, every impulse of pride, and manhood, 
 and freedom, to be choked down like crimes, and buried as 
 though they had never been. Hours again, that repaid these 
 in full, when the long line of Horse swept out to the attack, 
 with the sun on the points of their weapons ; when the wheel- 
 ing clouds of Arab riders poured like the clouds of the simoom 
 on a thinned, devoted troop that rallied and fought as hawks 
 fight herons, and saved the day as the sky was flushed with 
 that day's decline ; when some soft-eyed captive, with limbs 
 of free mountain grace, and the warm veins flushing under the 
 clear olive of her cheeks, was first wild as a young fettered 
 falcon, and then, like the falcon, quickly learned to tremble 
 at a touch, and grow tame under a caress, and love nothing so 
 well as the hand that had captured her. Hours of all the 
 chanceful fortunes of a soldier's life, in hill-wars and desert 
 raids, passed in memory through his thoughts now where he 
 was stretched, looking dreamily through the film of his chi- 
 bouque-smoke at the city of tents, and the couchant forms of 
 camels, and the tall, white, slowly moving shapes of the law- 
 less marauders of the sand plains. 
 
 * Is my life worth much more under the French Flag than 
 it was under the English ? ' thought the Chasseur, with a 
 certain careless, indifTercnt irony on himself, natural to him. 
 * There I killed time — here I kill men. Which is the better 
 pursuit, I wonder ? The world would rather economise the 
 first commodity than the last, I believe. Perhaps it don't 
 make an overgood use of either. 
 
 His thoughts did not stay long with that theme. He wag 
 no moralist and no philosopher, though he practised, without 
 ever knowing it, a philosophy of the highest and simplest kind 
 with every day that found him in the ranks of the Algerian 
 army, and had found thought grow on him, in a grave if a 
 desultory fashion, many a time when he had ridden alone 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 249 
 
 llirough defiles that, for aught he knew, might harbour death 
 with every stop, or sat the only wakeful watcher beside a 
 bivouac fire, while his comrades slept around him, and the 
 roar of angry beasts rolled upward from the ravines, or paced 
 to and fro in solitude on patrol duty, with a yawning mountain 
 pass, or a limitless night-veiled plain before him in the light 
 of the moon. He was more silent and more meditative than 
 seemed in keeping with a wild lion of the Chasseurs, whose 
 daring outdared all the fire-eaters, and whose negligent devilry 
 had become a password all over Africa, till ' quel p'tit verra 
 a bu Bel-a-faire-peur ? ' (alias, * what special exploit has he 
 done to-day ? ') became the question put after every skirmish 
 or expedition. But he was much more of a soldier than a 
 thinker at any time, and, instead of following out the problem 
 of the world's uses of its two raw materials, time and men, he 
 found a subject more congenial in the discussion of stable 
 science with the Emir. 
 
 To him the austere chief would unbend ; with him the thin 
 compressed lips of the Arab would grow eloquent with an 
 impressive oratory ; for him all the bonds of hospitality would 
 grow closer and warmer. Ilderim might be a pillager, with 
 a sure swoop and a merciless steel, as the officials of imperial 
 government wrote him out ; of a truth, caravanserais had felt 
 the tear of his talons, and battalions staggered under the blows 
 of his beak ; but he had two desert virtues that are obsolete 
 in the civilised world : he had gratitude and he had sincerity. 
 
 Of course he was but a nomad, a barbarrair,'a fcbbeiraiid^ a 
 ruler of robbers ; of course he was but a half-savage Ishmaelite, 
 or he would long have abandoned them. 
 
 The night was someway spent when the talk of wild-pigeon- 
 blue mares and sorrel stallions closed between the Djied and 
 his guest ; and the French soldier, who had been sent hither 
 from the Bureau Arabe with another of his comrades, took hig 
 way through the now still camp where the cattle were sleep- 
 ing, and the fires v/ere burning out, and the banner-folds hung 
 motionless in the lustre of the stars, to the black and white 
 tent prepared for him. A spacious one, close to the chief's, 
 and given such luxury in the shape of ornamented weapons, 
 thick carpets, and soft cushions, as the tribe's resources, drawn 
 from many a raid on travellers far south, could bring together 
 ko testify their hospitality. 
 
 As he opened the folds and entered, his fellow- soldier, who 
 
250 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 was lying on his back, with his heels much higher than his 
 head, and a short pipe in his teeth, tumbled himself up with 
 a rapid summersault, and stood bolt upright, giving the salute ; 
 a short, sturdy little man, with a skin burnt like a coffee-berry, 
 that was in odd contrast with his light dancing blue eyes and 
 his close matted curls of yellow hair. 
 
 * Beg pardon, sir ! I was half asleep 1 ' 
 The Chasseur laughed a little. 
 
 * Don't talk English ; somebody will hear you one day.' 
 
 ' What's the odds if they do, sir ? ' responded the other. 
 * It relieves one's feelins a little. All of 'em know I'm 
 English, but never a one of 'em know what you are. The 
 name you was enrolled by won't really tell 'em nothing. 
 They guess it ain't yours. That cute little chap, Tata, he 
 says to me yesterday, '* You're always a treatin' of your galonne 
 like as if he was a prince." " Dammee ! " says 1, " I'd like to 
 see the prince as would hold a candle to him." " You're right 
 there," says the little 'un. " There ain't his equal for takin* 
 off a beggar's head with a back sweep." ' 
 
 The Corporal laughed a little again, as he tossed himself 
 down on the carpet. 
 
 * Well, it's something to have one virtue I But have a care 
 what those chatterboxes get out of you.' 
 
 * Lord, sir 1 Ain't I been a takin' care these ten years ? 
 It comes quite natural now. I couldn't keep my tongue still ; 
 that wouldn't be in anyways possible. So I've let it run on 
 oiled wheels on a thousand rum tracks and doublings. I've 
 told 'em such a lot of amazin' stories about where we kem 
 from, that they've got half a million different styles to choose 
 out of. Some thinks as how you're a Polish nob, what got 
 into hot water with the Eussians ; some as how you're a 
 Italian prince what was cleaned out like Parma and them 
 was ; some as how you're a Austrian Archduke, that have cut 
 your country because you was in love with the Empress, and 
 had a duel about her that scandalised the whole empire ; some 
 as how you're a exiled Spanish grandee a* come to learn tac- 
 tics and that like, that you may go back, and pitch O'Donnell 
 into the middle of next week, whenever you see a chance to 
 cut in and try conclusions with him. Bless you, sir 1 you may 
 let me alone for bamboozlin' of anybody 1 ' 
 
 The corporal laughed again, as he began to unharness him- 
 pelf. There was in him a certain mingling of insouciance 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 251 
 
 aaid melancholy, each of which alternately predominated ; the 
 former his by nature, the latter born of circumstance. 
 
 ' If you can outwit our friends the Zephjnrs, and the 
 Loustics, and the Indigenes, you have reached a height of 
 diplomacy indeed 1 I would not engage to do it myself. Take 
 my word for it, ingenuity is always dangerous — silence is 
 always safe.' 
 
 ' That may be, sir,' responded the Chasseur, in the sturdy 
 English with which his bright blue eyes danced a fitting 
 nationahty. * No doubt it's uncommon good for them as can 
 bring their minds to it — ^just like water instead 0' wine — but 
 it's very tryin' like the teetotaUsm. You might as well tell 
 a Newfoundland not to love a splash as me not to love a 
 chatter. I'd cut my tongue out sooner than say never a word 
 that you don't wish — but say somethin* I must, or die for 
 it.' 
 
 With which the speaker, known to Algerian fame by the 
 sobriquet of Grache-au-Jiez-d'la-Mort, from the hair-breadth 
 escapes and reckless razzias from which he had come out 
 without a scratch, dropped on his knees, and began to take 
 off the trappings of his fellow-soldier, with as reverential 
 a service as though he were a lord of the bedchamber serving 
 a Louis Quatorze. The other motioned him gently away. 
 
 * No, no. I have told you a thousand times we are com- ''^' 
 rades and equals now.' 
 
 * And I've told you a thousand times, sir, that we aren't, and 
 never will be, and don't oughtn't to be,' replied the soldier, 
 doggedly, drawing off the spurred and dust-covered boots. , 
 'A gentleman's a gentleman, let alone what straits he fall'-^ 
 into.' 
 
 * But ceases to be one as soon as he takes a service he 
 cannot requite, or claims a superiority he does not possess. 
 We have been fellow- soldiers for twelve years ' 
 
 * So we have, sir ; but we are what we always was, and 
 always will be — one a gentleman, t'other a scamp. If you i^ 
 think so be as I've done a good thing side by side with you 
 now and then in the fightin', give me my own way and let 
 me wait on you when I can. I can't do much on it when 
 those other fellows' eyes is on us ; but here I can and I will 
 — beggin' your pardon^ — so there's an end of it. One may 
 gpeak plain in this place with nothing but them Arabs about ; 
 ftnd all the army know well enough, sir, that if it weren't for 
 
252 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 that black devil, Chateauroy, you'd have had your oflBcer*9 
 commission and your troop too long before now ' 
 
 * Oh, no. There are scores of men in the ranks merit pro- 
 motion better far than I do. And — leave the Colonel's name 
 alone. He is our chief, whatever else he be.' 
 
 The words were calm and careless, but they carried a 
 weight with them that was not to be disputed. * Crache- 
 au-nez-d'la-Mort ' hung his head a little and went on un- 
 harnessing his Corporal in silence, contenting himself with 
 muttering in his throat that it was true for all that, and the 
 whole regiment knew it. 
 
 ' Yo2i are happy enough in Algeria — eh ? ' asked the one 
 he served, as he stretched himself on the skins and carpets, 
 and drank down a sherbet that his self- attached attendant had 
 made with a skill learned from a pretty cantiniere, who had 
 given him the lesson in return for a slashing blow wath 
 which he had struck down two *Eiz-pain-sels,' who as the 
 best-paid men in the army had tried to cheat her in the price 
 of her Cognac. 
 
 ' I, sir ? Never was so happy in my life, sir. I'd be 
 discontented indeed if I wasn't. Always some spicy bit of 
 fighting. If there aren't a fantasia, as they call it, in the 
 field, there's always somebody to pot in a smaU way; and 
 if you're lying by in barracks there's always a scrimmage 
 hot as pepper to be got up with fellows that love the row 
 just as well as you do. It's life, that's where it is ; it ain't 
 rustin'/ 
 
 * Then you prefer the French service ? ' 
 
 * Right and away, sir. You see this is how it is,' and 
 the redoubtable yellow - haired * Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort ' 
 paused in the vigorous cleansing and brushing he was bestow- 
 ing on his Corporal's uniform and stood at ease in his shirt 
 and trousers, with his eloquence no way impeded by the 
 brule-gueule that was always between his teeth. * Over 
 there in England, you know, sir, pipeclay is the deuce- 
 and-all ; you've always got to have the stock on, and look as 
 stiff as a stake, or it's all up with you ; you're that tormented 
 about little things that you get riled and kick t]ie traces 
 before the great 'uns come to try you. There's a lot of lads 
 would be game as game could be in battle, ay, and good ladg 
 to boot, doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to 
 anything like war, that are clean druv' out of the service in 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 253 
 
 time o' peace, along with all them petty persecutions that 
 worry a man's skin like mosquito-bites. Now here they 
 know that, and Lord 1 what soldiers they do make through 
 knowing of it ! It's tight enough and stem enough in big 
 things ; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter 
 all through the campaigning; but that don't grate on a 
 fellow. If he's worth his salt he's sure to understand that he 
 must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he's to go to 
 hell at double-quick-march, and mute as a mouse, if his 
 ofiScers see fit to send him. That's all right, but they don't 
 fidget you here about the little fallals ; you may stick your 
 pipe in your mouth, you may have your lark, you may do as 
 you like, you may spend your decojtij^te how you choose, you 
 may settle your little duel as you wall, you may shout and 
 fling and jump and riot on the march, so long as you march on ; 
 you may lounge about half dressed in any style as suits you 
 best, so long as you're up to time when the trumpets sound 
 for you ; and that's what a man likes. He's ready to be a 
 machine when the machine's wanted in working trim, but 
 when it's run off the line and the steam all let off, he do like 
 to oil his own wheels, and lie a bit in the sun at his fancy. 
 There aren't better stuff' to make soldiers out of nowhere than 
 Englishmen, God bless 'em, but they're badgered, they're 
 horribly badgered, and that's why the service don't take over 
 there, let alone the way the country grudge 'em every bit of 
 pay. In England you go in the ranks — well, they all just 
 tell you you're a blackguard; and there's the lash, and you'd 
 better behave yourself or you'll get it hot and hot ; they take 
 for granted you're a bad lot, or you wouldn't be there, and in 
 course you're riled and go to the bad according, seeing that 
 it's what's expected of you. Here, contrariwise, you come 
 in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests 
 with yourself whether you won't be a fine fellow or not ; and 
 just along of feelin' that you're pricked to show the best metal 
 you're made on, and not to let nobody else beat you out of 
 the race like. Ah I it makes a wonderful difference to a 
 fellow— a wonderful difference — whether the service he's 
 come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothin' 
 but a scamp, or as a rascal that's maybe got in him, all rascal 
 though he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. It makes a 
 wonderful difference, this 'ere, whether you're looked at as 
 stuff that's only fit to be shovelled into the sand after a 
 
154 UNDER TAVO FLAGS 
 
 battle; or as stuiff that'll belike churn into a great man. 
 And it's just that difference, sir, that France has found out, 
 and England hasn't— God bless her all the same.' 
 
 With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, 
 and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration 
 by dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal's chibouque. 
 
 * A army's just a machine, sir, in course,' he concluded, 
 as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. But then it's a live 
 machine for all that ; and each little bit of it feels for itself, 
 like the joints in an eel's body. Now, if only one of them 
 little bits smarts, the whole crittur goes wrong — there's the 
 mischief.' 
 
 Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where 
 he lay flung full length on the skins. 
 
 ' I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my 
 
 men when — when I was in England ; we none of us did ; but 
 
 I can very well believe what you say. Yet — fine fellows 
 
 , though they are here, they are terrible blackguards ! ' 
 
 i * In course they are, sir ; they wouldn't be such larky com- 
 
 \ pany unless they was. But what I say is that they're scamps 
 
 who're told they may be great men if they like ; not scamps 
 
 who're told that because they're once gone to the devil they 
 
 must always keep there. It makes all the difierence in 
 
 ■life.' 
 
 * Yes — it makes all the difference in life, whether hope ia 
 left, or — left out 1 ' 
 
 The words were murmured with a half smile that had a 
 dash of infinite sadness in it ; the other looked at him quickly, 
 with a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, 
 laughing features of his sunburnt face ; he knew that the 
 brief words held the whole history of a life. 
 
 ' Won't there never be no hope, sir ? ' he whispered, while 
 his voice trembled a little under the long fierce * Zephyr ' 
 sweep of his yellow moustaches. 
 
 The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh ; 
 the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught 
 of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of 
 Mazagran. 
 
 ' Whom for ? Both of us ? Oh, yes, very likely we shall 
 achieve fame, and die sous-officiers or gardes champetres I A 
 uplendid destiny.' 
 
 *No, sir,' said the other with the hesitation still in the 
 
UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR 255 
 
 quiver of his voice. ' You know I meant, no hope of your 
 
 ever being again ' 
 
 Ho stopped : he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts 
 
 he was thinking. 
 
 The other moved with a certain impatience. 
 
 * How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever 
 anything except a soldier of France ? — forget as I have for- 
 gotten it ! ' 
 
 The audacious, irrepressible * Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,' 
 whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked 
 penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel. 
 
 * I know, sir. I have tried many a year, but I th5ught 
 perhaps as how his lordship's death ' 
 
 * No life and no death can make any difference to me, 
 except the death that some day an Arbico's lunge will give 
 me ; and that is a long time coming.' 
 
 * Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Cecil, don't talk like this I ' 
 
 The Chasseur gave a short sharp shiver, and started at the 
 name, as if a bullet had struck him. 
 
 * Never say that again ! ' 
 
 Rake, Algerian-christened Crache-au-nez-d'la-Morti stam- 
 mered a contrite apology. 
 
 ' I never have done, sir — not for never a year, but it 
 wrung it out of me hke — you talking of wanting death in 
 that way ' 
 
 * Oh, I don't want death ! ' laughed the other, with a low, 
 indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness 
 all the while. * I am of our friends the Spahis' opinion — 
 that life is very pleasant with a handsome well-chosen harem, 
 and a good horse to one's saddle. Unhappily harems are too 
 expensive for Roumis ! Yet I am not sure that I am not 
 better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household 
 — specially when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild 
 animals at the core, or we should never find such an infinite 
 zest in the death grapple. Good-night 1 ' 
 
 He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on 
 the skins that made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the 
 chibouque still in his mouth, and its amber bowl resting on 
 the carpet, which the friendship and honour of Sidi Ilderim 
 had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair 
 was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, 
 in all the din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes, 
 
256 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 echoing from the bills around, with his saddle beneath hia 
 head, under a slab of rock, or with the knowledge that at 
 every instant the alarm might be given, the drums roll out 
 over the night, and the enemy be down like Hghtning on the 
 bivouac. But now a name — long unspoken to him — had re- 
 called years he had buried far and for ever from the first day 
 that he had worn the Mpid'ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, 
 and been enrolled among its wild and brilliant soldiers. 
 
 Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the 
 light in the single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered 
 
 fand died away, the Chasseur d'Afrique lay wakeful, looking 
 
 \ outward through the folds of the tent at the dark and silent 
 camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory drift backward to 
 a time that had grown to be to him as a dream — a time when 
 
 , another world than the world of Africa had known him as 
 
 [ Bertie Cecil. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 CIGAEETTE EN BIENFAITRICB 
 
 ' Oh, h6 I We are a queer lot ; a very queer lot. Sweep- 
 ings of Europe,' said Claude de Chanrellou, dashing some 
 vermout off his golden moustaches, where he lay full length 
 on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Place du Gouverne- 
 ment, where the lamps were just lit, and shining through the 
 burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many- 
 coloured, many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of 
 the town were all fluttering out with the sunset, like so many 
 gay-coloured moths. 
 
 ' Hein ! Diamonds are found in the chiffoujiier's * sweep- 
 ings,' growled a General of Division, who was the most 
 terrible martinet in the whole of the French service, but who 
 loved * mes en/ants d'enfer^* ^ as he was wont to term hia 
 men, with a great love, and who would never hear another 
 disparage them, however he might order them blows of the 
 matraqtie, or exile them to Beylick himself. 
 
 ' Ragpicker. ■ My children of hell. 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 257 
 
 * You are poetic, men General,' said Claude de Chanrellon ; 
 * but you are true. We are a furnace in which Bla,ckguardism 
 is burnt into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A 
 fine manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal.' 
 
 * But our manufactures keep the original hall-mark, and 
 show that the devil made them, if the drill have moulded 
 them ! ' urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes. 
 
 Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar. 
 
 * Pardieu ! We do our original maker credit then, 
 iiothing good in this world without a dash of diablerie. 
 Scruples are the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, 
 principles are the quickset hedges of hfe, but devilry is its 
 champagne I ' 
 
 ' Ventre bleu ! ' growled the General. ' We have a right 
 to praise the blackguards ; without them our conscripts would 
 be very poor trash. The conscript fights because he has to 
 fight, the blackguard fights because he loves to fight. A great 
 difference that.' 
 
 The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes ; a slight pale 
 effeminate dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger 
 than a hothouse flower, yet who, as many an African chro- 
 nicle could tell, was swift as fire, keen as steel, unerring as a 
 leopard's leap, untiring as an Indian on trail, once in the 
 field with his Indigenes. 
 
 * In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, 
 mon G6n6ral,* he murmured. *What the catalogue of your 
 crimes must be ! ' 
 
 The tough old campaigner laughed grimly ; he took it as a 
 high compHment. 
 
 * Sapristi I The cardinal virtues don't send anybody, I 
 guess, into African service. And yet, pardieu I I don't know. 
 What fellows I have known 1 I have had men among my 
 Zephyrs — and they were the wildest ^pratiques too — that 
 would have ruled the world 1 I have had more wit, more 
 address, more genius, more devotion, in some headlong scamp 
 of a loicstic than all the courts and cabinets would ifumish. 
 Such lives, such lives too, morbleu t ' 
 
 And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the 
 mars^ellous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the 
 wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power 
 the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose 
 Btrength could have guided a sceptre, which he had found 
 
 B 
 
258 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr, 
 buried beneath the canvas shirts of a Roumi, lost for ever in 
 the wild lawless escapades of rebelhous pratiques,^ who 
 closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of 
 Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vidette, 
 where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, 
 and the death was unhonoured by even a line in the Gazettes 
 du Jour. 
 
 * Faith I ' laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General's 
 observation. 'If we all published our memoirs, the world 
 would have a droll book. Dumas and Terrail would be beat 
 out of the field. The real recruiting sergeants that send us 
 to the ranks would be soon found to be ' 
 
 ' Women ! ' growled the General. 
 
 * Cards,' sighed the Colonel. 
 
 * Absinthe,' muttered another. 
 
 * Mussetism in a garret.' 
 
 * Politics unpen tr op fort.' 
 
 * A comedy that was hissed.* 
 
 ' Carbonarist vows when one was a fool.' 
 i ' The spleen.' 
 ' * The dice.' 
 
 * The roulette.' 
 
 ' The natural desire of humanity to kill and to get killed I * 
 
 * Morbleu 1 ' cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, * all 
 those mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the 
 ranks, sure enough ; but the General named the worst. Look 
 at that little Cora ; the Minister of War should give her the 
 Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Con- 
 scription does. Five fine fellows — of the vieille roche too — 
 joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, 
 and they have nothing for it but the service. She is in- 
 valuable, Cora.' 
 
 * And there is not much to look at in her either,' objected 
 a captain, who commanded Turcos. ' I saw her when our 
 detachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as 
 a cherub — a soft voice — a shape that looks as slight and as 
 breakable as the stem of my glass — there is the end 1 ' 
 
 The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully but gently ; 
 he had been a great lion of the fashionable world before he 
 came out to his Indigenes. 
 
 ' Insubordinates. 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 259 
 
 * The end of Cora I The end of her is—" VEnfer / " My 
 good Alcide — that " baby face " has ruined more of us than 
 would make up a battaUon. She is so quiet, so tender ; smiles 
 like an angel, glides like a fawn ; is a little sad, too, the inno- 
 cent dove ; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf I 
 before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both 
 hands, and you wake one fine morning bankrupt ! ' 
 
 * Why do you let her do it ? ' growled the vieille moustacJiSf 
 who had served under Junot, when a Httle lad, and had scant 
 knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Eue 
 Breda. 
 
 ' Ah-bah ! ' said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders ; 
 ' it is the thing to be ruined by Cora. There is Bebee-je- 
 m'enfous ; there is Blonde-Miou-Miou ; there is the Cerisette ; 
 there is Neroli ; there is Loto — any one of them is equally 
 good style with Cora ; but to be at all in the fashion, one 
 must have been talked of with one of the six.' 
 
 ' Diantre ! ' sighed Claude de Chanrellon, stretching his 
 handsome hmbs, with a sigh of recollection ; for Paris had 
 been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had 
 had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it. *It was 
 Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up 
 — that woman — in three months. I had not a hundred francs 
 left : she stripped me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was 
 emeralds en cabochon • just then. Well, emeralds e?i cabochon 
 made an end of me, tmd sent me out here. Coeur d'Acier 
 was a wonderful woman 1 — and the chief wonder of her was, 
 that she was as ugly as sin.' 
 
 'Ugly?' 
 
 ' Ugly as sin ! But she had the knack of making herself 
 more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew ; 
 but men left the prettiest creatures for her : and she ruined 
 us, I think, at the rate of a score a month.' 
 
 * Like Loto,' chimed in the Tirailleur. * Loto has not a 
 shred of beauty. She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, 
 with a rough voice, and a villainous patois ; but to be well 
 with Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will 
 have nothing under the third order of nobility ; and Prince 
 Paul shot the Due de Var about 'ier the otljer day. She is a 
 great creature, Loto : nobody knows her secret.' 
 
 ' EmeraUls uncut. 
 
 02 
 
26o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * L'audacey mon ami ; toujours de Vaudacc ! * * said Chan- 
 rellon, with a twist of his superb moustaches. ' It is tha 
 finest quality out ; nothing so sure to win. Hallo 1 there is 
 le beau caporal listening. Ah I Bel-^-faire-peur, you fell, too, 
 among the Lotos and the Coeurs d'Acier once, I will warrant.' 
 
 The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, 
 as he saluted. 
 
 * Coeurs d'Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, 
 monsieur, I fancy ? ' 
 
 ' Bah ! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you 
 out here — eh ? ' ,, ..^ v 
 
 •No, monsieur — only chance.* f^K**^^ a. ^-^^ ^ "^< •-' 
 
 * A fig for your chance I Women are the mischief that 
 casts us adrift to chance.* 
 
 * Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes.' 
 
 ' Dieu de Dieu 1 I doubt that. We should go straight 
 enough if it were not for them.' 
 The Chasseur smiled again. 
 
 * M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, 
 for the key to every black story, we ask, " Who was she ? " ' 
 
 * Of course I do. Well ! who was she ? We are all quoting 
 our tempters to-night. Give us your story, mon brave I ' 
 
 * Monsieur, you have it in the folios matriculeSf as well as 
 my sword could write it.* 
 
 ' Good, good ! ' muttered the listening General. The 
 soldier-like answer pleased him, and he looked attentively at 
 the giver of it. 
 
 Chanrellon's brown eyes flashed a bright response. 
 
 * And your sword writes in a brave man's fashion — writes 
 what France loves to read. But before you wore your sword 
 here ? Tell us of that. It was a romance — wasn't it ? ' 
 
 ' If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur.* 
 
 * Open it then ! Come — what brought you out among 
 us? You had gamed au roi ddpoiiilU — that was it. Out 
 with it I ' 
 
 * Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier's duty ; but I 
 never heard that inquisitive annoyance was an officer's 
 privilege 1 * 
 
 The words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little 
 haughty. The manner of old habit, th e instinct of buried 
 
 J Audacity, my friend 1 Always that. 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 261 
 
 pride spoke in them, and disregarded the ban-ier between a 
 private of Chasseurs who was but a sous-oflQcier, and a Colonel 
 Commandant who was also a noble of France. 
 
 Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little tables, 
 Dutside the caf6, tm'ned and looked at him. The boldness of 
 speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity 
 upon him. 
 
 Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an in- 
 stant's passion gleamed out of his eyes : the next he threw his 
 three chairs down vnth a crash, as he shook his mighty frame 
 like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a 
 campaigner ' s frankness. 
 
 *A right rebuke I — fairly given, and well deserved. I 
 thank you for the lesson.* 
 
 The Chasseur looked surprised and moved ; in truth, he was 
 more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, 
 consideration or courtesy had been things long unshown to 
 him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand /| 
 out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentle- / 
 man. Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference of f 
 rank and station between them flashed on his memory, he was 
 raising it proudly but deferentially, in the salute of a sub- 
 ordinate to his superior, when Chanrellon's grasp closed on it 
 readily. The victim of Coeur d'Acier was of as gallant a 
 temper as ever blent the reckless condottUre with the thorouglx- ■ 
 bred noble. 1 
 
 The Chasseur coloured slightly, as he remembered that he 
 had forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations. 
 
 * I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Viscomte,' he said simply, 
 as he gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and passed 
 onward rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have 
 forgotten the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been 
 guilty. 
 
 ' Dieu I ' muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, 
 and struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the glasses 
 shook. ' I would give a year's pay to know that fine fellow's l 
 history. He is a gentleman — every inch of him.' V 
 
 *And a good soldier, which is better,' growled the General 
 of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox- 
 plough over the heavy tillage of Alsace. 
 
 * A private of Chateauroy — eh ? ' asked the Tirailleur, 
 lifting his eyeglass to watch the Chasseur as he went. 
 
£62 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 'Pardieu — yes — more'a the pity/ said Ohanrellon, who 
 epoke his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its 
 powder. ' The Black Hawk hates him — God knows why — 
 and he is kept down in consequence, as if he were the idlest 
 lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at 
 what he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is 
 not a finer Roumi in Africa — not even among our Schaouacks I 
 Since he joined, there has not been a hot and heavy thing 
 with the Arabs that he has not had his share in. There has 
 not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila that he has not gone 
 out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouin steel. 
 He rode once twenty leagues to deliver despatches with a 
 spearhead in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his 
 saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant's own 
 hands. He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila. We 
 should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had 
 not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs together, and 
 rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their 
 shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest 
 of the fight, and pierced the Arabs' centre, and gave us 
 breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the 
 Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred 
 more like stories of him — every one of them true as my sabre ; 
 — and, in reward, he has just been made a galonnS I ' 
 
 * Superb I ' said the General, with grim significance. 
 • Ce n'est pas d la France — ga ! Twelve years 1 In five 
 under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade ; 
 but then ' and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regret- 
 ful melancholy ; * but then, Napoleon read his men himself 
 and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift that for 
 commanders.' 
 
 * The Black Hawk can read, too,' said Ohanrellon, medi- 
 tatively ; it was the * petit nom,' that Chateauroy had 
 gained long before, and by which he was best known through 
 the army. * No eyes are keener than his, to trace a lascar 
 hibvr. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons — 
 pong! — till the thing drops dead — even where he strikes a 
 bird of his own brood.' 
 
 * That is bad,' said the old General, sententiously. * There 
 are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes : 
 they are an innkeoper, a schoolmaster, a ship's- skipper, and 
 a military chief.* 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 263 
 
 With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cos- 
 mopolitan groups of the great square. A little fartlicr 
 onward, laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a 
 Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen — a yachting 
 party, whose schooner lay in the harbour. He lingered a 
 moment, and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the 
 old famihar words. As he bent his head above the vesuvian, 
 no one saw the shadow of pain that passed over his face. 
 
 But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. 
 
 * The deuce,' he murmured to the man nearest him, * who 
 the dickens is it that French soldier's like ? ' 
 
 The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his 
 teeth, moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city — 
 uneasy lest he should be recognised by any passer-by or 
 tourist. ^ 
 
 * I need not fear that, though,' he thought with a smile. \ 
 *■ Ten years ! — why, in that world, we used to forget the 
 blackest ruin in ten da^ys, and the best life among us ten 
 hours after its grave was closed. Besides, I am safe enough, j 
 I am dead I ' ^--^ 
 
 And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of 
 the cigar under the chestnut splendour of his beard, and the 
 black eyes of veiled Moresco women flashed lovingly on his 
 tall lithe form, with the scarlet ceinturon swathed round his 
 loins, and the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as 
 lb woman's__still, despite of the tawny glow oI^lheA&ic sun,; 
 that had been on it for so long. L^ 
 
 He was ' dead ; ' therein had lain all his security ; thereby j 
 had ' Beauty of the Brigades ' been buried beyond all dis- 
 covery in ' Bel-^-faire-peur ' of the 2nd Chasseurs d'Afrique. 
 When, on the Marseilles rails, the maceration and slaughter 
 of as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rushing 
 through midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left him- 
 self and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by 
 little less than a miracle, he had seen in the calamity the I 
 surest screen from discovery or pursuit. -^ 
 
 Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the 
 debris, he had struck across the country with Rake for the 
 few leagues that still lay between them and the city, and had 
 entered Marseilles as weary foot-travellers, before half the 
 ruin on the rails had been seen by the full noon sun. 
 
264 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 As it chanced, a trading yawl was loading in the port, to 
 run across to Algiers that very day. The skipper was short 
 of men, and afraid of the Lascars, who were the only sailors 
 that he seemed likely to find, to fill up the vacant places in 
 his small crew. 
 
 Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the passage. He 
 had only a very few gold pieces on his person, and he was 
 willing to work his way across, if he could. 
 
 *But you're a gentleman,' said the skipper, doubtfully 
 eyeing him, and his velvet dress, and his black sombrero with 
 its eagle's plume. * I want a rare, rough, able seaman, for 
 there'll be like to be foul weather. She looks too fair to 
 last,' he concluded, with a glance upward at the sky. 
 
 He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own 
 rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumour was wont 
 to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself 
 ^ in far seas, with a likely run before her. 
 
 * You're a swell, that's what you are,' emphasised the 
 skipper. * You bean't no sort of use to me.' 
 
 ' Wait a second,* answered Cecil. * Did you ever chance 
 to hear of a schooner called Begina ? * 
 The skipper's face lighted in a moment. 
 
 * Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years ? her as 
 druv' through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a 
 swallow, when everything was splittin' and founderin', and 
 shipping seas around her ? her as was the first to bear down 
 to the great Wrestler, a-lyin' there hull over in water, and 
 took aboard all as ever she could hold o' the passengers, 
 a-pitchin' out her own beautiful cabin fittins to have as 
 much room for the poor wretches as ever she could ? Be you 
 a-meanin' her ? ' 
 
 Cecil nodded assent. 
 
 * She was my yacht, that's all ; and I was without a 
 captain through that storm. Will you think me a good 
 enough sailor now ? ' 
 
 The skipper wrung his hand, till he nearly wrung it off. 
 
 * Good enough ! Blast my timbers 1 there aren't one will 
 beat you in any waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes 
 it ; but never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks. 
 I never did think as how one of your yachting nobs could 
 ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller ; but, hang me, if the Club 
 make such sailors as you it's a rare 'un I Lord a mercy I 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 265 
 
 why, my wife wag in the Wrestler. I've heard her tell 
 scores of times as how she was a'most dead when that little 
 yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heavin' and 
 roarin' round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned 
 it gev' his cabin up to the womenMnd, and had his swivel 
 guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he 
 might be able to carry more passengers, and fed 'em, and 
 gev' 'em champagne all round, and treated 'em like a prince, 
 till he ran 'em straight into Brest Harbour. But, damn me ; > 
 that ever a swell like you should ' --— * 
 
 * Let's weigh anchor,' said Bertie, quietly. 
 
 And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through 
 Europe the tidings went, that the mutilated form, crushed 
 between iron and wood, on the Marseilles line, was his, and 
 that he had perished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern 
 night, when the rushing trains had met, as meet the thunder- 
 clouds. The world thought him dead. As such the journals 1 
 recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, 
 to make the death the darker ; as such his name was for- 
 bidden to be uttered at EoyalKeu ; as such the Seraph 
 mourned him with passionate loving force, refusing to the 
 last to accredit his guilt : — and he, leaving them in their 
 error, was drafted into the French army under two of hia 
 Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound — Louig 
 Victor — and laid aside for ever his identity as Bertie Cecil. 
 
 He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely 
 come in any of the larger towns since he had joined. Hia 
 only danger of recognition had once been when a Marshal 
 of France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and 
 at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African 
 troops. 
 
 Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few 
 yards' distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, 
 had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen often- 
 times in the Salles des Mar^chaux, and even under the roof 
 of Royallieu. The great chief's keen blue eyes were scruti- 
 nising the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, 
 a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against 
 * les ordonnances * in all the glitt-ering squadrons ; and swept 
 over him, seeing in him but one among thousands — a unit in 
 the mighty aggregate of the * raw material ' of war. 
 
 The Marshal only muttered to a General beside himi 
 
866 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Why don't they all ride like that man ? He has the seat of 
 the English Guards.' But that it was in truth an officer 
 of the English Guards, o.nd a friend of his own, who paced 
 past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader 
 never dreamed. 
 
 . From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, 
 pleasure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of 
 hardship, poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life 
 where every sense was gratified, he came to a Hfe where 
 every privation was endured. He had led the fashion — he 
 came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, 
 and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been 
 used to every delicacy and delight — he came where he had 
 to take the coarse black bread of the army as a rich repast. 
 He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in 
 great ladies' ears — he came where morning, noon, and night 
 the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant 
 obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He had known 
 nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of 
 amusement, refinery, brilliancy, and idleness — he came where 
 gnawing hunger, brutalised jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, 
 agonised pain, and pandemoniac mirth alternately filled the 
 measure of the days. 
 
 A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of 
 any man's endurance; yet, under it, he verified the truth, 
 * Bon sang ne pent mentir.* No Spartan could have borue 
 the change more mutely, more staunchly, than did the * dandy 
 of the Household.' 
 
 The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to 
 him. Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some 
 petty tyrant's jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding 
 his peace. Misery, when the hunger and thirst of long 
 marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the half-raw 
 offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood, 
 "which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, 
 when the dreary dawn broke, only to usher in a day of me- 
 chanical manoeuvres, of petty tyrannies, of barren, burdensome 
 hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy duty in the burning 
 Bun-glare, and under the heat of harness ; and the weary 
 pight fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blas- 
 phemy, and befouled merriment of the riotous Chambr^e, that 
 denied even the peace and oblivion of sleep. They were years 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 267 
 
 of infinite wretchedness oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty 
 and devotion of the man who had followed him into his exile. 
 But, however wretched, they never wrung a single regret or 
 lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life ; he took it 
 as it was. As, having lost the title to command, the high 
 breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obe- 
 dience which was the first duty of his present position, so it 
 made him accept, from first to last, without a sign of complaint 
 or of impatience, the altered fortunes of his career. The 
 hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured soldier in the 
 Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparent content 
 and more absolute fortitude than did the man who had used 
 to think it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to 
 Wormwood Scrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load 
 his own gun any shooting season, or to draw off his own coat 
 any evening. He suffered acutely many times ; suffered till 
 he was heartsick of his life ; but he never sought to escape 
 the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Eake ever 
 heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity. 
 
 Moreover, the war-fire woke in him. 
 
 In one shape or another, active service was almost always 
 his lot, and hot severe campaigning was his first introduction 
 to military Hfe in Algeria. The latent instinct in him — the 
 instinct that had flashed out during his lazy fashionable calm 
 in all moments of danger, in all days of keen sport ; the in- 
 stinct that had made him fling himself into the duello with 
 the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, * Kill 
 me if you like, but don't fail me ! ' — was the instinct of the 
 born soldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the 
 rush of the charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the 
 near presence of death, and in the chase of a foe through a 
 hot African night when both were armed to the teeth, and 
 one or both must fall when the grapple came — in all these 
 that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him content ; 
 made him think that the life which brought them was worth 
 the living. 
 
 There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which 
 had slept under the serene effeminate insouciance of his care- 
 less temper and his pampered habits. It had full rein now, 
 and made him, as the army affirmed, one of the most intrepid, 
 victorious, and chivalrous lascars of its fiery ranks. Fate had 
 flung him off his couch of down into the tempest of war, into 
 
268 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the sternness of life spent ever on the border of the grave, 
 ruled ever by an iron code, requiring at every step self-nega- 
 tion, fortitude, submission, courage, patience, the self-control 
 which should take the uttermost provocation from those in 
 command without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous 
 recklessness which should meet death and deal death, which 
 should be as the eagle to swoop, as the lion to rend. And he 
 was not found wanting in it. 
 r* He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority 
 that fortune no longer conferred on him, to seek to obtain a 
 deference that he had no longer the position to demand. He 
 obeyed far more implicitly than many a ruffian filibuster, who 
 had been among the dregs of society from his birth. And 
 though his quick-eyed comrades knew, before he had been 
 among them five minutes, that an ' aristocrat ' had taken 
 refuge under the Flag of Mazagran, they never experienced 
 from him one touch of the insolence that their own sous-officierg 
 beat them with, as with the flat of the sword ; and they never 
 found in him one shadow of the arrogance that some fellow- 
 soldier, who had swelled into a sergeant-major, or bristled 
 into an adjutant, would strut with, like any turkey-cock. 
 
 He was too quiet, too courteous, too calmly listless ; he had 
 too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too many gentleman 
 habits for them. But when they found that he could fight like 
 a Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot-wounds or desert- 
 thirst as though he were of bronze, it grew a delight to them 
 to see of what granite and steel this dainty patrician was 
 made ; and they loved him with a rough, ardent, dog-like 
 love, when they found that his last crust in a long march 
 would always be divided ; that the most desperate service of 
 danger was always volunteered for by him ; that no severity 
 of personal chastisement ever made him clear himself of a 
 false charge at a comrade's expense ; and that all his decompte 
 went in giving a veteran a stoup of wine, or a sick conscript 
 a tempting meal, or a prisoner of Beylick some food through 
 the grating, scaled, too, at risk of life and limb, 
 p Cecil had all a soldier's temper in him ; and the shock which 
 j had hurled him out of ease, and levity, and ultra- luxury, to 
 stand alone before as dark and rugged a fortune as ever fronted 
 any man, had awakened the war tire which ha 1 only slumbered 
 because lulled by habit and unaroused by circumstance. He 
 had never before been called on to exert either thought oc 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 269 
 
 action ; the necessity for both called many latent qualities in 
 him into play. The same nature, which made him wish to be 
 killed over the Grand Military course, rather than live to lose 
 the race, made him now bear privation as calmly, and risk 
 death as recklessly, as the hardiest and most fiery loustic of 
 the African cantonments. 
 
 Bitter as the life often was, severe the suffering, and acute 
 the deprivation, the sternest veteran scarcely took them more 
 patiently, more silently, than the * aristocrat,' to whom a 
 corked claret or a dusty raceday had'l^een calamities. Cast 
 among these wild iron-muscled Bohemians, who fought like 
 tigers, and were as impenetrable as rhinoceri, * race ' was too 
 strong in Cecil not to hold its own with them, whether in the 
 quality of endurance, or the quality of daring. 
 
 ' Mai7i defemme, mais main defer,^ the Eoumis were wont 
 to say of their comrade, with his delicate habits, * comma une 
 Marquise du Faubourg,' as they would growl impatiently ; 
 and his tenacious patience which would never give way either 
 in the toil of the camp or the grip of the struggle. 
 
 On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life 
 more utterly thrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a 
 gentleman, a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts 
 had he ever chosen to make anything of them, buried in the 
 ranks of the Franco-African army, risking a nameless grave 
 in the sand with almost every hour, associated with the 
 roughest riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by the 
 slash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years' splendid 
 service by the distinctive badge of a corporal. Any one of the 
 friends of his former years, seeing him thus, would have said 
 that he might as well be thrown at once into a pit in the 
 sand, where the dead were piled twenty deep after a skirmish 
 to lie and rot, or be dug up by the talons of famished beasts, 
 whichever might chance, as live thus in the obscurity, poverty, 
 and semi-barbarism of an Algerian private's existence. 
 
 Yet it might be doubted if any life would have done fori 
 him what this had done : it might be questioned, if, judging 
 a career not by its social position, but by its effect on charac- 
 ter, any other would have been so well for him, or would 
 equafly have given steel and strength to the indolence and 
 languor of his nature as this did. In his old world he would 
 have lounged listlessly through fashionable seasons, and, in an 
 atmosphere that encouraged his profound negligence of every- 
 
270 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 I thing and his natural nil admirari listlessness, would have 
 i glided from refinement to efi:eminacy, and from lazy grace to 
 ' blas6 inertia. 
 
 The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the 
 French army had roused the sleeping lion in him, and made 
 him as fine a soldier as ever ranged under any flag. He had 
 Bufi;ered, braved, resented, fought, loved, hated, endured, and 
 even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a vividness 
 that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless, 
 insouciant world of other days. He had known what the 
 hunger of famine, what the torment of fever, what the agony 
 of forbidden pride, what the wild delight of combat were. 
 He had known what it was to long madly for a stoup of 
 water ; to lie raving, yet conscious, under the throes of gun- 
 shot wounds ; to be forced to bear impassively words for a 
 tithe of which he could have struck across the mouth the 
 chief who spoke them ; to find in a draught of wretched 
 wine, after days of marching, a relish that he had never f omid 
 in the champagnes and burgundies of the Guards' mess ; to 
 I love the dark Arab eyes, that smiled on him in his exile, as 
 he had never loved those of any woman, and to suffer when 
 I the death film gathered over them as he had never thought it 
 1 in him to suffer for any death or any life ; to feel every nerve 
 thrill, and every vein glow with fierce, exultant joy as the 
 musketry pealed above the plains, and his horse pressed down 
 on to the very mouths of the rifles, and the naked sabres 
 flashed like the play of hghtnings, and, over the dead body of 
 his charger, he fought ankle deep in blood, with the Arabs 
 circling like hawks, and their great blades whirling round 
 him, catching the spears aimed at him with one hand, while 
 he beat back their swords, blow for blow, with the other — 
 he had known all these, the desert passions; and while out- 
 wardly they left him much tlie same in character, they 
 changed him vitally. They developed him into a magnificent 
 soldier — too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the 
 service he had adopted, not to, oftentimes, almost forget that 
 he had ever lived under any other flag than that tricolor which 
 he followed and defended now. 
 
 The quaint heroic Norman motto of his ancestors carved 
 
 over the gates of Bevallieu — ' C(£ur Vaillant Sc Fait Boyaume ' 
 
 —verified itself in his case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a 
 
 \^ itroke of every hope and prospect, he had taken his adversity 
 
^. ,, "VN^CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 271 
 
 ^'- ■' 
 
 .boldly by the beard, and had made himself at once a country 
 \ ftnd a kingdom among the brave, fierce, reckless, loyal hearta 
 ;of the men who came from north, south, east, and west, 
 *\ driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate, to fill 
 \up the battalions of North Africa. 
 
 As he went now, in the warmth of the afterglow, he turned 
 up into the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of 
 a narrow, dark, tumbledown, picturesque shop, half like a 
 stall of a Cairo bazaar, half like a Jew's den in a Florentine 
 alley. 
 A cunning wizen head peered out at him from the gloom. 
 
 * Ah-ah I good even, Corporal Victor ! * 
 
 Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered. 
 
 * Have you sold any ? ' he asked. There was a slight 
 constraint and hesitation in the words, as of one who can 
 never fairly bend his spirit to the yoke of barter. 
 
 The little, hideous, wrinkled, dwarf-like creature, a trader 
 in curiosities, grinned with a certain gratification, in disap- 
 pointing this lithe-limbed, handsome Chasseur. 
 
 *Not one. The toys don't take. Daggers now, or any- 
 thing made out of spent balls, or flissas one can tell an Arab 
 story about, go off like wildfire ; but your ivory bagatelles 
 are no sort of use, M. le Caporal.* 
 
 ' Very well — no matter,' said Cecil simply, as he paused 
 a moment before some delicate little statuettes and carvings — 
 miniature things, carved out of a piece of ivory, or a block of 
 marble the size of a horse's hoof, such as could be picked up 
 in dry river channels, or broken off stray boulders ; slender 
 crucifixes, wreaths of foliage, branches of wild fig, figures of 
 Arabs and Moors, dainty heads of dancing-girls, and tiny 
 chargers fretting like Bucephalus. They were perfectly con- 
 ceived and executed. He had always had a D'Orsay-like 
 gift that way, though, in common with all his gifts, he had 
 utterly neglected ail culture of it, until, cast adrift on the 
 world, and forced to do something to maintain himself, he had 
 watched the skill of the French soldiers at all such expedients 
 to gain a few coins, and had solaced many a dreary hour in 
 barracks and under canvas with the toy-sculpture, till he had 
 attained a singular art at it. He had commonly given Raka 
 the office of selling them, and as commonly spent all the pro- 
 ceeds on all other needs save his own. 
 
 He lingered a moment, with regret in his eyes. He had 
 
272 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 scarcely a sou in his pocket, and he had v/antod some money 
 sorely that night for a comrade dying of a lung-wound — a 
 noble fellow, a French artist, who, in an evil hour of despera- 
 tion, had joined the army, with a poet's temper that made its 
 hard, colourless routine unendurable, and had been shot in the 
 chest in a night skirmish. 
 
 * You will not buy them yourself ? ' he asked at length, 
 the colour flushing in his face. He would not have pressed the 
 question to save his own life from starving, but L6on Ramon 
 would have no chance of a fruit or a lump of ice to cool hig 
 parched lips and still his agonised retching, unless he himself 
 could get money to buy those luxuries that are too splendid 
 and too merciful to be provided for a dying soldier, who 
 knows so little of his duty to his country as to venture to die 
 in his bed. 
 
 * Myself 1 ' screeched the dealer, with a derisive laugh. 
 * Ask me to give you my whole stock next, M, le Galonn6 ! 
 These trumperies will lie on hand for a year.' 
 
 Cecil went out of the place without a word. Hig thoughts 
 were with L^on Ramon, and the insolence scarce touched 
 him. * How shall I get him the ice ? * he wondered. * God I 
 if I had only one of the lumps that used to float in our claret 
 cup ! ' 
 
 As he left the den, a military fairy, all gay with blue and 
 crimson, hke the fuchsia-bell she most resembled, with a 
 meerschaum in her scarlet lips and a world of wrath in her 
 bright black eyes, dashed past him into the darkness within, 
 and before the dealer knew or dreamt of her, tossed up the 
 old man's little shrivelled frame like a shuttlecock, shook him 
 till he shook like custards, flung him upward and caught him 
 as if he were the hoop in a game of La Grace, and set him 
 down bruised, breathless, and terrified out of his wits. 
 
 ' Ah, chAnapan I ' cried Cigarette, wdth a volley of slang 
 utterly untranslatable, * that is how you treat your betters, 
 is it ? Miser, monster, crocodile, serpent 1 Harpagon was 
 an angel to you.* (She knew Harpagon because some of 
 her Roumis chattered bits of Moliere.) * He wanted the money 
 and you refused it ? Ah — h — h ! son of Satan 1 you live on 
 other men's miseries I Run after him — quick, and give him 
 this, and this, and this, and this ; and say you were only in 
 jest, and that the things were worth a Sheik's ransom. Stay 1 
 you must not give him too much, or he will know it is not 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 27^ 
 
 you — viper ! Run quick, and breathe a word about me if 
 you dare ; one whisper only, and my Spahis shall cut your 
 throat from ear to ear. Off I or you shall have a bullet i% 
 quicken your steps ; misers dance weD when pistols play the 
 minuet 1 ' 
 
 With which exordium the little Amie du Drapeau shook 
 her culprit at every epithet, emptied out a shower of gold and 
 silver, just won at play, from the bosom of her uniform, 
 forced it into the dealer's hands, hurled him out of his own 
 door, and drew her pretty weapon with a clash from her 
 sash. 
 
 * Run for your life ! — and do just what I bid you, or a shot 
 shall crash your skull in as sure as my name is Cigarette I ' 
 
 The little old Jew flew as fast as his limbs would carry 
 him, clutching the coins in his horny hands. He was terrified 
 to a mortal anguish, and had not a thought of resisting or 
 disobeying her; he knew the fame of Cigarette — as who did 
 not ? Knew that she would fire at a man as carelessly as at 
 a cat, more carelessly in truth, for she favoured cats, saving 
 many from going into the Zouaves' soup- caldrons, and favoured 
 civilians not at all ; and knew that at her rallying cry all the 
 sabres about the town would be drawn without a second's 
 deliberation, and sheathed in anything or anybody that had 
 ciTended her, for Cigarette was, in her fashion, Generalissima 
 of all the Regiments of Africa. 
 
 The dealer ran with all the speed of terror, and overtook 
 Cecil, who was going slowly onward to the barracks. 
 
 *■ Are you serious ? * he asked in surprise at the large 
 amount, as the little Jew panted out apologies, entreaties, 
 and protestations of his only having been in jest, and of his 
 fervently desiring to buy the carvings at his own price, as he 
 knew of a great collector in Paris to whom he needed to send 
 them. 
 
 ' Serious 1 Indeed am I serious, M. le Caporal,' pleaded 
 the curiosity-trader, turning his head in agonised fear to see 
 if the vivandiere's pistol was behind him. * The things will 
 be worth a great deal to me where I shall send them, ani 
 though they are but bagatelles, what is Paris itself but one 
 bagatelle ? Pouf ! they are all children there — they will love 
 the toys. Take the money, I pray you, take the money ! ' 
 
 Cecil looked at him a moment ; he saw the man was in 
 earnest, and thought but little of his repentance and trepida- 
 
 T 
 
274 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 tion, for the citizens were all afraid of slighting or annoying 
 a soldier. 
 
 * So be it. Thank you,' he said, as he stretched out his 
 hand and took the coins, not without a keen pang of the old 
 pride that would not wholly be stilled, yet gladly for the sake 
 of the Chasseur dying yonder, growing delirious and wrench- 
 ing the blood off his lungs in want of one touch of the ice, 
 that was spoiled by the ton weight, to keep cool the wines 
 and the fish of M. le Marquis de Chateauroy. And he went 
 onward to spend the gold his sculptures had brought on some 
 yellow figs and some cool golden grapes, and some ice-chilled 
 wines that should soothe a little of the pangs of dissolution to 
 his comrade, and bear him back a moment, if only in some 
 fleeting dream, to the vine shadows and the tossing seas of 
 corn, and the laughing, sunlit sweetness of his own fair 
 country by the blue Biscayan waves. 
 
 * You did it ? That is well. Now, see here — one word 
 of me, now or ever after, and there is a little present that will 
 come to you, hot and quick, from Cigarette,' said the little 
 Friend of the Flag, with a sententious sternness that crushed 
 each word deliberately through her tightset pearly teeth. 
 The unhappy Jew shuddered and shut his eyes as she held a 
 bullet close to his sight, then dropped it with an ominous 
 thud in her pistol barrel. 
 
 ' Not a syllable, never a syllable,' he stammered ; ' and 
 if I bad known you Avere in love with him, ma belle * 
 
 A box on the ears sent him across his own counter. 
 
 ' In love ? Parbleu ! I detest the fellow I ' said Cigarette, 
 with fiery scorn and as hot an oath. 
 
 * Truly ? Then why give your napoleons ? ' began 
 
 the bruised and stammering Israelite. 
 
 Cigarette tossed back her pretty head, that was curly and 
 spirited and shapely as any thoroughbred spaniel's ; a superb 
 glance flashed from her eyes, a superb disdain sat on her lips. 
 
 ' You are a Jew-trader ; you know nothing of our code 
 under the tricolor. We — nous autres soldats — are too proud 
 not to aid even an enemy when he is in the right, and France 
 always arms for justice ! * 
 
 With which magnificent peroration she swept all the carv- 
 ings — they were rightfully hers — off the table. 
 
 ' They will light my cooking fire ! ' she said contemptu- 
 ously, as she vaulted lightly over the counter into the street 
 
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE 275 
 
 aJid pirouetted like a bit of fantoccini, that is wound up to 
 waltz for ever, along the slope of the crowded Babazoum. 
 All made way for her, even the mighty Spahis and the trudg- 
 ing Bedouin mules, for all knew that if they did not she 
 would make it for herself, over their heads or above theii 
 prostrated bodies. 
 
 She whirled her way, like a gay-coloured top set humming 
 down a road, through the divers motley groups, singing ai. 
 the top of her sweet mirthful voice, for she was angry with 
 herself ; and, for that, sang the more loudly the most wicked 
 and risque of her slang songs, that gave the morals of a Messa- 
 lina in the language of a fish-wife, and yet had an inalienable, 
 mischievous, contagious, dauntless French grace in it withaL 
 Finally she whirled herself into a dark deserted Moresco 
 archway, a little out of the town, and dropped on a stone 
 block, as a swallow, tired of flight, drops on to a bough. 
 
 'Is that the way I revenge myself? Ah, bah ! I deserve 
 to be killed ! When he called me unsexed — unsexed — un- 
 sexed ! ' — and with each repetition of the infamous word, so 
 bitter because vaguely admitted to be true, with her cheeks 
 scarlet and her eyes aflame, and her hands clinched, she flunt: 
 one of the ivory wreaths on to the pavement and stamped 01 > 
 it with her spurred heel until the carvings were ground intr 
 powdered fragments — stamped, as though it were a livin:r 
 foe, and her steelbound foot were treadmg out all its Ufe with 
 burning hate and pitiless venom. 
 
 In the act her passion exhausted itself, as the evil of sucli 
 warm, impetuous, tender natures will ; she was very stil) , 
 and looked at the ruin she had done with regret and a touci ; 
 of contrition. 
 
 • It was very pretty — and cost him weeks of labour, per- 
 haps,' she thought. 
 
 Then she took all the rest up, one by one, and gazed at 
 them. Things of beauty had had but httle place in her law- 
 less young life. What she thought beautiful was a regiment 
 sweeping out in full sunlight, with its eagles, and its colours, 
 and its kettle-drums ; what she held as music was the beat of 
 the r&veilU and the mighty roll of the great artillery ; who t 
 made her pulse throb and her heart leap was to see two fine 
 opposing forces draw near for the onslaught and thunder of 
 battle. Of things of grace she had no heed, though she had 
 so much grace herself; and her life, though full of colour, 
 
 t2 
 
lie UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 pleasure, and mischief, was as rough a one in most respects 
 as any of her comrades'. These delicate artistic carvings 
 were a revelation to her. 
 
 Here was the slender pliant spear of the river-reed ; here 
 the rich foliage of the v^d fig-tree ; here the beautiful blos- 
 som of the oleander; here fruit, and flower, and vine-leaf, 
 and the pendulous ears of millet, twined together in their 
 ivory semblance till they seemed to grow beneath her hands 
 — and those little hands looked so brown and so powder- 
 stained beside the pure snow whiteness of the wreaths ! She 
 touched them reverently one by one ; all the carvings had 
 their beauty for her, but those of the flowers had far the 
 most. She bad never noted any flowers in her life before, 
 save those she strung together for the Zephyrs on the Jour de 
 Mazagran. Her youth was a military ballad, rhymed ^dva- 
 ciously to the rhythm of the Pas de Charge ; but other or 
 softer poetry had never by any chance touched her until now 
 — now that in her tiny, bronzed, war-hardened palms lay th© 
 white foHage, the delicate art-trifles of this Chasseur, who 
 bartered his talent to get a touch of ice for the burning lips 
 of his doomed comrade. 
 
 * He is an aristocrat — he has such gifts as this — and yet 
 he is in the ranks, has no country, is so poor that he is glad 
 of a Jew's pittance, and must sell all this beauty to get a slice 
 of melon for L6on Ramon 1 ' she thought, wliQe the silvery 
 moon strayed in through a broken arch, and fell on an ivory 
 coil of twisted lentiscus leaves and river grasses. 
 
 And, lost in a musing pity, Cigarette forgot hor vow of 
 vengeance. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE rVORY SQUADKONS 
 
 The Cbambr^e of the Chasseurs was bright and clean in 
 the morning light : in common with all Algerian ban ack- 
 
 , rooms as unlike the barrack-rooms of the ordinary army as 
 Cigarette, with her d^bonnaire devilry, smoking on a gun- 
 
 ( wagon, was unlike a trim Normandy soubrette, sewing on a 
 
 ; bench in the Tuileries gardena 
 
THE IVORY SQUADRONS 277 
 
 Disorder reigned supreme; but Disorder, although a dis- 
 heTGlled goddess, is very often a picturesque one, and more 
 of an artist than her better-trained sisters ; and the disorder 
 was brightened with a thousand vivid colours and careless 
 touches that blent in confusion to enchant a painter's eyes. 
 The room was crammed with every sort of spoil that the 
 adventurous pillaging temper of the trcx)pers could forage 
 from Arab tents, or mountain caves, or river depths, or desert 
 beasts and birds. All things, from tiger-skins to birds' -nests, 
 from Bedouin weapons to ostrich-eggs, from a lion's mighty 
 coat to a tobacco- stopper chipped out of a morsel of deal, 
 were piled together, pell-mell, or hung against the whitewash 
 walls, or suspended by cords from bed to bed. Everything 
 that ingenuity and hardihood, prompted by the sharp spuv 
 ef hunger, could wrest from the foe, from the country, from 
 «arth or water, from wild beasts or riven rock, were here in 
 the midst of the soldiers' regimental pallets and regimental 
 arms, making the Chambr^e at once atelier, storehouse, work- 
 shop, and bazaar ; while the men, cross-legged on their little 
 hard couches, worked away with the zest of those who work 
 for the few coins that alone will get them the food, the draught 
 of wine, the hour's mirth and indulgence at the estaminet, to 
 which they look across the long stern probation of discipline 
 and manoeuvre. 
 
 Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, j 
 and invention that was the unforced offshoot of natural 
 genius, were all at work ; and the hands that could send the 
 naked steel down at a blow through turban and through 
 brain could shape, with a woman's ingenuity, with a crafts- 
 man's skill, every quaint device and dainty bijou from stone 
 and wood, and many-coloured feathers, and moi:j.tain berries^ 
 and all odds and ends that chance might bring to hand, and 
 that the women of Bedouin tribes or the tourists of Noith 
 Africa might hereafter buy with a wondrous tale appended to 
 them, racy and marvellous as the Sapir slang and the military 
 imagination could weave, to enhance the toys' value, and get 
 a few coins more on them for their manufacture. 
 
 Ignorance jostled art, and bizarrerie ran hand in hand with 
 talent, in all the products of the Chasseurs' extemporised 
 studio; but nowhere was there ever clumsiness, and every- 
 where was there an industry, gay, untiring, accustomed to 
 make the best of the worst ; the workers laughing, chattering, 
 
278 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 singing, in all good fellowship, while the fingers that gave the 
 doad-thrust held the carver's chisel, and the eyes that glared 
 hioodred in the heat of battle twinkled mischievously over 
 the meerschaum bowl, in whose grinning form some great 
 chief of the Bureaucratie had just been sculptured in audacious 
 parody. 
 
 In the midst sat Rake, tattooing with an eastern skill the 
 skin of a great lion, that a year before he had killed in single 
 combat in the heart of Oran, having watched for the beast 
 twelve nights in vain, high perched on a leafy crest of rock, 
 above a watercourse. While he worked, his tongue flew far 
 and fast over the camp- slang — the slangs of all nations came 
 easy to him — in voluble conversation with the Chasseur next 
 him, who was making a fan out of feathers that any Peeress 
 might have signalled with at the Opera. * Crache-au-nez- 
 d'la-Mort' was in high popularity with his comrades; and 
 had said but the truth when he averred that he had never 
 bvoen so happy as under the tricolor. The ofScers pronounced 
 .him an incurably audacious ^ i^ratiquc' ; he was always in 
 mischief, and the regimental rules he broke through like a 
 terrier through a gauze net ; but they knew that when once 
 the trumpets sounded Boot and Saddle, this yellow-haired 
 daredevil of an English fellow would be worth a score of 
 more orderly soldiers, and that wherever his adopted flag was 
 ■carried, there would he be, first and foremost, in everything 
 save retreat. The English service had failed to turn Rake 
 to account ; the French service made no such mistake, 
 but knew that though this British bulldog might set his 
 teeth at the leash and the lash, he would hold on like 
 grim death in a fight, and live game to the last, if well 
 handled. 
 
 Apart, at the head of the Chambr^e, sat Cecil. The 
 banter, the songs, the laughter, the chorus of tongues, went 
 on uuslackened by his presence. He had cordial sympathies 
 with the soldiers : with those men who had been his fol- 
 lowers in adversity and danger ; and in whom he had found, 
 despite all their occasional ferocity and habitual recklessness, 
 traits and touches of the noblest instincts of humanity. His 
 heart was with them always, as his purse, and his wine, and 
 his bread were alike shared ever among them. He had 
 learned to love them well — these wild wolf-dogs, whose fangg 
 were so terrible to their foes, but whose eyes would still 
 
THE IVORY SQUADRONS 279 
 
 glisten at a kind word, and who would give a staunch fidelity 
 unknown to tamer animals. 
 
 Living with them, one of them in all their vicissitudes, 
 knowing all their vices, but knowing also all their virtues, 
 owing to them many an action of generous nobility, and 
 watching them in many an hour when their gallant self- 
 devotion and their loyal friendships went far to redeem their 
 lawless robberies and their ruthless crimes, he understood 
 them thoroughly, and he could rule them more surely in 
 their tempestuous evil, because he comprehended them so 
 well in their mirth and in their better moods. When the 
 grade of sous-officier gave him authority over them, they 
 obeyed him implicitly because they knew that his sympathies 
 were with them at all times, and that he would be the last to 
 check their gaiety, or to punish their harmless indiscre- 
 tions. 
 
 The warlike Roumis had always had a proud tenderness 
 for their Bel-^-faire-peur and a certain wondering respect 
 for him ; but they would not have adored him to a man as 
 they did unless they had known that they might laugh 
 without restraint before him, and confide any dilemma to him 
 sure of aid, if aid were in his power. 
 
 The laughter, the work, and the clatter of conflicting 
 tongues were at their height ; Cecil sat, now listenicg, now 
 losing himself in thought, while he gave the last touch to the 
 carvings before him. They were a set of chessmen which it 
 had taken him years to find materials for and to perfect ; the 
 white men were in ivory, the black in walnut, and were two 
 opposing squadrons of French troops and of mounted Arabs. 
 Beautifully carved, with every detail of costume rigid to 
 truth, they were his masterpiece, though they had only been 
 taken up at any odd ten minutes that had happened to be 
 unoccupied during the last three or four yea^rs. The chess- 
 men had been about with him in so many places and under 
 canvas so long, from the time that he chipped out their first 
 Zouave pawn, as he lay in the broiling heat of Gran prostrate 
 by a dry brook's stony channel, that he scarcely cared to part 
 with them, and had refused to let Rake offer them for sale, 
 with all the rest of the carvings. Stooping over them, he 
 did not notice the doors open at the end of the Chambree, 
 until a sudden silence that fell on the babble and uproar 
 round him made him look up, then he rose and gave the 
 
28c UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 salute with the rest of his discomfited and awe-strickeB 
 troopers. Chateauroy with a brilliant party had entered. 
 The Colonel flashed an eagle glance round. 
 
 * Fine discipline ! You shall go and do this pretty work at 
 Beyhck ! ' 
 
 The soldiers stood like hounds that see the lash ; tliey 
 knew that he was like enough to carry out his threat ; though 
 they were doing no more than they had always tacit if not 
 open permission to do. Cecil advanced, and fronted him. 
 
 * Mine is the blame, mon Commandant I * 
 
 He spoke simply, gently, boldly ; standing with the cere- 
 mony that he never forgot to show to their chief, where ths 
 glow of African sunlight through the casement of th« 
 Chambr^e fell full across his face, and his eyes met the dark 
 glance of the * Black Hawk ' unflinchingly. He never 
 heeded that there was a gay, varied, numerous group behind 
 Chateauroy ; visitors who were looking over the barrack ; 
 he only heeded that his soldiers were unjustly attacked an^ 
 menaced. 
 
 The Marquis gave a grim significant smile, that cut like 
 so much cord of the scourge. 
 
 * Qa va sans dire I Wherever there is insubordination i* 
 the regiment the blame is very certain to be yours I CorporaJ 
 Gaston, if you allow your Chambrde to be turned into tlie 
 riot of a public fair you will soon find yourself degraded frona 
 the rank you so signally contrive to disgrace.' 
 
 The words were far less than the tone they were spokea 
 in, that gave them all the insolence of so many blows, as h© 
 swung on his heel and bent to the ladies of the party h« 
 escorted. Cecil stood mute ; bearing the rebuke as it became 
 a Corporal to bear his Commander's anger ; a very kee» 
 observer might have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun 
 tan of his face, and that his teeth clinched under his beard, 
 but he let no other sign escape him. 
 
 The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would 
 have been the first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had 
 any been attempted. 
 
 ' Back to your place, sir ? ' he said, with a wave of hii 
 hand, as he might have waved back a our. • Teach your 
 men the first formula of obedience at any rate 1 ' 
 
 Cecil fell back in silence. With a swift warning glance at 
 Rake — whose mouth was working, and whose forehead wa» 
 
THE IVORY SQUADRONS 281 
 
 uofc as fire, where he clinched his lion-skin, and longed to be 
 once free, to pull his chief down as lions pull in the deatk 
 spring — he went to his place at the farther end of tlie 
 ehamber and stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, 
 lest the control which was so bitter to retain should be broken 
 if he looked on at the man who had been the curse and th© 
 antagonist of his whole life in Algeria. 
 
 He saw nothing and heard almost as little of all that went 
 ©n around him ; there had been a flutter of cloud-like colour 
 in his sight, a faint dreamy fragrance on the air, a sound of 
 murmuring voices and of low laughter ; he had known that 
 some guests or friends of the Marquis's had come to view the 
 barracks, but he never even glanced to see who or what thej 
 were. The passionate bitterness of just hatred, that he had 
 to choke down as though it were the infamous instinct of 
 some nameless crime, was on him. 
 
 The moments passed, the hum of the voices floated to his 
 ear, the ladies of "the party lingered by this soldier and by that, 
 buying half the things in the chamber, filling their hands with 
 all the quaint trifles, ordering the daggers and the flissas and 
 the ornamented saddles and the desert skins to adorn their 
 chateaux at home ; and raining down on the troopers a shower 
 ©f uncounted napoleons until the Chasseurs, who had begun 
 to think their trades would take them to Beylick, thougJit 
 instead that they had drifted into dreams of El Dorado. H« 
 never looked up ; he heard nothing, heeded nothing ; he was 
 dreamily wondering whether he should always be able so te 
 hold his peace, and to withhold his arm, that he should never 
 strike his tyrant down with one blow, in which all the 
 ©pprobrimn of years should be stamped out ? A voice woke 
 him from his reverie. 
 
 ' Are those beautiful carvings yours ? ' 
 
 He looked up, and in the gloom of the alcove where ht 
 stood, where the sun did not stray, and two great rugs of 
 various skins, with some conquered banners of Bedouins, hunj 
 like a black pall, he saw a woman's eyes resting on him ; 
 proud, lustrous eyes, a little haughty, very thoughtful, yet 
 soft withal, as the deepest hue of deen waters. He bowed t© 
 her with the old grace of manner tiidt had so amused and 
 amazed the little vivandiere. 
 
 ' Yes, madame, they are mine/ 
 
 ' Ah ? — what wonderful skill I * 
 
e82 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 She took the White King, an Arab Sheik on his charger, 
 in her hand, and turned to those about her, speaking of its 
 beauties and its workmanship in a voice low, very melodious, 
 ever so slightly languid, that fell on Cecil's ear like a chime 
 of long-forgotten music. Twelve years had drifted by since 
 he had been in the presence of a high-bred woman, and 
 those lingering delicate tones had the note of his dead 
 past. 
 
 He looked at her ; at the gleam of the brilliant hair, at the 
 arch of the proud brows, at the dreaming, imperial eyes ; it 
 was a face singularly dazzling, impressive and beautiful at all 
 times ; most so of all in the dusky shadows of the waving 
 desert banners, and the rough, rude, barbaric life of the 
 Caserne, where a fiUe de joie or a cantiniere were all of her 
 sex that was ever seen, and those — poor wretches ! — were 
 hardened, and bronzed, and beaten, and brandy-steeped out 
 of all likeness to the fairness of women. 
 
 * You have an exquisite art. They are for sale ? * she 
 asked him : she spoke with the careless gracious courtesy of 
 a grande dame to a Corporal of Chasseurs, looking little at 
 him, much at the ivory Kings and their mimic hosts of 
 Zouaves and Bedouins. 
 
 * They are at your service, madame.' 
 
 ' And their price ? ' She had been purchasing largely of 
 the men on all sides as she had swept down the length of the 
 Chambr^e, and she drew out some French bank-notes as she 
 spoke. Never had the bitterness of poverty smitten him as 
 it smote him now when this young patrician offered him her 
 gold ! Old habits vanquished ; he forget who and where he 
 now was ; he bowed as in other days he had used to bow in 
 the circle of St. James's. 
 
 'Is— the honour of your acceptance, if you will deign to 
 give that.' 
 
 He forgot that he was not as he once had been. He forgot 
 that he stood but as a private of the French army before an 
 aristocrat whose name he had never heard. 
 
 She turned and looked at him, which she had never done 
 before, so absorbed had she been in the chessmen, and so little 
 did a Chasseur of the ranks pass into her thoughts. There 
 was an extreme of surprise, there was something of offence, 
 and there was still more of coldness in her glance ; a proud, 
 languid, astonished coldness of regard, though it softened 
 
THE IVORY SQUADRONS 283 
 
 slightly as she saw that he had spoken in all courtesy of 
 intent. 
 
 She bent her graceful regal head. 
 
 ' I thank you. Your very clever work can of course only 
 be mine by purchase.' 
 
 And with that she laid aside the White King among his 
 little troop of ivory Arabs, and floated onward with her 
 friends. Cecil's face paled slightly under the mellow tint left 
 there by the desert sun and the desert wind ; he swept the 
 chessmen into their walnut case and thrust them out of sight 
 under his knapsack. Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, 
 with the great leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, 
 casting a gloom that the gold points on his harness could 
 scarcely break in its heavy shadow, and never moved till the 
 echo of the voices, and the cloud of the draperies, and the 
 fragrance of perfumed laces, and the brilliancy of the staff 
 ojfficers' uniforms had passed away, and left the soldiers alone 
 in their Chambr^e. Those careless, cold words from a woman's 
 lips had cut him deeper than the matraque could have cut him, 
 though it had bruised his loins and lashed his breast ; they 
 showed all he had lost. 
 
 ' What a fool I am still ! ' he thought, as he made 
 his way out of the barrack-room. ' I might have fairly 
 forgotten by this time that I ever had the rights of a 
 gentleman.' 
 
 So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen 
 pang that day ; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung 
 him, by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he 
 had shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket- 
 fires, beneath the shade of wild fig-trees, and in the stir and 
 colour of Bedouin encampments. 
 
 *I must ask to be ordered out of the city,' he thought, as 
 he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians. 
 ' Here I get bitter, restless, impatient ; here the past is always 
 touching me on the shoulder ; here I shall soon grow to regret, 
 and to chafe, and to look back like any pining woman. Out 
 yonder there, with no cares to think of but my horse and my 
 troop, I am a soldier — and nothing else : so best. I shall be 
 nothing else as long as I live. Pardieu, though ! I don't 
 know what one wants better : it is a good life, as life goes. 
 One must not turn compliments to great ladies, that is all ; 
 not much of a deprivation there. The chessmen are the better 
 
284 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 for that ; her Maltese dog would have broken them all the first 
 time it upset their table 1 ' 
 
 He laughed a little as he went on smoking his brUle-gueule* 
 The old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were 
 with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide 
 from all pain as it arose. Though much of gravity and of 
 thoughtfulness had stolen ou him, much of insouciance re- 
 mained ; and there were times when there was not a mort 
 reckless or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than 
 * Bel-^-faire-peur.' Under his gentleness there was 'wild 
 blood * in him still, and the wildness was not tamed by the 
 fiery champagne-draught of the perilous, adventurous years he 
 spent. 
 
 ' I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he 
 may strike his beak in once too far?' he pondered, with & 
 sudden darker, graver touch of musing ; and involuntarily 
 he stretched his arm out, and looked at the wrist, supple ai 
 Damascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced beneath 
 the skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy 
 as any athlete's. He doubted his countenance there, fast rein 
 as he held all rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him 
 against his own passions in the breastplate of a soldier's firs» 
 duty — obedience. 
 
 He shook the thought off him as he would have shaken a 
 snake. It had a terrible temptation — a temptation which he 
 knew might any day overmaster him ; and Cecil, who all 
 through his life had certain inborn instincts of honour, which 
 served him better than most codes or creeds served their pro- 
 fessors, was resolute to follow the military religion of obedience 
 enjoined in the Service that had received him at his needs, 
 and to give no precedent in his own person that could be 
 fraught with dangerous, rebellious allurement for the untamed, 
 chafing, red-hot spirits of his comrades, for whom he kn^w 
 insubordination would be ruin and death — whose one chance 
 of reward, of success, and of a higher ambition, lay in tbeiif 
 implicit subordination to their chiefs, and their continuous 
 resistance of every rebellious impulse. 
 
 Cecil had always thought very little of himself. 
 
 In his most brilliant and pampered days he had always 
 considered in his own heart that he was a graceless fellow, 
 not worth his salt, and had occasionally wondered, in a listless 
 sort of way, why so useless a bagatelle d la mode as his ow» 
 
THE IVORY SQUADRONS 285 
 
 life was had ever been created. He thought much the sa.me 
 now ; but following his natural instincts, which were always 
 the instincts of a gentleman, and of a generous temper, he 
 did, unconsciously, make his life of much value among its 
 present comrades. ^^k^^ 
 
 His influence had done more to humanise the men he waa^ 
 associated with than any preachelrs or * teachers could have 
 done. The most savage and obscene brute in the ranks with 
 him caught something gentler and better from the * aristo- 
 crat.' His refined habits, his serene temper, his kindly 
 forbearance, his high instinctive honour, made themselves felt 
 imperceptibly, but surely ; they knew that he was as fearless 
 in war, as eager for danger as themselves, they knew that he 
 was no saint, but loved the smile of women's eyes, the flush 
 ©f wines, and the excitation of gaming hazards as well as 
 they did ; and hence his influence had a weight that probably 
 a more strictly vii'tuous man's would have strained for, and 
 missed for ever. The coarsest ruffian felt ashamed to make 
 an utter beast of himself before the calm eyes of the patri- 
 cian. The most lawless pratique felt a lie halt on his lips 
 when the contemptuous glance of his gentleman -comrade 
 fcaught him that falsehood was poltroonery. Blasphemous 
 tongues learnt to rein in their filthiness when this * beau 
 lion ' sauntered away from the picket-fire, on an icy night, 
 to be out of hearing of their witless obscenities. More than - 
 once the weight of his arm and the slash of his sabre had 
 called them to account in fiery fashion for their brutality to 
 women or their thefts from the country people, till they grew 
 aware that ' Bel-a-faire-peur ' would risk having all their 
 g words buried in him rather than stand by to see injustice ' 
 done. *'*" 
 
 And throughout his corps men became unconsciously gentler, | 
 juster, with a finer sense of right and wrong, and less bestial j 
 modes of pleasure, of speech, and of habit, because he was 
 among them. Moreover, the keen-eyed desperadoes who made 
 up the chief sum of his comrades saw that he gave unques- 
 tioning respect to a chief who made his life a hell ; and 
 rendered unquestioning submission under a&onts, tyrannies, 
 and insults which, as they also saw, stung him to the quick, 
 and tortured him as no physical torture would have done — 
 and the sight was not without a strong effect for good on 
 jttiem. They could tell that he suffered under these as they 
 
286 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 never suffered themselves, yet he bore them and did his duty 
 with a self-control and patience they had never attained. 
 
 Almost insensibly they grew ashamed to be beaten by himj 
 
 and strove to grow hke him as far as they could. They never 
 
 knew him drunk, they never heard him swear, they never 
 
 found him unjust, even to a poverty-stricken indigene, or 
 
 f'bruta], even to ai,fille de joie. Insensibly his presence human- 
 
 \ i'sed them. Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of playing 
 
 was that of a teacher to any mortal thing — yet — here in Africa, 
 
 it might reasonably be questioned if a second Augustin or 
 
 Francis Xavier would ever have done half the good among 
 
 the devil-may-care Roumis that was wrought by the daunt- 
 
 I less, listless, reckless soldier who followed instinctively the 
 
 ■ one religion which has no cant in its brave simple creed, and 
 
 j binds man to man in links that are true as steel — the religion 
 
 lof a gallant gentleman's loyalty and honour. 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 CIGARETTE EN OONSBIL ET OACHETTB 
 
 *CoRroEAL Victor, M. le Commandant desires yon to 
 present yourself at his campagne to-night, at ten precisely, 
 with all your carvings ; — above all, with the chessmen.' 
 
 The swift sharp voice of a young officer of his regiment 
 wakened Cecil from his musing, as he went on his way down 
 the crowded, tortuous, stifling street. He had scarcely time 
 
 .Jo catch the sense of the words, and to halt, giving the salute, 
 
 f before the Chasseur's skittish little Barbary mare had galloped 
 past liim, scattering the people right and left, knocking over 
 a sweetmeat seller, upsetting a string of maize-laden mules, 
 jostling a venerable marabout on to an impudent little grisette, 
 and laming an old Moor as he tottered to his mosque, without 
 any apology for any of the mischief, in the customary in- 
 solence, which makes • Roumis * and * Bureaucratie ' alike 
 execrated by the indigenous populace with a detestation that 
 
 V. the questionable benefits of civilised importations can do very 
 little to counterbalance in the fiery breasts of the sons of 
 
 \ iha soiL 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 287 
 
 Cecil involuntarily stood still. His face darkened. All 
 orders that touched on the service, even where harshest and 
 most unwelcome, he had taught himself to take without aisy 
 hesitation, till he now scarcely felt the check of the steel 
 curb ; but to be ordered thus like a lackey — to take his wares 
 thus like a hawker ! 
 
 'Ah ma cantche ! We are soldiers, not traders — aren't 
 we ? You don't like that, M. Victor ? You are no pedlar — 
 eh ? And you think you would rather risk being court- 
 maitialled and shot, than take your ivory toys for the Black 
 Hawk's talons ? ' 
 
 Cecil glanced up in astonishment at the divination and 
 translation of his thoughts, to encounter the bright falcon eyes 
 of Cigarette looking down on him from a little oval casement 
 above, dark as pitch within, and whose embrasure, with its rim 
 of grey stone coping, set off like a picture-frame, with a heavy 
 background of unglazed Rembrandt shadow, the piquant head 
 of the Friend of the Flag, with her pouting, scarlet, mocking 
 lips, and her mischievous challenging smile, and her dainty 
 little gold-banded foraging cap set on curls as silken and jettj 
 as any black Irish setter's. 
 
 ' Bon jouTf ma telle ! ' he answered, with a little weariness., 
 lifting his fez to her with a certain sense of annoyance, that 
 this young Bohemian of the barracks, this child with her 
 slang and her satire, should always be in his way hke a 
 shadow. 
 
 ' Bon jour i mon brave /' returned Cigarette, contemptuously. 
 ' We are not so ceremonious as all that in Algiers ! Good 
 fellow, you should be a chamberlain, not a corporal. What 
 fine manners, mon Dieu ! ' 
 
 She was incensed, and piqued, and provoked. She had 
 been ready to forgive him because he carved so wonderfully, 
 and sold the carvings for his comrade at the hospital ; sh« 
 was holding out the olive-branch after her own petulant 
 fashion ; and she thought, if he had had any grace in him, 
 he would have responded with some such florid compliment 
 as those for which she was accustomed to box the ears of her , 
 admirers, and would have swung himself up to the coping, to j 
 touch, or at least try to touch, those sweet, fresh, crimson lips / 
 of hers, that were like a half-opened damask rose. Modesty ' 
 is apt to go to the wall in camps, and poor little Cigarette's 
 notions of the great passion were very simple, rudimentarjj 
 
288 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and, certes, in no way coy. How should they be ? She had 
 tossed about with the army, like one of the tassels to their 
 standards, blowing whichever way the breath of war floated 
 her, and had experienced, or thought she had experienced, as 
 many affaires as the veriest Don Juan among them, thougk 
 her heart had never been much concerned in them, but had 
 beaten scarce a shade quicker, if a lunge in a duel, or a shot 
 from an Indigene had pounced off with her hero of the hour 
 k> Hades. 
 
 * Fine manners I ' echoed Cecil, with a smile : * my poor 
 child, have you been so buffeted about that you have never 
 been treated with commonest courtesy ? ' 
 
 * Whew 1 ' cried the Uttle lady, blowing a puff of smoke 
 down on him. ' None of your pity for me, my ci-devant f 
 Buffeted about ? Nom du diable I do you suppose anybody 
 ever did anything with me that I didn't choose ? If you had 
 as much power as I have in the army, Chateauroy would not 
 send for you to sell your toys like a pedlar. You are a slave I 
 
 Xam a sovereign ! ' 
 
 With which she tossed back her graceful, spirited head, as 
 though the gold band of her cap were the gold band of a 
 diadem. She was very proud of her station in the Army of 
 Africa, and glorified her privileges with all a child's vanity. 
 
 He listened, amused with her boastful supremacy ; but the 
 last words touched him with a certain pang just in that 
 moment. He felt like a slave — a slave who must obey his 
 tyrant, or go out and die like a dog. 
 
 * Well, yes,' he said, slowly, * I am a slave, I fear. I wish 
 a Bedouin flissa would cut my thralls in two.' 
 
 He spoke jestingly, but there was a tinge of sadness in the 
 words that touched Cigarette's changeful temper to contrition, 
 and filled her with the same compassion and wonder at him 
 that she had felt when the ivory wreaths and crucifixes had 
 laid in her hands. She knew she had been ungenerous — a 
 crime dark as night in the sight of the little chivalrous 
 soldier. 
 
 ' Tiens ! ' she said, softly and waywardly, winding her 
 way aright with that penetration and tact which, however 
 unsexed in other things. Cigarette had kept thoroughly 
 feminine. ' That was but an idle word of mine : forgive it, 
 REid forget it. You are not a slave when you fight in the 
 fantaiias. Morbleu ! they say to see you kill a man is beau- 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 28<, 
 
 tiful — so workmanlike 1 And you would go out and be shot 
 to-morrow, rather than sell your honour, or stain it — eli ? 
 Bah ! while you know they should cut your heart out rather 
 than make you tell a lie, or betray a comrade, you are no 
 slave, my galo7in6 ; you have the best freedom of all. Take 
 a glass of champagne ? Prut-tut I how you look ! Oh, the 
 demoiselles, with the silver necks, are not barrack drink, of 
 course ; but I drink champagne always myself. This is 
 M. le Prince's. lie knows I only take the best brands.' 
 
 With which Cigarette leaning down from her casement, 
 whose eill was about a foot above his head, tendered her 
 peace-ofiering in a bottle of Cliquot, three of which, packed 
 in her knapsack, she had carried off from the luncheon-table 
 of a Russian Prince, who was touring through Algiers, and 
 who had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitch- 
 ing, damitless, capricious, unattaohable, unpurchasable, and 
 coquettish little fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated hioi 
 with infinitely more insolence and indifference than she 
 would show to some battered old veteran, or some worn-out 
 old dog, who had passed through the great Kabaila raids and 
 battles. 
 
 ' You will go to your Colonel's to-night ? ' she said 
 questioningly, as he drank the champagne, and thanked her 
 — for he saw the spirit in which the gift was tendered — aa 
 he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall, with its blue 
 and while striped awning spread over both their heads in the 
 little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and inces- 
 sant traffic no way troubled Cigarette, who had talked argot 
 to monarchs undaunted, and who bad been one of the chief 
 sights in a hundred grand reviews ever since she had been 
 perched on a gun-carriage at five years old, and paraded with 
 a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars, as having 
 gone through the whole of Bugeaud's campaign, at which 
 parade, by-the-way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous 
 General's wife. Cigarette had made the immortal reply, in 
 lisping sabir : * Madame^ mes bonbons sont des boulets ! ' ' 
 
 She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent : 
 * You vdW go to-night ? ' 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders. He did not care to discusa 
 his Cclonei's orders with this pretty little Bacchante. 
 
 ' Madame, my sweetmeats are bullets I 
 
290 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Oh, a chiefs command, you know- 
 
 A fico for a chief ! ' retorted Cigarette impatiently. * Why 
 don't you say the truth ? You are thinking you will disobey, 
 and risk the rest ! ' 
 
 * Well, why not ? I grant his right in barrack and field, 
 but ' 
 
 He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, 
 as he spoke, went back to the scene of the morning. He 
 felt, with a romantic impulse that he smiled at even as it 
 passed over him, that he would rather have half a dozen 
 muskets fired at him in the death-sentence of a mutineer 
 than meet again the glance of those proud azure eyes 
 sweep over him, in their calm indifference to a private of 
 Chasseurs, their calm ignorance that he could be wounded 
 or be stung. 
 
 ' But ? ' echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, 
 perched in the quaint, grey, Moresco wall, parti-coloured with 
 broken encaustics of varied hues. * Chtit, hon camarade / 
 that little word has been the undoing of the world ever since 
 the world began. " But " is a blank cartridge, and never did 
 anything but miss fire yet. Shoot dead, or don't aim at all, 
 whichever you like ; but never make a cowp vianqud ^ with 
 ** but I " So you won't obey Chateauroy in this ? ' 
 
 He was silent again. He would not answer falsely, and 
 he did not care to say his thoughts to her. 
 
 ' " No," ' pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her 
 fancy, * you say to yourself, " I am an aristocrat — I will 
 not be ordered in this thing " — you say. " I am a good 
 soldier: I will not be sent for like a hawker" — you say. 
 ** I was noble once : I will show my blood at last, if I die ! " 
 Ah ! — you say that ! ' 
 
 He laughed a little as he looked up at her. 
 
 ' Not exactly that, but something as foolish perhaps. Are 
 you a witch, my pretty one ? ' 
 
 * Whoever doubted it except you ? ' 
 
 She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, 
 bending to him out of her owl's nest, with the flash of the 
 gun under the blue awning brightly catching the sunny brown 
 of her soft cheek and the cherry bloom of her lips, arched, 
 routing, and coquette> She set her teeth sharply, and mut. 
 
 * False stroke. 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 291 
 
 iered a hot, heavy sacr^j or even soDiething worse, aa she saw 
 that his eyes had not even remained on her, but were thought' 
 fully looking down the checkered light and colour of the street. 
 She was passionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was 
 fierce as a little velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant, plu- 
 maged hawk ; she had all the faults, as she had all the virtues, 
 of the thorough Celtic race ; and, for the moment, she had an 
 instinct, fiery, ruthless, and full of hate, to draw the pistol 
 out of her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through / 
 heart or brain, that girls who were * unsexed ' could keep 
 enough of the woman in them not to be neglected with im- 
 punity, and could lose enough of it to be able to avenge the 
 negligence by a summary vendetta. But she was a haughty 
 little condotti^re in her fashion. She would not ask for 
 what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that might be 
 traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud lips in 
 as firm a lin-e of wrath and scorn as ever Cesar's or Napo- 
 leon's moulded themselves into, and spoke in the curt, im- 
 perious, generalissimo fashion with which Cigarette before 
 now had rallied a demoraUsed troop, reeling drunk and mad 
 away from a razzia. 
 
 ' I am a witch 1 That is, I can put two and two together, 
 and read men, though I don't read the alphabet. Well, one 
 reading is a good deal rarer than the other. So you mean to 
 disobey the Hawk to-night ? I like you for that. But listen 
 here — did you ever hear them talk of Marquise ? ' 
 
 'No!' 
 
 * Parbleu ! ' swore the vivandi^re in her wrath, ' you look 
 on at a bamboula as if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and 
 can only give one " yes " and " no " as if one were a drummer- 
 boy. Bah ! are those your Paris courtesies ? ' 
 
 ' Forgive me, ma belle ! I thought you called yourself 
 our comrade, and would have no *' fine manners." There is 
 no knowing how to please you.' 
 
 He might have pleased her simply and easily enough if 
 he had only looked up with a shade of interest to that most 
 picturesque picture, bright aa a pastoral portrait., that was 
 hung above him in the old tumbledown Moorish stonework. 
 But his thoughts were with other things ; and a love scene 
 with this fantastic young Amazon did not attract him. The 
 warm, ripe, mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his 
 path, with the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it 
 
 c 3 
 
292 ^^""t UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 / merrily ; but it had no charm for him. He was miTRing\ 
 
 \ rather on that costly, delicate, brilliant-hued, hothouse bios- \ 
 
 \som that could only be reached down by some rich man's \ 
 
 /band, and grew afar on heights where never winter chills, > 
 
 Inor summer tan, could come too rudely on it. "^ 
 
 * Come, tell me what is Marquise ? — a kitten ? ' he went 
 on, leaning his arm still on the sill of her embrasure, and 
 willing to coax her out of her anger. 
 
 ' A kitten ! ' echoed Cigarette contemptuously, ' You think 
 me a child, I suppose ? ' 
 
 * Surely you are not far off it ? * 
 
 * Mon Dieu ! why, I was never a child in my life,' re- 
 torted Cigarette, waxing sunny-tempered and confidential 
 again, while she perched herself, like some gay-feathered 
 mocking-bird on a branch, on the window-sill itself. * When 
 I was two I used to be beaten Hke a Turco that pawns his 
 musket; when I was three, I used to scrape up the cigar 
 ends the officers dropped about to sell them again for a bit of 
 hlack bread ; when I was four, I knew all about Philippe 
 Durron*s escape from Beylick, and bit my tongue through, to 
 say nothing, when my mother flogged me with a tringlo's 
 mule-whip, because I would not tell, that she might tell 
 again at the Bureau, and get the reward. A child ? — diantre I 
 before I was two f'jt high I had winged my first Arbi. He 
 stole a rabbit I was roasting. Presto ! how quick he dropped 
 it when my ball broke his wrist like a twig.' 
 
 And the Friend of the Flag laughed gaily at the recollec- 
 tion, as at the best piece of mirth with which memory could 
 furnish her. 
 
 * But you asked about Marquise ? Well, he was what you 
 are, a hawk among carrion crows, a gentleman in the ranks. 
 Dieu I how handsome he was ! Nobody ever knew his real 
 name, but they thought he was of Austrian breed, and we 
 called him Marquise because he was so womanish white in 
 his skin and so dainty in all his ways. Just like you I Mar- 
 quise could fight, fight like a hundred devils; and— pouf ! — 
 
 ; how proud he was ; very much like you altogether ! Now, one 
 day something went wrong in the exercise-ground. Marquise 
 
 • was not to blame, but they thought he was ; and an adjutant 
 struck him — flick, flack, like that — across the face with a 
 riding-switch. Marquise had his bayonet fixed — he belonged 
 $0 the Turcos — and before we knew what was up. crash the 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 293 
 
 blade went through — through the breastbone, and out at the 
 spine — and the adjutant fell as dead as a cat, with the blood 
 spouting out like a fountain. " I come of a great race, that 
 never took insult without giving back death," was all that 
 Marquise said when they seized him and brought him to 
 judgment; and he would never say of what race that was. 
 They shot him — ah, bah 1 discipline must be kept — and I 
 saw him with five great wounds in his chest, and his 
 beautiful golden hair all soiled with the sand and the powder, 
 lying there by the open grave, that they threw him into 
 as if he were offal ; and we never knew more of him than 
 that.' 
 
 Cigarette's radiant laugh had died, and her careless voice 
 had sunk, over the latter words. As the little vivacious 
 brimette told the tale of a nameless life, it took its eloquence 
 from her, simple and brief as her speech was, and it owned a 
 deeper pathos because the reckless young Bacchante of the 
 As de Pique grew grave one moment while she told it. Then, 
 grave still, she leaned her brown, bright face nearer down 
 from htr oval hole in the wall. 
 
 ' Now,* she whispered very low, * if you mutiny once, thej 
 will shoot you just like Marquise, and you will die just as 
 silent, like him.' 
 
 •Well,' he answered her slowly, 'why not? Death is 
 no great terror ; I risk it every day for the sake of a common 
 soldier's rations, why should I not chance it for the sake and 
 in the defence of my honour ? ' 
 
 ' Bah ! men sell their honour for their daily bread all 4h« 
 world over 1 * said Cigarette with the satire that had treble 
 raciness from the slang in which she clothed it. * But it is 
 not you alone. See here — one example set on your part, and 
 half your regiment will mutiny too. It is bitter work to obey 
 the Black Hawk, and if you give the signal of revolt, three 
 parts of your comrades will join you. Now what will that 
 end in, beau lion — eh ? ' 
 
 ' Tell me — you are a soldier yourself, you say.* 
 
 ' Yes, I am a soldier 1 ' said Cigarette between her tightest 
 teeth, while her eyes lightened, and her voice sank down into 
 ft whisper that had a certain terrible meaning in it, like thei., 
 first dropping of the scattered opening shots in the distance*, 
 before a great battle commences ; ' and I have seen war, not ; 
 holiday war, but war in calmest — war when men fall like 
 
294 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 r 
 
 \ hailstones, and tear like tigers, and choke like mad dogs with 
 their throats full of blood and sand ; when the gun-carriage 
 wheels go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horses 
 charge full gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out 
 the brains before death has stunned them senseless. Oh, yes ! 
 I am a soldier, and I will tell you one thing I have seen. I 
 have seen soldiers mutiny, a squadron of them, because they 
 hated their chief and loved two of their sous-officiers ; and I 
 have seen the end of it all — a few hundred men, blind and 
 drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, and 
 walled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on 
 from a score of cannon-mouths — volley on volley, like the 
 thunder — till not one living man was left, and there was only 
 a shapeless, heaving, moaning mass, with the black smoke 
 over all. That is what I have seen ; you will not make me 
 \ see it again ? * 
 
 "^ Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and 
 tender with thought ; there was a vein of grave, even of in- 
 tense feeling, that ran through the significant words to which 
 tone and accent lent far more meaning than lay in their mere 
 phrases ; the little Bohemian lost her insolence when she 
 pleaded for her ' children,' her comrades ; and the mischievous 
 1 pet of the camp never treated lightly what touched the France 
 I that she loved, the France that alone of all things in her 
 ( careless life she held in honour and reverence. 
 
 'You will not make me see it again?' she said, once 
 more leaning out, with her eyes, thai were like a brown 
 brook sparkling deep yet bright in the sun, fixed on him. 
 * They would rise at your bidding, and they would be mowed 
 down like corn. You vrill not ? ' 
 * Never 1 I give you my word.* 
 
 The promise was from his heart. He would have endured 
 any indignity, any outrage, rather than have drawn into 
 ruin, through him, the fiery, fearless, untutored lives of the 
 men who marched, and slept, and rode, and fought, and lay 
 in the light of the picket-fires, and swept down through the 
 hot sand storms on to the desert foe by his side. Cigarette 
 stretched out her hand to him — that tiny brown hand, which, 
 small though it was, had looked so burnt and so hard beside 
 the delicate, fairy ivory carvings of his workmanship — 
 stretched it out with & frank, winning, childlike, soldierlike 
 graco. 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 295 
 
 * C'est ga, tu es bon soldat I ' ^ 
 
 He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy 
 natural with him to all her sex, and touched it lightly with 
 his lips. 
 
 * Thank you, my little comrade,' he said simply, with the 
 graver thought still on him that her relation and her entreaty 
 had evoked, ' you have given me a lesson that I shall not be 
 qaick to forget.' ^ 
 
 Cigarette was the wildest little bacchanal that ever pirou- \ 
 etted for the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt- 
 sleeves and half-drunk ; she was the most reckless coquette 
 that ever made the roll-call of her lovers range from prince- 
 marshals to ploughboy conscripts ; she had flirted as far and 
 wide as the butterfly flirts with the blossoms it flutters on to 
 through the range of a summer-day ; she took kisses, if the 
 giver of them were handsome, as readily as a child takes 
 sweetmeats at Mardi Gras ; and of feminine honour, feminine 
 scruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such veryV^ 
 dim, fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant 
 growth amid the rank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of 
 camp-life. Her eyes had never sunk, her face had neve^J 
 flushed, her heart had never panted for the boldest or the 
 wildest wooer of them all, from M. le Due's Lauzun-esque 
 blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough over- 
 tures ; she had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity 
 of a boy. Now only, for the first time, Cigarette coloured 
 hotly at the grave, graceful, distant salute, so cold and so 
 courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the rude and bois- 
 terous familiarities to which she was accustomed ; and drew 
 her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly 
 hardihood and her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an 
 impulse of shyness. 
 
 ' Dam ! Ne me donnez de la gabatine / ^ I am not a 
 court lady, hon-zig I ' she cried hastily, almost petulantly, 
 to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness ; while, to 
 make good the declaration and revindicate her military re- 
 nown, she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of he* 
 oval hole, and sprang, with a young wildcat's easy, vaulting 
 leap, over his head, and over the heads of the people beneath, 
 
 • That's right 1 You are a true soldier. 
 ' Stufi ! Don't humbug me. 
 
206 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 on to the ledge of the house opposite, a low-built wine-shop, 
 whose upper story nearly touched the leaning walls of the old 
 Moorish buildings in which she had been perched. The crowd 
 in the street below looked up amazed and aghast at that bound 
 from casement tc casement as she flew over their heads like a 
 blue-and-scarlet-winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as 
 they saw who it was. 
 
 * It is Cigarette ! ' growled a Turco Indigene. ' Ah-ha ! the 
 devil, for a certainty, must have been her father ! * 
 
 * To be sure ! ' cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from 
 her elevation ; ' he is a very good father, too, and I don't tease 
 him Hke his sons the priests ! But I have told him to take 
 you, Ben Arsli, the next time you are stripping a dead body ; 
 so look out — he won't have to wait long.' 
 
 The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an 
 oath, through the laughing crowd as best he might, and Cigar- 
 ette, with an airy pirouette on the wine-shop's roof that would 
 have done honour to any opera boards, and was executed as 
 carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had been a panto- 
 mime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning, 
 hand over hand like a little mousse from the harbour, jumped 
 on to a forage- wagon that was just passing full trot down the 
 street, and disappeared, standing on the piles of hay, and 
 singing to the driving tringWs unutterable delight the stanzas 
 of Beranger's * InfideliUs de Lisette ; ' her lithe, slender, 
 miniature form, with its flash of gold on the breast, and its 
 strip of rich scarlet in the fluttering sash, rising out against 
 the blue and burning sky, the glare of the white walls, and 
 the dusky glow and movement of the ebbing and flowing 
 crowd. 
 
 Cecil looked after her with a certain touch of pity for her 
 in him. 
 
 * What a gallant boy is spoilt in that little Amazon ! ' he 
 thought ; the quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal 
 of her hand, he had not noticed ; she had not much interest 
 for him — scarcely any, indeed — save that he saw she was 
 pretty, with a mignonne mischievous face, that all the sun- 
 tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne could not 
 harden or debase. But he was sorry a child so bright and so 
 brave should be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, 
 should have been tossed up on the scum and filth of the lowest 
 barrack life, and should be doomed in a few years' time to 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 297 
 
 become the yellow, battered, foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp- 
 follower that premature old age would surely render the dar- 
 ling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As de Pique. 
 
 Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it 
 down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in 
 tobacco fumes, drowning it in trembling cascades of wine, 
 trampling it to dust under the cancan by her little brass- 
 bound boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, and her 
 Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till therd 
 was scarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest littl« 
 scamp of all the Army of Africa. But strive to kill it how 
 she would, her sex would have its revenge one day and play 
 Nemesis to her. -r 
 
 She was bewitching now — bewitching, though she had no 
 witchery for him, in her youth. But when the bloom should 
 leave her brown cheeks, and the laughter die out of her 
 lightning glance, the womanhood she had defied would assert 
 itself, and avenge itself, and be hideous in the sight of the 
 men who now loved the tinkling of those little spurred feet, 
 and shouted with applause to hear the reckless barrack-blas- 
 phemies ring their mirth from that fresh mouth which wa« 
 now like a bud from a damask rose branch, though even now 
 it steeped itself in wine, and sulhed itself with oaths, and 
 geared itself with smoke, and had never been touched from 
 its infancy with any kiss that was innocent, not even with its 
 mother's. 
 
 And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil's though ti 
 as he watched her out of sight, and then strolled across to th« 
 cafe opposite to finish his cigar beneath its orange- striped 
 awning. The child had been flung upward, a little straw 
 floating in the gutter of Paris iniquities ; a little foam-beU 
 bubbling on the sewer waters of barrack--vice ; the stick had 
 been her teacher, the baggage-wagon her cradle, the camp- 
 dogs her playfellows, the caserne ^ oaths her lullaby, the 
 guidons * her sole guiding- stars, the razzia ' her sole fete day ; 
 it was httle marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little Friend 
 of the Flag had nothing left of her sex save a kitten's mischief 
 and a coquette's archness. It said much rather for the straight, 
 fair, sunlit instincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had 
 gleaned, even out of such a life, two virtues that she would 
 
 * Barraok. ' Standarde. * BaicL 
 
296 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 have held by to the death, if tried : a truthfulness that would 
 have scorned a lie as only fit for cowards, and a loyalty that 
 cleaved to France as a religion. 
 
 Cecil thought that a gallajit boy was spoiled in this eighteen 
 year old brunette of a campaigner ; he might have gone further, 
 and said that a hero was lost. 
 
 ' Voil^ ! ' said Cigarette between her little teeth. 
 She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with a 
 million stars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the 
 bronze trellised gate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateau- 
 roy, when he was not on active service — whi^h chanced rarely, 
 for he was one of the finest soldiers and most daring chiefs in 
 Africa — indemnified himself with the magnificence that his 
 private fortune enabled him to enjoy, for the unsparing exer- 
 tions and the rugged privations that he always shared wil- 
 ; Hngly with the lowest of his soldiers. It was the grandest 
 j trait in the man's character that he utterly scorned the eil'emi- 
 ! nacy which many commanders provided for their table, their 
 ' comfort, and their gratification while campaigning, and would 
 commonly neither take himself nor allow to his oificers any 
 more indulgence on the march than his troopers themselves 
 enjoyed. But his villa on the Sahel was a miniature palace ; 
 it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens 
 were as enchanting as the interior was, if something florid, still 
 as elegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it ; for 
 ferocious as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved 
 the chase and the slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had 
 whetted beak and talons to satiety, to smooth his rufiied 
 plumage in downy nests and under caressing hands. 
 
 To-night the windows of the pretty, low, snow-white, far 
 stretching building were lighted and open, and through the 
 wilderness of cactus, myrtle, orange, citron, fuchsia, and a 
 thousand flowers that almost buried it under their weight of 
 leaf and blossom, a myriad of lamps were gleaming like so 
 many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedar 
 grove some shght way farther out, the melodies and overtures 
 of the best military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though 
 not broken, by the distance and the fall of the bubbling foun- 
 tains. Cigarette looked and listened, and her gay brown face 
 grew duskily warm with wrath. 
 
 ' Ah, bah ! ' she muttered as she pressed her pretty lips to 
 the lattice-work. ' The men die like murrained sheep in the 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 299 
 
 hospital, and get sour bread tossed to them as if they were pigs,"^ 
 ajid are thrashed if they pawn their muskets for a stoup of 
 drink when their throats are as dry as the desert — and you live 
 like a coq en pdte ! ^ Morbleu ! what fools the people are to 
 fight, and toil, and get their limbs broken, and have their 
 brains dashed out by spent balls, that M. le Marechal may 
 send home a grand story with his own name flaring in letters 
 a yard long on the placards, and M. le Colonel gives his fetes 
 with stars and ribbons on his breast, while those who won the 
 battle lie rotting in the sand ! ' *^ i' -^ 
 
 Cigarette was a resolute little democrat ; she had loaded the ^"^'-^ 
 carbines behincHlie barricade in an emeute in Paris before she 
 was ten years old, and was not seldom in the perplexity of 
 conflicting creeds when her loyalty to the tricolor and the 
 guidons smote with a violent clash on her love for the popu- 
 lace and their liberty. She was given, however, usually to 
 reconciling the dilemma with all her sex's illogical ingenuity, 
 and so far thoroughly carried out her republicanism that she 
 boxed a Prmce's ear without ceremony when one tried to sub- 
 jugate her, and never by any chance veiled the sun of her 
 smiles to her ' children,' the troopers — not even when she 
 was tired to death after a burning march across leagues on 
 leagues of locust-wasted country, or had spent half the night, 
 after a skirmish, dressing wounds, soothing fever, seeking out 
 the dying men who lay scattered on the outskirts of the field 
 of carnage, with a magic, and a sweetness, and a patience that 
 seemed rather fitting for the gentle Sosurs Grises than for the 
 wayward, mischievous, insolent young reveller of the As de 
 Pique. 
 
 She looked a moment longer through the gilded scrollwork ; 
 then, as she had done once before, thrust her pistols well within 
 her sash that they should not catch upon the boughs, and 
 pushing herself through the prickly cactus hedge, impervious 
 k) anything save herself or a Barbary marmoset, t"wisted with 
 marvellous ingenuity through the sharp-pointed leaves, and 
 the close barriers of spines, and launched herself with inimi- 
 table dexterity on to the other side of the cacti. Cigarette 
 had too often played a game at spying and reconnoitring for 
 her regiments, and played it with a cleverness that distanced 
 even the most rusi of the Zephyrs, not to be able to do just 
 
 ^ In oloyer. 
 
300 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 whatever she chose, in taking the way she liked, and lurking 
 unseen at discretion. 
 
 She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy 
 shade of arbutus- trees with a hare's fleetness, and stood a 
 second looking at the open windows and the terraces that lay 
 before them, brightly lighted by the summer moon and by 
 the lamps that sparkled among the shrubs. Then down 
 she dropped, as quickly, as lightly, as a young setter down 
 charging among the ferns, into a shower of rhododendrons, 
 whose rose and lilac blossoms shut her wholly within them 
 like a fairy inclosed in bloom. The good fairy of one life 
 there she was assuredly, though she might be but a devil- 
 may-care, audacious, careless little feminine Belphegor and 
 military Asmodeus. 
 
 ' Ah 1 ' she said, quickly and sharply, with a deep-drawn 
 breath. The single ejaculation was at <^nce a menace, a 
 tenderness, a whirlwind of rage, a volume of disdain, a world 
 of pity. It was intensely French, and the whole nature of 
 Cigarette was in it. 
 
 Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering 
 to and fro before the open windows, after dinner, listening to 
 the bands, which, through dinner, had played to them, and 
 laughing low and softly ; and, at some distance from them, 
 beneath the shade of a cedar, the figure of a Corporal of 
 Chasseurs, calm, erect, motionless, as though he were the 
 figure of a soldier cast in bronze. The scene was simple 
 enough, though very picturesque; but it told, by its vivid 
 force of contrast, a whole history to Cigarette. 
 
 * A true soldier 1 ' she muttered, where she lay among the 
 rhododendrons, while her eyes grew very soft, as she gave the 
 highest word of praise that her whole range of language held. 
 * A true soldier I How he keeps his promise I But it must 
 be bitter I ' 
 
 She looked awhile, very wistfully, at the Chasseur, where 
 he stood under the Lebanon boughs ; then her glance swept 
 bright as a hawk's over the terrace, and lighted with a pre- 
 scient hatred on the central form of all — a woman's. There 
 were two other great ladies there ; but she passed them, and 
 darted with unerring instinct on that proud, fair, patrician 
 head, with its haughty stag-like cp.rriage and the crown of its 
 golden hair. 
 
 Cigarette had seen grandes dames by the thousand, though 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 301 
 
 never very close ; seen them in Paris, when they came to 
 look on at a grand review ; seen them in their court attire, 
 when the Guides had filled the Carrousel on some palace ball 
 night, and lined the Cour des Princes, and she had bewitched 
 the officers of the guard into letting her pass in to see the 
 pageantry. But she had never felt for those grandes dames any- 
 thing save a considers bly contemptuous indifference. She had 
 looked on them pretty much as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran 
 looks on the curled dandy of some fashionable, home- staying 
 corps. She had never realised the difference betwixt them 
 and herself, save in so far as she thought them useless butter- 
 flies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as she triumphantly 
 remembered how she could shoot a man like any Tirailleur, 
 and break in a colt Uke any rough rider. rA^^ 
 
 Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats ^ 
 gmote her with a keen hot sting of heart-burning jealousy. 
 Now, for the first time, the little Friend of the Flag looked 
 at all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her 
 sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never before been 
 touched with — with a sudden perception, quick as thought, 
 bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what 
 this womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might 
 be in its highest and purest shape. 
 
 * Unsexed — he said I was unsexed,* she mused, while her 
 teeth clinched on the ruby fulness of her lips, and her heart 
 swelled, half with impotent rage, half with unconfessed pain. 
 For the first time, looking on this imperial foreign beauty, 
 sweeping so slowly and so idly along there in the Algerian 
 starlight, she understood all that he had missed, all that he 
 had meant, when he had used that single word, for which 
 she had vowed on him her vengeance and the vengeance of 
 the Army of Africa. 
 
 * If those are the women that he knew before he came 
 here, I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my 
 bamboula,' was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was 
 so cruel to her ; the consciousness — which forced itself in on 
 her, while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the 
 one in whom instinct had found her rival — that, while she 
 had been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry, and 
 her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had 
 only been something very worthless, something very lightly 
 held by those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a guin- 
 
302 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 guette dance, and a Spahi's supper of headlong riot and drunken 
 mirth. 
 
 The mood did not last. She was too brave, too fiery, too 
 dauntless, too untamed. The dusky angry flush upon her 
 face grew deeper, and the passion gathered more stormily in 
 her eyes, while she felt the pistol butts in her sash, and 
 laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched under her 
 flowery nest. 
 
 ' Bah ! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of 
 these,' she thought, with her old disdain, * and would stand 
 fire no more than a gazelle ! They are only made for summer- 
 day weather, those dainty, gorgeous, silver pheasants. A 
 breath of war, a touch of tempest, would soon beat them down 
 ,3— crash ! — with all their proud crest drooping ! ' 
 / Like many another, Cigarette underrated what she had no 
 j knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of 
 ^hose fence she had no power to gauge. 
 
 Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as 
 a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have 
 told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, 
 until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian's, could detect 
 the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused 
 all the hot ire of her warrior's soul and her democrat's im- 
 patience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine dark head 
 towards the patrician on whom her instinct of sex had fastened 
 her hatred. 
 
 * You expressed your wish to see my Corporal's little 
 sculptures again, madame,' he was murmuring now, as Cigar- 
 ette got close enough under her flower shadows to catch the 
 sense of the words. * To hear was to obey with me. He 
 waits your commands yonder.' 
 
 ' Mille tonneres ! It was you, was it, brought him here ? * 
 muttered the Friend of the Flag to herself, with the passion 
 in her burning more hotly against that ' silver pheasant,' 
 whose delicate train was sweeping the white marbles of 
 Chateauroy's terraces, and whose reply, ' with fashion, not 
 with feeling, softly freighted,' she lost, though she could 
 guess what it had been, when a lackey crossed the lawn, and 
 summoned the Chasseur from his waiting-place beneath the 
 cedars. 
 
 Cecil obeyed, passed up the terrace stairs, and stood before 
 his Colonel, giving the salute ; the shade of some acacias still 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 303 
 
 fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the 
 glow of a full Algerian moon, and of the thousand lamps 
 among the belt of flowers and trees. Cigarette gave another 
 sharp deep-drawn breath, and lay as mute and motionless as 
 she had done before then, among the rushes of some dried 
 brook's bed, scanning a hostile camp, when the fate of a 
 handful of French troops had rested on her surety and her 
 caution. 
 
 Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, 
 turning to his Corporal. 
 
 ' Victor, Madame la Princesse honours you with the desire 
 to see your toys again. Spread them out.' 
 
 The savage authority of his general speech was softened for 
 the sake of his guest's presence, but there was a covert tone in 
 the words that made Cigarette murmur to herself : 
 
 * If he forget his promise; I will forgive him ! ' 
 
 Cecil had not forgotten it ; neither had he forgotten the 
 lesson that this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. 
 He saluted his chief again, set the chessbox down upon the 
 ledge of the marble buiustrade, and stood silent, without once 
 glancing at the fair and haughty face that was more brilliant 
 still in the African starlight than it had been in the noon sun 
 of the Chasseurs' Chambree. Courtesy was forbidden him as 
 insult from a corporal to a nobly born beauty ; he no more 
 quarrelled with the decree than wdth other inevitable conse- 
 quences, inevitable degradations, that followed on his entrance 
 as a private under the French flag. He had been used to tliel^j^i 
 impassable demarcations of Caste, he did not dispute themrs/-' 
 more now that he was without, than he had done when! ) 
 within, their magic pale. -^ 
 
 The carvings were passed from hand to hand as the Marquis's Vyj^* 
 six or eight guests, listlessly willing to be amused in the ^ g 
 warmth of the evening after their dinner, occupied themselves V, 
 with the ivory chess armies, cut with a skill and a finish ^ 
 worthy a Roman studio. Praise enough was awarded to the •-"'^ 
 art, but none of them remembered the artist who stood apart, 
 grave, calm, with a certain serene dignity that could not be 
 degraded because others chose to treat him as the station he 
 filled gave them fit right to do. 
 
 Only one glanced at him with a touch of wondering pity, 
 softening her pride ; she who had rejected the gift of those 
 mimic squadrons. 
 
304 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' You were surely a sculptor, once ? * she asked him with 
 that graceful distant kindness which she might have showa 
 some Arab outcast. 
 
 ' Never, madame.' 
 
 * Indeed ! Then who taught you such exquisite art ? * 
 'It cannot claim to be called art, madame.' 
 
 She looked at him with an increased interest : the accent of 
 his voice told her that this man, whatever he might be now, 
 had once been a gentleman. 
 
 * Oh, yes ; it is perfect of its kind. Who was your master 
 m it ? ' 
 
 * A common teacher, madame — Necessity.' 
 
 There was a very sweet gleam of compassion in the lustre 
 of her dark dreaming eyes. 
 
 * Does necessity often teach so well ? * 
 
 ' In the ranks of our army, madame, I think it does ; often 
 indeed much better.' 
 
 Chateauroy had stood by and heard, with as much impa- 
 tience as he cared to show before guests whose rank waa 
 precious to the man who had still weakness enough to be 
 ashamed that his father's brave and famous life had first been 
 cradled under the thatch roof of a little posting-house. 
 
 * Victor knows that neither he nor his men have any right 
 to waste their time on such trash,' he said carelessly; 'but 
 the truth is they love the canteen so well that they will do 
 anything to add enough to their pay to buy brandy.' 
 
 She whom he had called Madame la Princesse looked with 
 % doubting surprise at the sculptor of the white Arab King 
 she held. 
 
 * That man does not care for brandy,' she thought. 
 
 * It must be a solace to many a weary hour in the barracks 
 to be able to produce such beautiful trifles as these,' she said 
 aloud. ' Surely you encourage such pursuits, monsieur I ' 
 
 * Not I,* said Chateauroy, with a dash of his camp tone 
 that he could not withhold. ' There are but two arts or 
 virtues for a trooper to my taste — fighting and obedience.' 
 
 * You should be in the Russian service, M. de Chateauroy,' 
 said the lady with a smile, that, slight as it was, made the 
 Marquis's eyes flash fire. 
 
 ' Almost I wish I had been,' he answered her ; * men are 
 aaade to keep their grades there, and privates who think them- 
 selves fine gentlemen receive the lash they merit.' 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 305 
 
 * How he hates his Corporal 1 ' thought Miladi, while she 
 laid aside the White King once more. 
 
 'Nay,' interposed Chateauroy, recovering his momentary 
 self-abandonment, * since you like the bagatelles, do me honour 
 enough to keep them.' 
 
 ' Oh, no, I offered your soldier his own price for them this 
 morning, and he refused any.' 
 
 Chateauroy swung round. 
 
 ' Ah, sacripant ! you dared refuse your bits of ivory when 
 you were honoured by an offer for them.' 
 
 Cecil stood silent ; his eyes met his chief's steadily ; Cha- 
 teauroy had seen that look when his Chasseur had bearded 
 him in the sohtude of his tent, and demanded back the Pearl 
 of the Desert. 
 
 The Princess glanced at both ; then she stooped her elegant 
 head slightly to the Marquis. 
 
 ' Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray 
 you. He refused any price, but he offered them to me very 
 gracefully as a gift, though of course it was not possible that 
 I should accept them so.' 
 
 ' The man is the most insolent larron in the service,* 
 muttered her host, as he motioned Cecil back off the terrace. 
 ' Get you gone, sir, and leave your toys here, or I will have 
 them broken up by a hammer.' 
 
 The words were low, that they should not offend the ears 
 of the great ladies who were his Usteners, but they were 
 coarsely savage in their whispered command, and the Princess 
 heard them. 
 
 * He has brought his Chasseur here only to humiliate him,* 
 thought Miladi with the same thought that flashed through 
 the mind of the Kttle Friend of the Flag where she hid 
 among her rhododendrons. Now the dainty aristocrat was 
 very proud, but she was not so proud but that justice was 
 stronger in her than pride, and a noble generous temper 
 mellowed the somewhat too cold and languid negligence of 
 one of the fairest and haughtiest women that ever adorned a 
 court. She was too generous not to rescue any one who 
 Buffered through her the slightest injustice, not to interfere 
 when through her any misconception lighted on another ; she 
 told with her sex's rapid perception and sympathy that the 
 man, whom Chateauroy addressed with the brutal insolence of 
 a bully to his disobedient dog, had once bcc^n a gentleman, 
 
306 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 though he now held but the rank of a sous-officier in the 
 Algerian Cavalry, and she saw that he suffered all the more 
 keenly under an outrage he had no power to resist because of 
 that enforced serenity, that dignity of silence and of patience, 
 with which he stood before his tyrant. 
 
 ' V7ait,' she said, moving a little towards them, while she 
 let her eyes rest on the carver of the sculptures with a grave 
 compassion, though she addressed his chief. * You wholly 
 mistake me. I laid no blame whatever on your Corporal. 
 Let him take the chessmen back with him ; I would on no 
 account rob him of them. I can well understand that he does 
 not care to part with such masterpieces of his art ; and thai 
 he would not appraise them by their worth in gold only shows 
 that he is a true artist, as doubtless also he is a true soldier.' 
 
 I^he words were spoken with a gracious courtesy, the clear 
 cold tone of her habitual manner just marking in them still 
 the difference of caste between her and the man for whom she 
 interceded, as she would equally have interceded lor a dog 
 who should have been threatened with the lash because he 
 had displeased her. That very tone struck a sharper blow to 
 Cecil than the insolence of his commander had power to deal 
 him. His face flushed a little ; he lifted his cap to her with 
 a grave reverence, and moved away. 
 
 * I thank you, madam. Keep them, if you will so far 
 honour me.' 
 
 The words reached only her ear, in another instant he had 
 passed away down the terrace steps, obedient to his chief's 
 dismissal. 
 
 * Ah ! have no kind scruples in keeping them, madame,' 
 Chateauroy laughed to her, as she still held in her hand, doubt- 
 fully, the White Sheik of the chess Arabs ; * I will see that 
 Bel-^-faire-peur, as they call him, does not suffer by losing 
 these trumperies, which, I believe, old Zist-et-Zest, a veteran 
 of ours and a wonderful carver, had really far more to do with 
 producing than he. You must not let your gracious pity be 
 moved by such fellows as these troopers of mine ; they are the 
 most ingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to 
 produce a dramatic effect in your presence as they do how to 
 drink and to swear when they are out of it.' 
 
 ' Very possibly,' she said, with an indolent indifference ; 
 * but that man was no actor, and I never saw a gentleman if 
 be have not been one.' 
 
(Vs^" CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 307 ^^ 
 
 * Like enough,' answered the Marquis. * I believe mauy^ 
 " gentlemen " come in our ranks who have fled their native 
 countries and broken all laws, from the Decalogue to the Code 
 Napoleon. So long as they fight well, we don't ask their 
 past criminahties. We cannot afford to throw away a good 
 sabi-eur because he has made his own land too hot to hold 
 him.' ^ 
 
 ' Of what country is your Corporal, then ? * 
 
 ' I have not an idea. I imagine his past must have been 
 something very black indeed, for the slightest trace of it has 
 never, that I know of, been allowed to let slip from him. He 
 encourages the men in everj^ insubordination, buys their favour 
 with every sort of stage trick, thinks himself the finest gentle- 
 man in the whole brigades of Africa, and ought to have been 
 shot long ago if he had had his real deserts.' 
 
 She let her glance dwell on him with a contemplation that 
 was half contemptuous amusement, half unexpressed dissent. 
 
 ' I wonder he has not been, since you have the ruling of 
 his fate,' she said, with a slight smile lingering about the 
 proud rich softness of her lips. 
 
 * So do I.' 
 
 There was a gaunt, grim, stern significance in the three 
 monosyllables that escaped him unconsciously ; it made her 
 turn and look at him more closely. 
 
 ' How has he offended you ? ' she asked. 
 
 Chateauroy laughed off the question. 
 
 ' In a thousand ways, madame. Chiefly because I received 
 my regimental training under one who foDowed the traditions 
 of the Armies of Egypt and the Rhine, and have, I confess, 
 little tolerance, in consequence, of a rebel who plays the 
 martyr, and a soldier who is too effeminate an idler to do any- 
 thing except attitudinise in interesting situations to awaken 
 sympathy.' 
 
 She hstened with something of distaste upon her face where 
 Bhe still leaned against the marble balustrade toying with the, 
 ivory Bedouins. 
 
 ' I am not much interested in military discussions,' she 
 said, coldly, * but I imagine — if you will pardon me for saying 
 so — that you do your Corporal some little injustice here. I 
 should not fancy he " affects " anything, to judge from the very 
 good tone of his manners. For the rest, I shall not keep the 
 chessmen without making him fitting payment for them ; 
 
 xQ 
 
3o8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 since he declines money, you will tell me what form that had 
 better take to be of real and welcome service to a Chasseur 
 d'Afrique.' 
 
 Chateauroy, more incensed than he chose or dared to show, 
 bowed courteously, but with a grim ironic smile. 
 
 ' If you really insist, give him a napoleon or two whenever 
 you see him ; he will be very happy to take it and spend it 
 au cabaret, though he played the aristocrat to-day. But you 
 are too good to him ; he is one of the very worst of my pra- 
 tiques, and you are as cruel to me in refusing to deign to 
 accept my trooper's worthless bagatelles at my hands.' 
 
 She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence 
 or rejection he could not well resolve with himself, and turned 
 to the staff-officers, among them the heir of a princely semi- 
 royal French House, who surrounded her, and sorely begrudged 
 the moments she had given to those miniature carvings and 
 the private soldier who had wrought them. She was no co- 
 quette ; she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride, 
 and was too difficult to charm or to enchain ; but those medi- 
 tative, brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of wakening 
 without ever seeking love, and of drawing without ever recom- 
 pensing homage. 
 
 Couched down among her rose-hued covert. Cigarette had 
 watched and heard, her teeth set tightly, her breath coming 
 and going swiftly, her hand clinched close on the butts of her 
 pistols, fiery curses, with all the infinite variety in cursing of 
 a barrack ripertoire, chasing one another in hot fast mutterings 
 off those bright lips, that should have known nothing except 
 a child's careless and innocent song. 
 
 * Comme elle est belle I comme elle est belle I * she whispered 
 every now and then to herself, with a new, bitter, ferocious 
 meaning in the whisper that had, with all its hate, something 
 pathetic too. She had never looked at a beautiful high-bred 
 woman before, holding them in gay satirical disdain as mere 
 papillons roitants who could not prime a revolver and fire it off 
 to save their own lives, if ever such need arose ; a depth of 
 ignorance that was, to the vivandi^re's view, the ne plus ultra 
 of crassitude and impotence. But now she studied one through 
 all the fine, quickened, unerring instincts of jealousy ; and 
 there is no instinct in the world that gives such thorough ap- 
 preciation of the very rival it reviles. She saw the courtly 
 negligence, the regal grace, the fair brilliant loveliness, the 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE 309 
 
 delicious serene languor, of a pure ' aristocrate ' for the very 
 first time to note them, and they made her heart sick with a 
 new and deadly sense ; they moved her much as the whifcp 
 delicate carvings of the lotus-lilies and the lentiscus-leaves 
 had done ; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had 
 missed. She dropped her head suddenly, like a wounded bird, 
 and the racy vindictive camp-oaths died off her lips. She 
 thought of herself as she had danced that mad Bacchic bam- 
 bmila amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken, half- 
 infuriated soldiery, and for the moment she hated herself more 
 even than she hated that patrician yonder. 
 
 * I know what he meant tioio I ' she pondered, and her 
 spirited, sparkling, brunette face was dark and weary, like a 
 brown sun -lightened brook over whose radiance the heavy 
 shadow of some broad-spread eagle's wings hovers, hiding 
 the sun. 
 
 She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, 
 thii'stily ; then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their 
 music afresh, and light laughter echoed to her from the terrace, 
 she turned and wound herself back under the cover of the 
 shrubs, not joyously and mischievously as she had come, but 
 almost as slowly, almost as sadly, as a hare that the grey- 
 hounds have coursed drags itself through the grasses and 
 ferns. 
 
 Once through the cactus hedge her old spirit returned ; she 
 shook herself angrily with petulant self- scorn ; she swore a 
 little, and felt that the fierce familiar words did her good like 
 brandy poured down her throat ; she tossed her head like a 
 colt that rebels against the gall of the curb ; then, fleet as a 
 fawnj she dashed down the moonlit road at topmost speed, 
 '^iantre I she can't do what I do ! ' she thought. 
 
 And she ran the faster, and sang a drinking-song of the 
 Spahis all the louder, because still at her heart a dull pain 
 waa aching. 
 
3IO UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 OIGABETTE EN OONDOTTIERA 
 
 Cigarette always went fast. She had a birdlike way of 
 skimming her ground that took her over it with wonderful 
 swiftness, all the tassels and ribbon knots, and sashes with 
 which her uniform was rendered so gay and so distinctive 
 fluttering behind her, and her little military boots, with the 
 bright spurs twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly for a 
 speck of dust, though it lay thick as August suns could parch 
 it, to rest upon her. Thus she went now, along the lovely 
 moonlight, singing her drinking-song so fast and so loud that 
 had it been any other than this young fire-eater of the African 
 squadrons, it might have been supposed she sang out of fear 
 and bravado — two things, however, that never touched Ciga- 
 rette; for she exulted in danger as friskly as a youn* 
 salmon exults in the first fresh, crisp, tumbUng crest of a sea- 
 wave, and would have backed up the most vainglorious word 
 she could have spoken with the cost of her life, had need 
 been. Suddenly, as she went she heard a shout on the still 
 night air — very' still now, that the lights, and the melodies, 
 and the laughter of Chateauroy's villa lay far behind, and the 
 town of Algiers was yet distant, with its lamps gUttering 
 down by the sea. 
 
 The shout was, ' A moi, Boumis I Pour la France ! * And 
 Cigarette knew the voice, ringing melodiously and calmly 
 still, though it gave the sound of alarm. 
 
 ' Cigarette au secour I ' she cried in answer ; she had cried 
 it many a time over the heat of battlefields, and when the 
 wounded men in the dead of the sickly night writhed under 
 the knife of the camp-thieves. If she had gone hke the wind 
 before, she went like the lightning now. 
 
 A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and 
 of riders struggling one with another in a cloud of wliite dust 
 silvery and hazy in the radiance of the moon. 
 
 The centre figure was Cecil's ; the four others were Arabs, 
 armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the 
 whole day in drunken debauchery, pouring raki down their 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 311 
 
 throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had 
 darted headlong all abreast down out of the town, overriding 
 all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with 
 their sabres till the horses' flanks ran blood. Just as they 
 neared Cecil, they had knocked aside and trampled over a 
 worn-out old colon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time 
 from their path. Cecil had reined up and shouted to them 
 to pause ; they, inflamed with the perilous drink, and sense- 
 less with the fury which seems to possess every Arab once 
 started in a race neck to neck, were too blind to see, and too 
 furious to care, that they were faced by a soldier of France, 
 but rode down on him at once, with their curled sabres flash- 
 ing round their heads. His horse stood the shock gallantly, 
 and he sought at first only to parry their thrusts and to cut 
 through their stallions' reins ; but the latter were chain bridles, 
 and only notched his sword as the blade struck them, and 
 the former became too numerous and too savagely dealt to be 
 easily played with m carte and tierce. The Arabs were dead- 
 drunk, he saw at a glance, and had got the bloodthirst upon 
 them ; roused and burning with brandy and raki, these men 
 were like tigers to deal with ; the words he had spoken they 
 never heard, and their horses hemmed him in powerless, 
 while their steel flashed on every side ; — they were not of the 
 tribe of the Khalifa. 
 
 If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few 
 moments more of that moonlight night were all that he would 
 Uve. He wished to avoid bloodshed, both because his sym- 
 pathies were always with the conquered tribes, and because 
 he knew that every one of these quarrels and combats between 
 the vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen 
 the breach, already broad enough, between them. But it was 
 no longer a matter of choice with him, as his shoulder was 
 grazed by a thrust which, but for a swerve of his horse, would 
 have pierced to his lungs ; and the four riders, yelling like 
 madmen, forced the animal back on his haunches, and assaulted 
 him with breathless violence. He swept his own arm back, 
 and brought his sabre down straight through the sword-arm 
 of the foremost ; the limb was cleft through as if the stroke 
 of an axe had severed it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs 
 closed in on him. The points of their weapons were piercing 
 his harness when, sharp and pwift, one on another, three shots 
 hissed past him ; the nearest of his assailants fell stone dead, 
 
3ia UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and the others, wounded and startled, loosed their hold, shook 
 their reins, and tore off down the lonely road, while the dead 
 man's horse, shaking his burden from him out of the stirrups, 
 followed them at a headlong gallop through a cloud of dust. 
 
 * That was a pretty cut through the arm ; better had it 
 been through the throat. Never do things by halves, ami 
 Victor,' said Cigarette carelessly, as she thrust her pistols 
 back into her sash, and looked, with the tranquil appreciation 
 of a connoisseur, on the brown, brawny, naked limb, where 
 it lay severed on the sand, with the hilt of the weapon still 
 hanging in the sinewy fingers. Cecil threw himself from his 
 saddle and gazed at her in bewildered amazement ; he had 
 thought that those sure, cool, death-dealing shots had come 
 from some Spahis or Chasseur. 
 
 * I owe you my life ! ' he said rapidly. * But — good God ! 
 you have shot the fellow dead ' 
 
 Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous 
 glance at the Bedouin's corpse. 
 
 * To be sure — I am not a bungler.' 
 
 ' Happily for me, or I had been where he lies now. But 
 wait — let me look ; there may be breath in him yet.' 
 
 Cigarette laughed, offended and scornful, as with the offence 
 and scorn of one whose first science was impeached. 
 
 * Pas si bete ! Look and welcome ; but if you find any 
 life in that Arbi, make a laugh of it before all the army to- 
 morrow.* 
 
 She was at her fiercest. A thousand new emotions had 
 been roused in her that night, bringing pain with them, that 
 she bitterly resented ; and, moreover, this child of the Army 
 of Africa caught fire at the flame of battle with instant con- 
 tagion, and had seen slaughter around her from her first 
 infancy. 
 
 Cecil, disregarding her protest, stooped and raised the fallen 
 Bedouin. He saw at a glance that she was right ; the lean, 
 dark, lustful face was set in the rigidity of death ; the bullet 
 had passed straight through the temples. 
 
 ' Did you never see a dead man before ? ' demanded Ciga- 
 rette impatiently, as he lingered ; — even in this moment ha 
 had more thought of this Arbico than he had of her ! 
 
 He laid the Arab's body gently down, and looked at her 
 with a glance that, rightly • or wrongly, she thought had a 
 rebuke in it. 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 313 
 
 * Very many. But — it is never a pleasant sight. And 
 they were in drink ; they did not know what they did.' 
 
 * Pardieu ! What divine pity ! G-ood powder and ball 
 were sore wasted, it seems ; you would have preferred to lie 
 there yourself, it appears. I beg your pardon for interfering 
 with the preference.' 
 
 Her eyes were flashing, her lips very scornful and wrath- 
 ful. This was his gratitude ! 
 
 * Wait, wait,' said Cecil rapidly, laying his hand on her 
 shoulder, as she flung herself away. *My dear child, do 
 not think me ungrateful. I know well enough I should be 
 a dead man myself had it not been for your gallant assistance. 
 Believe me, I thank you from my heart.' 
 
 ' But you think me " unsexed " all the same ! I see, beati, 
 lion ! ' 
 
 The word had rankled in her ; she could launch it now with 
 telling reprisal. 
 
 He smiled ; but he saw that this phrase, which she had 
 overheard, had not alone incensed, but had wounded 
 her. 
 
 * Well, a little, perhaps,' he said gently. ' How should 
 it be otherwise ? And, for that matter, I have seen many a 
 great lady look on and laugh her soft, cruel laughter, while 
 the pheasants were falling by hundreds, or the stags being 
 torn by the hounds. They called it " sport," but there wag 
 not much difference — in the mercy of it, at least — from your 
 war. And they had not a tithe of your courage.' 
 
 The answer failed to conciliate her ; there was an accent of 
 compassion in it that ill suited her pride, and a lack of admi- 
 ration that was not less new and unwelcome. 
 
 ' It was well for you that I ivas unsexed enough to be 
 able to send an ounce of lead into a drunkard ! ' she pursued 
 with immeasurable disdain. ' If I had been like that dainty 
 aristocrat down there — pardieu I it had been worse for you. 
 I should have screamed, and fainted, and left you to be killed, 
 while I made a tableau. Oh-he, that is to be " feminine," is it 
 not?' 
 
 * Where did you see that lady ? ' he asked in some surprise. 
 ' Oh ! I was there ! ' answered Cigarette, with a toss of 
 
 her head southward to where the villa lay. ' I went to se© 
 how you would keep your promise.' 
 
 * Well, you saw I kept it.' 
 
314 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 She gave her little teeth a sharp click like the click of a 
 trigger. 
 
 * Yes. And I would have forgiven you if you had broken it.' 
 
 * Would you ? I should not have forgiven myself.' 
 
 * Ah ! you are just like Marquise. And you will enel 
 like him.' 
 
 * Very probably.' 
 
 She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his patk 
 with the pistols thrust in her sash, and her hands resting 
 lightly on lier hips, as a good workman rests after a neatly 
 finished job, and her dainty fez set half on one side on hei 
 brown tangled curls, while upon them the intense lustre of 
 the moonlight streamed, and in the dust, wellnigh at their 
 feet, lay the gaunt, white-robed form of the dead Arab, with 
 the olive saturnine face turned upward to the stars. 
 
 * Why did you give those chessmen to that silver pheasant ? ' 
 ihe asked him abruptly. 
 
 * Silver pheasant ? ' 
 
 * Yes. See how she sweeps — sweeps — sweeps so languid, 
 BO brilliant, so useless — bah I Why did you give them ? ' 
 
 * She admired them. It was not much to give.' 
 
 ' Diantre ! You \rould not have given them to a daughter 
 of the people.' 
 
 * Why not ? ' 
 
 ' Why not ? Oh-h^ ! Because her hands would be hard, 
 and brown, and coarse, not fit for those ivory puppets ; but 
 Miladi's are white like the ivory, and cannot soil it. She 
 will handle them so gracefully, for five minutes ; and then 
 buy a new toy, and let her lap-dog break yours ! ' 
 
 ' Like enough.' He said it with his habitual gentle 
 temper, but there was a shadow of pain in the words. The 
 chessmen had become in some sort like living things to hira, 
 through long association ; he had parted from them not with- 
 out regret, though for the moment courtesy and generosity of 
 instinct had overcome it ; and he knew that it was but too 
 true how in all likelihood these trifles of his art, that had 
 brought him many a solace and been his companion through 
 many a lonely hour, would be forgotten by the morrow, where 
 he had bestowed them, and at best put aside in a cabinet to 
 lie unnoticed among bronzeb of porcelain, or be set on some 
 boudoir-table to be idled with in the mimic warfsj'e that 
 would serve to cover some listless flirtation. 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 315 
 
 Cigarette, quick to sting, but as quick to repent using her 
 sting, saw the regret in him ; with the rapid, uncalculating 
 liberaUty of an utterly unselfish and intensely impulsive 
 nature, she hastened to make amends by saying what was 
 like gall on her tongue in the utterance : 
 
 * Tiens I ' she said quickly. ' Perhaps she will value them 
 more than that. I know nothing of the aristocrats — not I ! 
 When you were gone, she championed you against the Black 
 Hawk, She told him that if you had not been a gentleman 
 before you came into the ranks, she had never seen one. Ma 
 caniche I she spoke well, if you had but heard her.' 
 
 'She did !\ 
 
 She saw his glance brighten as it turned on her in a 
 surprised gratification. 
 
 * Well ! What is there so wonderful ? ' 
 
 Cigarette asked it with a certain petulance and doggedness, 
 taking a namesake out of her breast-pocket, biting its end off, 
 and striking a fusee. A word from this aristocrat was more 
 welcome to him than a bullet that had saved his life ! 
 
 Her generosity had gone very far, and, like most generosity, 
 got nothing for its pains. 
 
 He was silent a few moments, tracing lines in the dust with 
 the point of his scabbard. Cigarette, with the cigar in her 
 mouth, stamped her foot impatiently. 
 
 * Corporal Victor ; are you going to dream there all night ? 
 What is to be done with this dog of an Arbico ? ' 
 
 She was angered by him ; she was in the mood to make 
 herself seem all the rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more 
 callous. She had shot the man — pouf I what of that ? She 
 had shot men before, as all Africa knew. She would defend 
 a half-fledged bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out old cur ; but 
 a man ! Men were the normal and natural food for pistols 
 and rifles, she considered. A state of society in which fire« 
 arms had been unknown was a thing Cigarette had never 
 heard of, and in which she would have contumeliously dis- 
 believed if she had been told of it. 
 
 Cecil looked up from his musing ; he thought what a pity 
 it was this pretty, graceful French kitten was such a blood- 
 thirsty young panther at heart. 
 
 * I scarcely know what to do,' he answered her doubtfully. 
 ' Put him across my saddle, poor wretch, I suppose ; the fray 
 must be reported.* 
 
3i6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Leave that to me,* said Cigarette decidedly, and with a 
 certain haughty patronage. * I shot him — I will see the 
 thing gets told right. It might be awkward for you ; they 
 are growing so squeamish about the Roumis killing the natives. 
 Draw him to one side there, and leave him. The crows will 
 finish his affair.' 
 
 The coolness with which this handsome child disposed 
 of the fate of what, a moment or two before, had been 
 a sentient, breathing, vigorous frame, sent a chill through 
 her hearer, though he had been seasoned by a decade of 
 slaughter. 
 
 * No,' he said briefly. * Suspicion might fall on some 
 innocent passer-by. Besides — he shall have decent burial.' 
 
 ' Burial for an Arbi — faugh ! ' cried Cigarette in derision. 
 • Parbleu, M. Bel-^-faire-peur, I have seen hundreds of our 
 best lascara lie rotting on the plains with the birds' beaks at 
 their eyes and the jackals' fangs in their flesh. What was 
 good enough for them is surely good enough for him. You 
 are an eccentric fellow — you * 
 
 He laughed a little. 
 
 ' Time was when I should have begged you not to call me 
 any such ** bad form I " Eccentric ! I am not genius enough 
 for that.' 
 
 * Eh ? ' She did not understand him. * Well, you want 
 that carrion poked into the earth, instead of lying atop of it. 
 I don't see much difference myself. I would like to be in 
 the sun as long as I could, I think, dead or alive. Ah ! how 
 odd it is to think one will be dead some day — never wake for 
 the r6veill6 — never hear the cannon or the caissons roll by — 
 never stir when the trumpets sound the charge, but He there 
 dead — dead — dead — while the squadrons thunder above one's 
 grave 1 Droll, eh ? ' 
 
 A momentary pathos softened her voice (which could melt 
 and change into a wonderful music), where she stood in the 
 glistening moonlight. That the time would ever come when 
 her glad laughter would be hushed, when her young heart 
 would beat no more, when the bright, abundant, passionate 
 blood would bound no longer through her veins, when all the 
 vivncious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended 
 for her for ever, was a thing that she could no better bring 
 home to her than a bird that sings in the light of the sun 
 could be made to know that the time would come when its 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 317 
 
 little melodious throat would be frozen in death, and give 
 Bong never more. 
 
 The tone touched him — made him think less and less of her 
 as a daredevil boy. as a reckless child-soldier, and more of 
 her as what she was, than he had done before ; he touched 
 her ahnost caressingly. 
 
 ' Pauvre enfant I I hope that day will be very distant 
 from you. And yet — how bravely you risked death for me 
 just now 1 ' 
 
 Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the 
 camp, flushed ever so slightly at the mere caress of his hand. 
 
 * Chut I I risked nothing ! ' she said rapidly. * As for 
 death — when it comes, it comes. Every soldier carries it in 
 his wallet, and it may jump out on him any minute. I would 
 rather die young than grow old. Pardi ! age is nothing else 
 but death that is conscious* 
 
 ' Where do you get your wisdom, Uttle one ? * 
 
 * Wisdom ? Bah ! Living is learning. Some people go 
 through life with their eyes shut, and then grumble there is 
 nothing to see in it 1 Well — you want that Arbi buried ? 
 What a fancy I Look you, then ; stay by him, since you are 
 30 fond of him, and I will go and send some men to you with 
 a stretcher to carry him down to the town. As for reporting, 
 leave that to me ; I shall tell them I left you on guard. That 
 will square things if you are late at the barrack.' 
 
 ' But that will give you so much trouble. Cigarette.* 
 
 * Trouble ? Morbleu ! Do you think I am Hke that silver 
 pheasant yonder ? Lend me your horse, and I shall be in the 
 town in ten minutes I ' 
 
 She vaulted, as she spoke, into the saddle ; he laid his hand 
 on the bridle, and stopped her. 
 
 * Wait I I have not thanked you half enough, my brave 
 little champion. How am I to show you my gratitude ? ' 
 
 For a moment the bright, brown, changeful face, that could 
 look so fiercely scornful, so sunnily radiant, so tempestuously 
 passionate, and so tenderly childlike, in almost the same 
 moment, grew warm as the warm suns that had given their fire 
 to her veins ; she glanced at him almost slyly, while the 
 moonhght slept lustrously in the dark softness of her eyes ; 
 there was au intense allurement in her in that moment — the 
 allurement of a woman's loveliness, bitterly as she disdained 
 ft woman's charms. It might have told him, more plainly 
 
3i8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 than words, how best he could reward her for the shot that 
 had saved him ; yet, though a man on whom such beguile- 
 ment usually worked only too easily and too often, it did not 
 now touch him. He was grateful to her, but, despite himself, 
 he was cold to her ; despite himself, the life which that little 
 hand that he held had taken so lightly made it the hand of a 
 comrade to be grasped in alliance, but never the hand of a 
 mistress to steal to his lips and to lie in his breast. 
 
 Her rapid and unerring instinct made her feel that keenly 
 and instantly ; she had seen too much passion not to know 
 when it was absent. The warmth passed off her face, her 
 teeth clinched, she shook the bridle out. of his hold. 
 
 • Take gratitude to Miladi there ! She will value fin© 
 words ; I set no count on them. I did no more for you than 
 I have done scores of times for my Spahis. Ask them how 
 many I have shot with my own hand ! ' 
 
 In another instant she was away like a sirocco, a whirlwind 
 of dust that rose in the moonlight marking her flight as she 
 rode full gallop down to Algiers. 
 
 * A kitten with the tigress in her,* thought Cecil as he 
 seated himself on a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over 
 the dead Arab. It was not that he was callous to the gene- 
 rous nature of the little Friend of the Flag, or that he was 
 insensible either of the courage that beat so dauntlessly in her 
 pulses, or of the piquant, picturesque grace that accompanied 
 even her wildest actions ; but she had nothing of her sex's 
 charm for him. He thought of her rather as a young soldier 
 than as a young girl. She amused him as a wayward, bright, 
 mischievous, audacious boy might have done ; but she had no 
 other interest for him. He had given her little attention ; a 
 waltz, a cigar, a passing jest, were all he had bestowed on 
 the little lionne of the Spahis corps ; and the deepest senti- 
 ment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity — 
 pity for this flower which blossomed on the polluted field of 
 war, and under the poison-dropping branches of lawless crime. 
 A flower bright-hued, sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth 
 now, when it had just unclosed, in all its earliest beauty, but 
 already soiled and tainted by the bed from which it sprang, 
 and doomed to be swept away with time, scentless and love- 
 less, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, black 
 stream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly. 
 
 Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 319 
 
 sound of the horse's hoofs had died where he sat on a loose 
 pile of stones, with the lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet. 
 
 * Who was it in my old life that she is like ? ' he was 
 musing. It was the deep-blue, dreaming, haughty eyes of 
 ' Miladi ' that he was bringing back to memory, not th« 
 brown mignon face that had been so late close to his in th« 
 light of the moon. 
 
 Meanwhile, on his good grey, Cigarette rode like a trua 
 Chasseur, herself. She was used to the saddle, and would 
 ride a wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle, balancing her 
 supple form, now on one foot, now on the other, on the ani- 
 mal's naked back, while they flew at full speed, with a skill 
 and address that would have distanced the best heroines of 
 manege and hippodrome. Not so fantastically, but full as 
 speedily, she dashed down into the city, scattermg all she met 
 with right and left, till she rode straight up to the barracks 
 of the Chasseurs d'Afrique. At the entrance, as she reined 
 up, she saw the very person she wanted, and signed him to 
 her as carelessly as if he were a conscript instead of that 
 powerful officer, FranQois Vireflau, captain and adjutant. 
 
 ' Hola ! ' she cried, as she signalled him ; Cigarette was 
 privileged all through the army, and would have given the 
 langue verte to the Emperor himself, had she met him. 
 ' Adjutant Vireflau, I come to tell you a good story for your 
 folios matricules. There is your Corporal there — le beau 
 Victor — has been attacked by four drunken dogs of ArbicoSj 
 iead drunk, and four against one. He fought them superbly, 
 but he would only parry, not thrust, because he knows how 
 strict the rules are about dealing with the scoundrels — even 
 when they are murdering you, parbleu ! He has behaved 
 splendidly. I tell you so. And he was so patient with these 
 dogs that he would not have killed one of them. But I did ; 
 shot one straight through the brain — a beautiful thing — and 
 he lies on the Oran road now. Victor would not leave him, 
 for fear some passer-by should be thought guilty of a murder ; 
 so I came on to tell you, and ask you to send some men up for 
 the jackal's body. Ah ! he is a fine soldier, that Bel-a-faire- 
 peur of yours. Why don't you give him a step — two steps — 
 three steps *? Diantre ! It is not hke France to leave him a 
 Corporal I ' 
 
 Vireflau listened attentively — a short, lean, black-visaged 
 campaigner, who yet relaxed into a grim half-smile as the 
 
320 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 vivandi^re addressed him with that air as of a generalissimo 
 addressing a subordinate, which always characterised Cigarette 
 the more strongly the higher the grade of her companion or 
 opponent. 
 
 ' Always eloquent, pretty one I * he growled. * Are you 
 sure he did not begin the fray ? ' 
 
 * Ma cantche I Don't I tell you the four Arabs were Like 
 four devils ! They knocked down an old colon, and Bel-^- 
 faire-peur tried to prevent their doing more mischief, and they 
 set on him like so many wild cats. He kept his temper won- 
 derfully ; he always tries to preserve order ; you can't say so 
 much of your riffraff, Captain Vireflau, commonly I Here ! 
 this is his horse. Send some men to him ; and mind the 
 thing is reported fairly, and to his credit, to-morrow.' 
 
 With which command, given as with the air of a commander- 
 in-chief, in its hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted 
 off' the charger, flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away 
 and out of sight before Fran9ois Vireflau had time to consider 
 whether he should laugh at her caprices, as all the army did, 
 or resent her insolence to his dignity. But he was a good- 
 natured man, and, what was better, a just one ; and Cigarette 
 had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh 
 well with him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would 
 not reach his Colonel in any warped version that could give 
 pretext for any fresh exercise of tyranny over * Bel-^-faire- 
 peur ' under the title of ' discipline.' 
 
 * Dieu de Dieu ! ' thought his champion as she made her 
 way through the gay-lit streets. 'I swore to have my 
 vengeance on him. It is a droll vengeance, to save his life, 
 and plead his cause with Vireflau ! No matter ! one could 
 not look on and let a set of Arbicos kill a good lascar of 
 France, and the thing that is just must be said, let it go as 
 it will against one's grain. Public Welfare before Private 
 Pique! ' 
 
 A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for 
 an abandonment of her sworn revenge which she felt was a 
 weakness utterly unworthy of her, and too much like that 
 inconsequent weathercock, that useless, insignificant part of 
 creation, those objects of her supreme derision and contempt, 
 those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good God had 
 ever troubled himself to make — namely, ' Les Femmes.' 
 
 ' Hoi A, Cigarette ! * cried the Zouave Tata, leaning out of 
 
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA 321 
 
 a little casement of the As de Pique as she passed it. ' A la 
 honne heure, ma belle I Come in ; we have the devil's own tun 
 here ' 
 
 * No doubt ! ' retorted the Friend of the Flag. *It would 
 be odd if the master-fiddler would not fiddle for his 
 own! ' 
 
 Through the window, and over the sturdy shoulders in their 
 canvas shirt of the hero Tata, the room was visible, full of 
 smoke, through which the hght glimmered like the sun in a 
 fog, reeking with bad wines, crowded with laughing bearded 
 faces, and the battered beauty of women revellers, while on 
 the table, singing with a voice Mario himself could not have 
 rivalled for exquisite sweetness, was a slender Zouave gesticu- 
 lating with the most marvellous pantomime, while his melo- 
 dious tones rolled out the obscenest and wittiest ballad that 
 ever was carolled in a guinguette. 
 
 ' Come in, my pretty one ! ' entreated Tata, stretching out 
 his brawny arms. ' You will die of laughing if you hear 
 Gris-Gris to-night — such a song I ' 
 
 * A pretty song, yes, for a pig- sty 1 ' 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, as 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, as she murmured, dreaming : 
 'Comriie elle est belU I Conmie elle est belle /' 
 
322 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE MISTRESS OP THE WHITE KINO 
 
 * Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough ; but here t ' 
 thought Cecil, as, earher awake than those of his Chambr^e, 
 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 marvellously various types — those 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 ft 
 galley-slave than a soldier, were the Uthe 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 naked torso of one of 
 the splendid peasants of the Sables d'Olonue ; 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, 
 doglike, with its round black head meeting its feet, was % 
 wiry frame, on which every muscle was traced Uke network, 
 and the skin burnt 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, * Mdre ! mdre I 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 323 
 
 Pauvre vi^'e I ' 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 
 imder its gi'ape-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 soKtude. 
 
 Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of cam- 
 paigning, 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 confine- 
 ment 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 accoutrements were awry, or an insub- 
 cfrdinate scoundrel had pawned his regulation shirt; to be 
 incessantly witness of tyrannies and cruelties he was power- 
 less to prevent, and which he continually saw undo all he 
 had done, and render men desperate whom he had spent 
 months in endeavouring to make contented ; to have as the 
 only diversions for his few instants of leisure loathsome plea- 
 sures 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 regret- 
 fully 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 th&. 
 oblivion of death. 
 
 Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hard- 
 ships 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 iu the Indian 
 
334 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 plains, such a thought would never have crossed him ; ha 
 was far too thorough a soldier not the7i to have been not only 
 satisfied, but happy. What made his hfe in the barracks of 
 Algiers so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the com- 
 pelled 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 unde- 
 viating 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 pic- 
 tured with such teiiible force and truth. 
 
 'Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be 
 the wiser way to draw my own sabre across my throat ? ' he 
 thought, as the brutalised 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 any one who should have used the word ' duty ' in con- 
 nection 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 Eoyaume ' 
 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 Chambr^e with that 
 xindly gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach 
 their liking ; went through the customary routine of his post 
 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 chases-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, 
 
h 
 
 THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 325 
 
 weery, parched with thirst, scorched through with heat, and 
 covered with white dust, fco 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 I 
 
 Cecil said nothing. 
 
 Yet he reeled slightly as he threw himself out of the 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 wellnigh 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 dis- 
 mounted. 
 
 The Chasseur who had brought him the message caught his 
 arm eagerly. 
 
 ' Are you hurt, mon Gaporal ? ' 
 
 Cecil shook his head. The speaker was one known in the 
 regiment as Petit Picpon, who had begun life as a gamm 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 
 his 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 galowi6 with that curious doglike deathless attachment 
 that these natures, all reckless, wanton, destructive, and mis- 
 chievous though they be, so commonly bestow, he muttered a 
 terrible curse under his fiercely-curled moustaches. 
 
 '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 out- 
 burst 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 
 
326 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 to sovT 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 tnatraque, 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. Diantre ! ' 
 
 Cecil was infinitely more touched than he dared, for 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, 
 *faisant roue,' with hands and heels in the dexterous somer- 
 saults 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, the foremost of la queue, into the for- 
 saken theatres of Bouffes or of Vari6t^s in search for those 
 odds and ends which the departed audience might have left 
 behind them — one of the favourite modes of seeking a liveli- 
 hood 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 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 327 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 
 ceinturofi, to fill up the sack with date-stones, to make it 
 assume its original form so that none could have imagined it 
 had been ton shed, and to proceed with it thus to the Moorish 
 lionne'a dwelling. The negro who always opened her door 
 would take it in ; Picpon would hint to him to be careful, aa 
 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. Voild ! here was a neat trick ! If it had 
 8 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 hand- 
 Bom.e moukieras, what tavern banquets they would bring I 
 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 legiti- 
 mate aspect such a theft bore, it is necessary to have also 
 understood the unrecordable codes that govern the genua 
 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 aa 
 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 
 
328 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 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 over- 
 topped 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, deU- 
 vered 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 I ' he thought, as he stood on his head, with 
 his legs at an acute angle in the air, a position very favoured 
 by him for moments of reflection — he said his brain worked 
 better upside down. ' Ma cantche ! what a weakness, what a 
 weakness 1 What remorse to have yielded to it ! Beneath 
 yoUj 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 lae 
 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, mahciousness, 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 ' aristo- 
 crat'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 brutalised jests and mosquito-like torments 
 of this little odious chimpanzee of Paris. 
 
 One day, however, it chanced that a detachment of Chas- 
 seurs, 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 liimself a clear path through their ranks, ho caught 
 Bight of his young enemy, Picpon, on the ground, with a 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 32^ 
 
 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 vidette 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 souvie?idra,' 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 sun-endered because thieving and lying in 
 the regiment gave pain to that oddly predjudiced * 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 fre- 
 quented, and spent the few sous he could afford on an iced 
 draught of lemcn-flavoured drink. Eat he could not ; over- 
 fatigue 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 odours 
 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 
 &n old Moor, who had some of the rarest and most beautiful 
 
S30 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 fereasures 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 coHee 
 and a hubble-bubble 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 continuoiis 
 turmoil of street and of barrack, and he went thither now. 
 He found the old man sitting cross-legged behind his 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 colours glowed through 
 the darkness. 
 
 * No coffee, no sherbet, thanks, good father,' said Cecil, 
 in answer to the Moor's hospitable entreaties. ' Give me 
 only licence to sit in the quiet here. I am very tired.' 
 
 * Sit and be welcome, my son,' said Ben Arsli. * Whora 
 should this roof shelter in honour, if not thee ? Musjid shall 
 bring thee the supreme solace.' 
 
 The supreme solace was a narghile, 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 witk 
 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 lustre and confusion of 
 shadowy hues swam awhile 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, whea 
 there came a delicate odour of perfumed laces, a delicate rustle 
 of silk swept the floor ; a lady's voice asked the price of &n 
 ostrich-egg, superbly mounted in gold. Ben Arsli opened his 
 eyes — the Chasseur slept on ; the new-comer was one of those 
 great ladies who now and then winter in Algeria. 
 
 Her carriage waited without ; she was alone, making pur- 
 chase of those innumerable splendid trifles with which Algiers 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 331 
 
 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 begin to spread before her the richest treasures of 
 his stock. Under the plea of the light, he remained near the 
 entrance with her : money was dear to him, and must not be 
 lost, but he wouid make it if he could without awakening 
 the tired soldier. Marvellous caskets of mother-of-pearl ; 
 carpets soft as down, and 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 
 wnerring grace of taste and lavishness of expenditure which 
 were her characteristics, but which are far from always found 
 m unison ; and throughout her survey Ben Arsli had kept her 
 near the entrance, and Cecil had slept on unaroused by the 
 low tones of their voices. 
 
 A roll of notes had passot' from her hand to the Moslem's, 
 smd 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 coloured glass, silver, gold and 
 ivory being wrought in with 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,' sof% 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 1 ' Her eyes feU 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, 
 BO that the face was turned upward. With a woman's rapid, 
 comprehensive glance, she saw the 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 hijs wrists, the softness of his hair ; she saw, as she had 
 Been before, that whatever he might be now, in some past 
 
332 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 companion- 
 ship 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 sale 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 accident ; the noise startled Cecil, 
 and his eyes unclosed to all the dreamy fantastic colours of the 
 place, and met those bent on him in musing pity — saw that 
 lustrous, haughty, delicate head bending slightly down through 
 the many coloured shadows. 
 
 He thought he was dreaming, yet on instinct he rose, 
 staggering slightly, for sharp pain was still darting through 
 his head and temples. 
 
 * Madame 1 pardon me ! Was I sleeping ? ' 
 
 * You were, and rest again. You look ill 1 * she said, 
 gently, and there was, for a moment, less of that accent in 
 her voice which the night before had marked so distinctly, 
 so pointedly, the Une of demarcation between a Princess of 
 Spain and a soldier of Africa, 
 
 * I thank you, I ail nothing.' 
 
 He had no sense that he did in the presence of that face 
 which had tbe beauty of his old life ; under the charm of that 
 voice which had the music of his buried years. 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 333 
 
 * I fear that is scarcely true ? ' she answered him. * You 
 look in pain; though as a soldier, perhaps, you will not 
 own it ? * 
 
 * A headache from the sun — no more, madame.' 
 
 He was careful not again to forget the social gulf which 
 yawned between them. 
 
 * That is quite bad enough 1 Your service must be 
 severe ? * 
 
 ' In Africa, Miladi, one cannot expect indulgence.* 
 ' I suppose not. You have served long ? ' 
 ' Twelve years, madame.' 
 
 * And your name ? ' 
 
 * Louis Victor.' She fancied there was a slight abrupt- 
 ness in the reply, as though he were about to add some other 
 name, and checked himself. 
 
 She entered it in the little book from which she had taken 
 her bank-notes. 
 
 * I may be able to serve you,' she said, as she wrote. * I 
 will speak of you to the Marshal ; and when I return to 
 Paris, I may have an opportunity to bring your name before 
 the Emperor. He is as rapid as his uncle to reward military 
 merit ; but he has not his uncle's opportunities for personal 
 observation of his soldiers.' 
 
 The colour flushed his forehead. 
 
 'You do me much honour,' he said, rapidly, 'but if you 
 would gratify me, madame, do not seek to do anything of the 
 kind.' 
 
 ' And why ? Do you not even desire the cross ? ^ 
 
 * I desire nothing, except to be forgotten.' 
 
 * You seek what others dread, then ? ' 
 
 *It may be so. At any rate, if you would serve me, 
 madame, never say what can bring me into notice.' 
 
 She regarded him with much surprise, with some slight 
 sense of annoyance ; she had bent far in tendering her in- 
 fluence at the French court to a private soldier, and his re- 
 jection of it seemed as ungracious as it was inexplicable. 
 
 At that moment the Moor joined them. 
 
 ' Miladi has told me. Monsieur Victor, that you are a first- 
 rate carver of ivories. How is it you have never let me 
 benefit by your art ? ' 
 
 'My things are not worth a sou,' muttered Cecil hur- 
 riedly. 
 
334 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 'You do them great injustice, and yourself also,' said the 
 grande damef more coldly than she had before spoken. ' Your 
 carvings are singularly perfect, and should bring you con- 
 siderable returns.* 
 
 ' Why have you never shown them to me, at least ? * pur- 
 sued Ben Arsli — * why not have given me my option ? ' 
 
 The blood flushed Cecil's face again ; he turned to the 
 Princess. 
 
 'I withheld them, madame, not because he would have 
 underpriced, but overpriced them. He rates a trifling act of 
 mine, of long ago, so unduly.' 
 
 She bent her head in silence ; yet a more grateful compre- 
 hension of his motive she could not have given than her glance 
 alone gave. 
 
 Ben Arsli stroked his great beard ; more moved than his 
 Moslem dignity would show. 
 
 * Always so ! ' he muttered, '' always so I My son, in some 
 life before this, was not generosity your ruin ? ' 
 
 * Miladi was about to purchase that lamp ? ' asked Cecil, 
 avoidmg the question. ' Her Highness will not find any- 
 thing like it in all Algiers.' 
 
 The lamp was taken down, and the conversation turned from 
 himself. 
 
 ' May I bear it to your carriage, madame ? ' he asked, as 
 she moved to leave, having made it her own, while her foot- 
 man carried out the smaller articles she had brought to the 
 equipage. She bowed in silence ; she was very exclusive, 
 she was not wholly satisfied with herself for having conversed 
 thus with a Chasseur d'Afrique in a Moor's bazaar. Still, 
 she vaguely felt pity for this man ; she equally vaguely de- 
 sired to serve him. 
 
 * Wait, Monsieur Victor ! ' she said as he closed the door 
 of her carriage. * I accepted your chessmen last night, but 
 you are very certain that it is impossible I can retain them on 
 Buch terms.* 
 
 A shadow darkened his face. 
 
 ' Let your dogs break them, then, madame. They shall not 
 Dome back to me.' 
 
 * You mistake — I did not mean that I would send them 
 back. I simply desire to offer you some equivalent for them. 
 There must be something that you wish for ?— something which 
 would be acceptable to you in the life you lead ? ' 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 33S 
 
 * I have already named the only thing I desire.* 
 
 He had been solicitous to remember and sustain the enor- 
 mous difference in their social degrees ; but at the offer of her 
 gifts, of her patronage, of her recompense, the pride of his old 
 life rose up to meet her own. 
 
 * To be forgotten ? A sad wish I Nay, surely life in a 
 regiment of Africa cannot be so cloudless that it can create in 
 you no other ? ' 
 
 * It is not. I have another.' 
 
 * Then tell it to me : it shall be gratified.* 
 
 * It is to enjoy a luxury long ago lost for ever. It is — to 
 be allowed to give the slight courtesy of a gentleman without 
 being tendered the wage of a servant.' 
 
 She understood him ; she was moved, too, by the inflexion 
 ©f his voice. She was not so cold, not so negligent, as the 
 world called her. 
 
 * I had passed my word to grant it ; I cannot retract,' she 
 answered him, after a pause. ' I will press nothing more on 
 you. But — as an obhgation to me — can you find no way in 
 which a rouleau of gold would benefit your men ? ' 
 
 * No way that I can take it for them. But, if you care 
 indeed to do them a charity, a little wine, a Httle fruit, a few 
 flowers (for there are those among them who love flowers), 
 sent to the hospital, will bring many benedictions on your 
 name, madame. They lie in infinite misery there I ' 
 
 * I will remember,' she said simply, while a thoughtful 
 Badness passed over her brilliant face. ' Adieu, M. le Caporal ; 
 and if you should think better of your choice, and will allow 
 your name to be mentioned by me to his Majesty, send me word 
 through my people. There is my card.' 
 
 The carriage whirled away down the crooked street ; ho 
 stood under the tawny awning of the Moorish house, with the 
 thin glazed card in his hand. On it was printed : 
 
 ♦ Mme, la Frincesse Corona d'Amagile^ 
 
 Hdtel Corona^ Farii* 
 
 In the comer was written, * Villa Aiaussa, Algiers.' He 
 thrust it iii the folds of his sash, and turned within. 
 ' Do you know her ? ' he asked Ben ArsH. 
 The old man shook his head. 
 
 * She is the most beautiful of thy many fair Frankish women. 
 
336 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 I never saw her till to-day. She seeraed to have an interest in 
 thee, my son. But listen here. Touching these ivory toys — 
 if thou dost not bring henceforth to me all the work in them 
 that thou doest, thou shalt never come here more to meet the 
 light of her eyes.' 
 
 Cecil smiled and pressed the Moslem's hand. 
 
 * I kept them away because you would have given me a 
 hundred piastres for what had not been worth one. As for her 
 eyes, they are stars that shine on another world than an 
 African trooper's. So best I * 
 
 Yet they were stars of which he thought more, as he wended 
 his way back to the barracks, than of the splendid constella- 
 tions of the Algerian evening that shone with all the lustre of 
 the day, but with a soft enchanted light which transfigured 
 sea, and earth, and sky as never did the day's full glow, as he 
 returned to the mechanical duties, to the thankless services, to 
 ^the distasteful meal, to the riotous mirth, to the coarse com- 
 . ^radeship, which seemed to him to-night more bitter than they 
 ^1^ Clhad ever done since his very identity, his very existence, had 
 jbeen killed and buried past recall,' past resurrection, under 
 ItJie kejn d' ordoimance of a Chasseur d'Afrique. 
 
 Meantime, the Princesse Corona drove homeward — home- 
 ward to where a temporary home had been made by her in 
 the most elegant of the many snow-white villas that stud the 
 sides of the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay ; 
 a villa with balconies, and awnings, and ccol silent chambers, 
 and rich glowing gardens, and a broad low roof, half hidden 
 in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid 
 sound of waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of 
 blossom. 
 
 Madame la Princesse passed from her carriage to her own 
 morning-room, and sank down on a couch a little listless and 
 weary with her search among the treasures of the Algerine 
 bazaars. It was purposeless work, after all. Had she not 
 bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and ohjets d'art in 
 profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her groat 
 grim palace in Estremadura. 
 
 ' Not one of those things do I want — not one shall 1 look 
 at twice. The money would have been better at the soldiers' 
 hospital,' she thought, while her eyes dwelt on a chess- table 
 near her — a table on which the mimic hosts of Chasseurs and 
 Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons. 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 337 
 
 She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with 
 a certain interest. 
 
 * That man has been noble once,' she thought. ' What a 
 fate ! — whiit a cruel iate I ' 
 
 It touched her to great pity; although proud with too in- 
 tense a pride, her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when 
 once moved, deeply compassionate. The unerring glance of~T 
 a woman habituated to the first society of Europe had told bsr 
 that the accent, the bearing, the tone, the features of this 
 soldier, who only asked of life ' oblivion,' were those of ona 
 originally of gentle blood ; and the dignity and patience of big 
 acceptajice of the indignities which his present rank entailed 
 on him had not escaped her any more than the delicate beauty 
 of his face as she had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with j 
 pain, in the unconscious revelation of sleep. ^-^ 
 
 * How bitter his life must be I ' she mused. * When 
 Philip comes, perhaps he will know some way to aid him. 
 And yet — who can serve a man who only desire ~ to be for- 
 gotten ? ' 
 
 Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd dis- 
 crepancy, of some unseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling 
 on the wishes and the burdens of a sotis-officier of Light 
 Cavalry, she laughed a little, and put the White Chief back onca 
 more in his place. Yet even as she set the king among his 
 mimic forces, the very carvings themselves served to retain 
 their artist in her memory. 
 
 There was about them an indescribable elegance, an exceed- 
 ing grace and beauty, which spoke of a knowledge of art and of 
 refinement of taste far beyond those of a mere military amateur 
 in the one who had produced them. 
 
 ' What could bring a man of that talent, with that address, 
 into the ranks ? ' she mused. * Persons of good family, of onca 
 fine position, come here, they say, and live and die unrecognised 
 under the Imperial flag. It is usually some dishonour that 
 drives them out of their own worlds ; it may be so with him. 
 Yet he does not look like one whom shame has touched ; he ig 
 proud still — prouder than he knows. More hkely it is tho old, 
 old story — a high name and a narrow fortune — the ruin of thou- 
 sands ! He is French, I suppose ; a French aristocrat who 
 has played auroi dejjoullU, most probably, and buried himsell 
 and his history for ever beneath those two names that tell one 
 iiothing — Louis Victor. WeU, it is no matter of mine. Very 
 
 z 
 
338 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 possibly he is a mere adventurer with a good manner. This 
 army here is a pot-pourri, they say, of all the varied scoun- 
 drelisms of Europe ! ' 
 
 She left the chess-table and went onward to the dressing and 
 bath and bed-chambers, which opened In one suite from her 
 boudoir, and resigned herself to the hands of her attendants 
 for her dinner-toilet. 
 
 The Moslem had said aright of her beauty ; and now, as her 
 splendid hair was unloosened and gathered up afresh with a 
 crescent-shaped comb of gold that was not brighter than the 
 tresses themselves, the brilliant, haughty, thoughtful face was 
 of a truth, as he had said, the fairest that had ever come from 
 the Frankish shores to the hot African sea-board. Many beside 
 the old Moslem had thought it ' the fairest that e'er the sun 
 shone on,' and held one grave, lustrous glance of the blue im- 
 perial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her — 
 all without return. Yet, although only twenty years had 
 passed over her proud head, the Princess Corona d'Amagiie 
 had been wedded and been widowed. 
 
 Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain 
 pity and a certain honour for the man whose noble Spanish 
 name she took. Widowed, by a death that was the seal of her 
 marriage-sacrament, and left her his wife only in name and 
 law. 
 
 The marriage had left no chain upon her ; it had only made 
 her mistress of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, 
 of that light spacious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her 
 name, of that vast majestic old castle throned on brown Estre- 
 maduran crags, and looking down on mighty woods of cork 
 and chestnut, and flashing streams of falling water hurling 
 through the gorges. The death had left no regret upon her ; 
 it only gave her for awhile a graver shadow over the brilliancy 
 of her youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always — or 
 for so long, at least, as she so chose to use it — a plea for that 
 indifference to men's worship of her which their sex called 
 heartlessness, which her own sex thought an ultra-refined co- 
 quetry, and which was in real truth neither the one nor the 
 other, but simply the negligence of a woman very difficult to 
 touch, and, as it had seemed, impossible to charm. 
 
 None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some 
 were wont to whisper it ' ambition ; ' and, when that whisper 
 came round to her. her splendid lips would curl with as splen- 
 did a scorn. 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 339 
 
 * Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us \ 
 equally ? ' she would ask ; for she came of a great Line that 
 thought few royal branches on equality with it ; and she che- 
 rished as things of strictest creed the legends that gave her 
 race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire blue, tha,> 
 blood M. Arthur in their veins. 
 
 Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his 
 deathbed, with Beltran Corona d'Amagiie ; but what it was 
 the world could never tell precisely. The world would not 
 have believed it if it had heard the truth — the truth that it 
 had been, in a different fashion, a gleam of something of the 
 same compassion that now made her merciful to a common 
 trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish 
 .Prince — compassion which, with many another rich and j 
 generous thing, lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the \ 
 golden stamen lies folded within the white virginal chill cup ' 
 of the lily. 
 
 She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to 
 any one out of the many who had sought her high-born 
 beauty ; she was too proud to be easily moved to such selec- 
 tion, and she was far too habituated to homage to be wrought 
 upon by it ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sunlit, 
 gracious nature ; she had been always happy, always obeyed, 
 always caressed, always adored ; it had rendered her im- 
 measurably contemptuous of flattery ; it had rendered her a 
 little contemptuous of pain. She had never had aught to 
 regret ; it was not possible that she could realise what re- 
 gret was. 
 
 Hence men called and found her very cold ; yet those of 
 her own kin whom she loved knew that the heart of a sum- 
 mer rose was not warmer, nor sweeter, nor richer than hers. 
 And first among these was her brother — at once her guar- 
 dian and her slave — who thought her perfect, and would no 
 more have crossed her will than he would have set his foot 
 on her beautiful imperial head. Corona d'Amagiie had been 
 his friend ; the only one for whom he had ever sought to 
 break her unvarying indifference to her lovers, but for whom 
 even he had pleaded vainly until one autumn season, when 
 they had stayed together at a great archducal castle in South 
 Austria. In one of the forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of 
 the hunt, she rejected, for the third time, the passionate 
 supplication of the superb noble who ranked Y>'ith the 
 
340 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 D'Ossuna and the Medina- Sidonia. He rode from her in great 
 bitterness, in grief that no way moved her — she was impor- 
 tuned with these entreaties to weariness. An hour after he 
 was brought past her, wounded and senseless ; he had saved 
 her brother from imminent death at his own cost, and the 
 tusks of the mighty Styrian boar had phmged through and 
 through his frame, as they had met in the narrow woodland 
 glade. 
 
 * He will be a cripple — a paralysed cripple — for life 1 ' said 
 the one whose life had been saved by his devotion to her that 
 night ; and his lips shook a httle under his golden beard as 
 he spoke. 
 
 She looked at him ; she loved him well, and no homage to 
 herself could have moved her as this sacrifice for him had 
 done. 
 
 * You think he will live ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But 
 how ? My God I what a death in life I and all for my sake, 
 in my stead 1 ' 
 
 She was silent several moments ; then she raised her face, 
 a little paler than it had been, but with a passionless resolve 
 set on it. 
 
 * Philip, we do not leave our debts unpaid. Go ; tell him 
 I will be his wife.' 
 
 * His wife — now 1 Venetia 1 ' 
 
 * Go I ' she said, briefly. * Tell him what I say.' 
 
 * But what a sacrifice 1 in your beauty, your youth ' 
 
 * He did not count cost. Are we less generous ? Go — 
 tell him.' 
 
 He was told ; and was repaid. Such a light of unutterable 
 joy burnt through the misty agony of his eyes as never, it 
 seemed to those who saw, had beamed before in mortal eyes. 
 He did not once hesitate at the acceptance of her self-surrender ; 
 he only pleaded that the marriage ceremony should pass be- 
 tween them that night. 
 
 There were notaries and many priests in the great ducal I 
 household ; all was done as he desired. She consented with- 1 
 out wavering ; she had passed her word, she would not have 
 withdrawn it if it had been a thousand times more bitter in 
 its fulfilment. The honour of her house was dearer to her than 
 any individual happiness. This man for them had lost peace, 
 health, joy, strength, every hope of life ; to dedicate her own 
 
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING 341 
 
 life to hini; as he had vainly prayed her when in the full glo^ 
 and vigour of his manhood, was the only means by which their 
 vast debt to him could be paid. To so pay it was the instant 
 choice of hex-higi-Xiode of honour, and of her generosity that 
 would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitied him unspeakably, 
 though her heart had no tenderness for him ; she had dis- 
 missed him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to 
 save the only life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, 
 broken, helpless wreck, with endless years of pain and weari- 
 ness before him I 
 
 At midnight, in the great dim magnificence of the state 
 chamber where he lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the 
 chapel choir, from afar echoing through the incensed air, she 
 bent her haughty head down over his couch, and the marriage 
 benediction was spoke over them. 
 
 His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of £ 
 passionate triumph in it. When the last words were uttered, 
 he lay awhile, exhausted, silent, only looking ever upward at 
 her with his dark, dreamy eyes, in which the old love glanced 
 80 strangely through the blindness of pain. Then he smiled 
 as the last echo of the choral melodies died softly on the 
 silence. H-^ ^ " 
 
 * Thp.t is joy enough I Ah ! h-a. -ce no fear. With the dawifj ^^^ ' 
 you will be fi-ee once more. Did you think that I could have 
 taken your sacrifice ? I knew well, let them say as they 
 would, that I should not live the night through. But, l^st 
 existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, I rent the 
 linen bands off m.y wounds an hour ago. All their science^ 
 will not put back the life now ! My limbs are dead, and the 
 cold steals up ! Ah, love I ah, love ! You never thought how \ 
 men can suffer I But have no grief for me. I am happy. 1 
 Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mine once. Youf ' 
 are my own I — death is sweeter than hfe I ' *^ 
 
 And before sunrise he died. 
 
 Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage 
 rested on her still. Though she was blameless, some vague 
 remorse ever haunted her : though she had been so whoUy 
 guiltless of it, this death for her sake ever seemed in some 
 sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder, only 
 prouder ; but they erred. She was one of those women who, 
 beneath the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of 
 infinite tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach. 
 
342 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from 
 a distance, shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, 
 like the sun, dazzled him. ' Exquisite — superb ! ' he mut- 
 tered ; and he was a man whose own ideals were so matchless 
 that living women rarely could wring out his praise. * She 
 is nearly perfect, your Princess Corona 1 ' 
 
 ' Nearly ! ' cried a Roman sculptor. * What, in Heaven's 
 name, can she want ? ' 
 
 ' Only one thing i ' 
 
 'And that is ?' 
 
 * To have loved.' 
 
 Wherewith he turned into the Greco. 
 
 He had found the one flaw — and it was still there. WTiat 
 he missed in her was still wanting. 
 
 ^f-s 
 
 OHAPTER XXIII 
 
 /\ THE LITTLE LEOPABD OF FBANOB 
 
 «^. < Y'ld ce que &est la gloire — au grahat I ' 
 
 The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette's 
 tight-pressed bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. 
 She was sitting on the edge of a grahat, hard as wood, com- 
 fortless as a truss of straw, and looking down the long hospital- 
 room, with its endless rows of beds and its hot sun shining 
 blindingly on its glaring whitewashed walls. 
 
 She was well known and well loved there. W^hen her little 
 brilliant-hued figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, 
 down the dreary length of those chambers of misery, bloodless 
 lips, close-clinched in torture, would stir with a smile, would 
 move with a word of welcome. No tender-voiced dove-eyed 
 Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding grey and soft, and like a 
 hving psalm of consolation, beside those couches of misery, 
 bore with them the infinite inexpressible charm that the 
 Friend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were 
 good, were gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest 
 blackguard prostrate there : but they never smiled, they never 
 took the dying heart of a man back with one glance to the 
 days of his childhood, they never gave a sweet wild snatch of 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 343 
 
 song like a bird's on a spring-blossoming bough that thrilled 
 through half -dead senses, with a thousand voices from a thou- 
 sand buried hours. ' But the Little One,' as said a gaunt 
 grey-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill 
 stealing slowly up his jagged, torn frame — * the Little One — 
 do you see — she is youth, she is life ; she is all we have lost. 
 That is her charm I The Sisters are good women, they are 
 very good ; but they only pity us. The Little One, she loves 
 us. That is the difference : do you see ? ' 
 
 It was all the difference — a wide difference ; she loved them 
 all, with the warmth and fire of her young heart, for sake of 
 France and of their common Flag. And though she was but 
 a wild wayward mischievous gamin, a gamin all over though 
 in a girl's form, men would tell in camp and hospital, with 
 great tears coursing down their brown scarred cheeks, how 
 her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated fore- 
 heads, how her watch would be kept by them through long 
 nights of torment, how her gifts of golden trinkets would be 
 sold or pawned as soon as received to buy them ice or wine, 
 and how in their delirium the sweet fresh voice of the child 
 of the regiment would soothe them, singing above their 
 wretched beds some carol or chant of their own native pro- 
 vince, which it always seemed she must know by magic ; for, 
 were it Basque, or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a 
 mountain -song of the Orientales, were it a mere ringing 
 rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild bold romanesque 
 from the country of Berri — Cigarette knew each and all, and 
 never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the 
 rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's 
 cradle-song and of his first love's lips. And there had been 
 times when those songs suddenly breaking through the dark- 
 ness of night, suddenly lulling the fiery anguish of wounds, 
 had made the men who one Jiour before had been like mad 
 dogs, like goaded tigers, men full of the lusts of slaughter 
 and the lust of the senses, and chained powerless and blas- 
 pheming to a bed of agony, tremble and shudder at them- 
 selves, and turn their faces to the wall and weep like children, 
 and fall asleep, at length, with wondering dreams of God. 
 
 ' Via ce que c'est la gloire — au grabat I ' said Cigarette 
 now grinding her pretty teeth. She was in her most revo- 
 lutionary and reckless mood, drumming the ratajjlan with her 
 spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the corner of old Miou- 
 
344 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Matou's mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that tills 
 among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat 
 into a stew, so divine tliat you could not tell it from rabbit, 
 being laid up with a ball in his hip, a spearhead between his 
 shoulders, a rib or so broken, and one or two other little trifling 
 casualties. 
 
 Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, 
 laughed in the depths of his great hairy chest. * Dream of 
 glory, and end on a grabat! Just so, just so. And yet one 
 has pleasures — to sweep off an Arbico's neck nice and clean — 
 swish ! ' And he described a circle with his lean brawny arm 
 with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would 
 listen thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience 
 or Delia Quercia work. 
 
 ' Pleasures 1 My God ! Infinite, endless misery I ' mur- 
 mured a man on her right hand. He was not thirty years cf 
 age, with a delicate, dark, beautiful head that might have 
 . passed as model to a painter for a St. John. He was dying 
 fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies. 
 
 Cigarette flashed her bright falcon glance over him. 
 
 * Well 1 is it not misery that is glory ? ' 
 
 * We think that it is when we are children. God help us ! ' 
 murmured the man who lay dying of lung-disease. 
 
 ^ ' Ouf ! Then we think rightly ! Glory ! Is it the cross, the 
 
 star, the baton ? No ! ^ He who wins those runs his horpe 
 up on a hill, out of shot range, and watches through his glass 
 how his troops surge up, wave on wave, in the great sea oi 
 blood. It is misery that is glory — the misery that toils with 
 bleeding feet under burning suns without complaint ; that 
 lies haif-dead through the long night with but one care — t^ 
 keep the torn flag free from the conqueror's touch ; that bear? 
 the rain of blows in punishment, rather than break silence 
 and buy release by betrayal of a comrade's trust ; that is 
 beaten like the mule, and galled like the horse, and starved 
 like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet does the 
 
 ' Having received ardent reproaches from field-officers and commanders 
 of divJBions for the injustice done their services by this sentence, I beg to 
 assure them that the sentiment is Cigarette's — not mine. I should be very 
 Bony for an instant to seem to depreciate that ' genius of command ' with- 
 out whose guidance an army is but a rabble, or to underrate that noblest 
 courage which accepts the burden of arduous responsibilities and of duties 
 U bitter in anxiety aa they are precious in honour. 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 345 
 
 thing which is right, and the thing which is brave, despite 
 all ; that suffers, and endures, and pours out his blood like 
 water to the thirsty sands, whose thirst is never stilled, and 
 goes up in the morning sun to the combat, as though death 
 were paradise that the Arbicos dream, Imowing the whik 
 that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoof through the 
 throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over the 
 writhing limb. That is glory. The misery that is heroism 
 because France needs it, because a soldier's honour wills it. 
 That is glory. It is here to-day in the hospital as it never ig 
 in the Cour des Princes, where the glittering host of the mar- j 
 ehals gather I ' ^ 
 
 Her voice rang clear as a clarion ; the warm blood burnt 
 in her bright cheeks ; the swift, fierce pathetic eloquence of 
 her nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her 
 hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there 1 
 was in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world | 
 mistily calls genius. ' 
 
 There were-men lying in that sick-chamber brutalised, 
 crime-stained, ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and like 
 them, reared and driven for the slaughter, yet there was not 
 one among them to whom some ray of light failed to come 
 from those words, through whom some thrill failed to pass as 
 they heard them. Out yonder in the free air, in the barrack- 
 court, or on the plains, the Little One would rate them 
 furiously, mock them mercilessly, rally them with the flat of 
 a sabre, if they were mutinous, and lash them with the most 
 pitiless ironies if they were grumbling ; but here, in the 
 hospital, the Little One loved them, and they knew it, and 
 that love gave a flute-like music to the passion of her voice. 
 
 Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with 
 her brass heel. 
 
 * All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat, eh, P^j-e 
 Matou ? ' she said curtly. She was half impatient of her 
 own momentary lapse into enthusiasm, and she knew the 
 temper of her * children ' as accurately as a bugler knows 
 the notes of the reveille — knew that they loved to laugh even 
 with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts 
 half breaking over a comrade's corpse, would cry in burlesque 
 mirth, * Ah, le bon zig I II a avale sa cartoiiche ! ' ^ 
 
 ' Ah, the good fellow I He's swallowed his own oartouehe ! 
 
346 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Paradise 1 ' growled P^re Matou. ' Ouf ! Who wants 
 that ? If one had a few bidons of brandy, now ' 
 
 * Brandy ? Oh-h6. You are to be much more of aristo- 
 crats now than that I ' cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable 
 satire curling on her rosy, piquant lips. * The Silver Pheasants 
 have taken to patronise you. Ma cantcke / if I were you, I 
 would not touch a glass, nor eat a fig ; you will not, if you 
 have the spirit of a rabbit. You ! Fed like dogs with the 
 leavings of her table — pardieu ! that is not for soldiers of 
 France I ' 
 
 * Eh ? What dost thou say ? ' growled Miou- Matou, peer- 
 ing up under his grey, shaggy brows. 
 
 ' Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That 
 is all. Sapristi I How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan 
 with two wards to one's maitre d hotel, and a rouleau of gold 
 that one never misses I The rich they can buy all things, 
 you see, even heaven, so cheap ! ' With which withering 
 satire Cigarette left P^re Matou in the conviction that he 
 must be already dead and among the angels if the people 
 began to talk of champagne to him ; and flitting down between 
 the long rows of beds with the old disabled veterans who 
 tended them, skimmed her way, like a bird as she was, into 
 another great chamber, filled, like the first, with suffering in 
 all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript, tossing in 
 African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundred 
 wounds. 
 
 Cigarette was as ca,ustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming 
 through the entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard 
 that Madame la Princesse Corona d'Amagiie had made a gift 
 of singular munificence and mercy to the invalid soldiers — a 
 gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would brighten their 
 long dreary hours for many weeks. Who Madame la Princesse 
 might be she knew nothing ; but the title was enough, she 
 was a silver pheasant — bah 1 And Cigarette hated the aristo- 
 crats — when they were of the sex feminine. * An aristocrat 
 in adversity is an eagle,* she would say ; * but an aristocrat 
 in prosperity is a peacock.' Which was the reason why she 
 flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence imagin- 
 able, but took the part of * Marquise,' of * Bel-^-faire-peur,' 
 and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their six- 
 teen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of 
 Africa. With a word here and a touch there, tender, soft, 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 347 
 
 ftnd bright, eincG, however ironic her mood, she never brought 
 anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need 
 of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the 
 narrow chink of a hospital window. At last she reached the 
 bed she came most specially to visit — a bed on which was 
 stretched the emaciated form of a man once beautiful as a 
 Greek dream of a god. 
 
 The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead ; his 
 teeth were tight clinched on lips white and parched ; and his 
 immense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were 
 fastened on vacancy, with the yearning misery that gleams in 
 the eyes of a Spanirh bull when it is struck again and again 
 by the matador, and yet cannot die. 
 
 She bent over him softly. 
 
 * Tiens, Morisieur L6on ! I have brought you some ice.' 
 His weary eyes turned on her gratefully ; he sought to 
 
 speak, but the effort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh ; 
 it shook him with horrible violence from head to foot, and the 
 foam on his auburn beard was red with blood. 
 
 There was no one by to watch him ; he was sure to die ; a 
 week sooner or later — what mattered it ? He was useless as 
 a soldier ; good only to be thrown into a pit, with some 
 quicklime to hasten destruction and do the work of the slower 
 earthworms. 
 
 Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine- 
 leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him ; the 
 delicious coolness and freshness in that parching noontide 
 heat stilled the convulsion ; his eyes thanked her, though his 
 lips could not ; he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved ; and 
 she — thoughtfully for her — slid herself down on the floor, 
 and began singing low and sweetly as a fairy might sing on 
 the raft of a water-Uly leaf. She sung quadriales, to be sure, 
 B Granger's songs and odes of the camp ; for she knew of no 
 hymn but the Marseillaise, and her chants were all chants like 
 the La^is Veneris. But the voice that gave them was pure as 
 the voice of a thrush in the spring, and the cadence of its 
 music was so silvery sweet that it soothed like a spell all the 
 fever-racked brains, all the pain-tortured spirits. 
 
 * Ah ! that is sweet,' murmured the dying man, * It is 
 like the brooks — like the birds — like the winds in the 
 leaves.' 
 
 He wus but half conscious ; but the lulling of that gliding 
 
348 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 voice brought him peace. And Cigarette sung on, only 
 moving to reach him some fresh touch of ice, while time 
 travelled on, and the first afternoon shadows crept across the 
 bare floor. Every now and then, dimly through the openings 
 of the windows, came a distant roll of drums, a burst of 
 military music, an echo of the laughter of a crowd ; and then 
 her head went up eagerly, an impatient shade swept across 
 her expressive face. 
 
 It was a fete day in Algiers ; there were flags and banners 
 fluttering from the houses, there were Arab races and Arab 
 manoeuvres, there was a review of troops for some foreign 
 general, there were all the mirth and the mischief that she 
 loved, and that never went on without her, and she knew 
 well enough that from mouth to mouth there was sure to be 
 asking, ' Mais oil done est Cigarette ? ' Cigarette who was the 
 Generalissima of Africa I 
 
 But still she never moved ; though all her vivacious life was 
 longing to be out and in their midst, on the back of a desert 
 horse, on the head of a huge drum, perched on the iron 
 support of a high- hung lantern, standing on a cannon while 
 the Horse Artillery swept full gallop, firing down a volley of 
 argot on the hot homage of a hundred lovers, drinking creamy 
 liqueurs and filling her pockets with bonbons from handsome 
 subalterns and aides-de-camp, doing as she had done ever 
 since she could remember her first rataplan. But she never 
 moved. She knew that in the general gala these sick-beds 
 would be left more deserted and less soothed than ever. She 
 knew, too, that it was for the sake of this man, lying dying 
 here from the lunge of a Bedouin lance through his lungs, 
 that the ivory wreaths and crosses and statuettes had been 
 sold. 
 
 And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a 
 time for her ' children.' 
 
 The day stole on ; L6on Ramon lay very quiet ; the ice 
 for his chest and the song for his ear gave him that semi- 
 oblivion, dreamy and comparatively painless, which was the 
 only mercy which could come to him. All the chamber was 
 unusually still ; on three of the beds the sheet had been drawn 
 over the face of the sleepers, who had sunk to a last sleep 
 Bince the morning rose. The shadows lengthened, the hours 
 followed one another ; Cigarette sang on to herself with few 
 pauses : whenever she did so pause to lay soaked linen on 
 
THE LriTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 349 
 
 the soldier's hot forehead, or to tend him gently in those 
 paroxysms that wrenched the clotted blood from off his lungs, 
 there was a light on her face that did not corns from the 
 golden heat of the African sun. 
 
 Such a light those who know well the Chilrken of France 
 may have seen, in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful 
 upon the young face of a conscript or of boy-insurgent as he 
 lifted a dying comrade, or pushed to the front to be slain in 
 another's stead ; the face that a moment before had been keen 
 for the slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklessly gay as 
 the saucy refrain the lips carolled. 
 
 A step sounded on the bare boards ; she looked up ; and 
 the wounded man raised his weary lids with a gleam of glad- 
 ness under them ; Cecil bent above his couch. 
 
 * Dear L6on ! how is it with you ? ' 
 
 His voice was softened to infinite tenderness ; L^on Ramon 
 had been for many a year his comrade and his friend ; an 
 artist oLParis, a nian of marvellous genius, of high idealic 
 creeds, who, in a fatal moment of rash despair, had flung his 
 talents, his broken fortunes, his pure and noble spirit, into 
 the fiery furnace of the hell of military Africa ; and now lay 
 dying here, a common soldier, forgotten as though he were 
 already in his grave. 
 
 ' The review is just over. I got ten minutes to spare, and 
 came to you the instant I could,* pursued Cecil. * See here 
 what I bring you ! You, with your artist's soul, will feel 
 yourself all but well when you look on these I ' 
 
 He spoke with a hopefulness he could never feel, for he 
 knew that the life of Leon Ramon was doomed ; and as the 
 other strove to gain breath enough to answer him, he gently 
 motioned him to silence, and placed on his bed some peaches 
 bedded deep in moss and circled round with stephanotis, with 
 magnolia, with roses, with other rarer flowers sdlL 
 
 The face of the artist-soldier hghtened with a longing joy; 
 his lips quivered. 
 
 * Ah, God ! they have the fragrance of my France I ' 
 
 Cecil said nothing, but moved them nearer in to the clasp 
 of bis eager hands. Cigarette he did not see. 
 
 There were some moments of silence, while the dark eyes 
 of the dying man thirstily dwelt on the beauty of the flowers, 
 and his dry ashen Hps seemed to drink in their periumes as 
 those athirst drink in water. 
 
350 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' They are beautiful,' he said faintly, at length. ' They 
 have our youth in them. How came you by them, dear 
 friend ? ' 
 
 * They are not due to me,* answered Cecil, hurriedly. 
 •Madame la Princesse Corona sends them to you. She has 
 sent great gifts to the hospital — wines, fruits, a profusion of 
 flowers, such as those. Through her, these miserable cham- 
 bers will bloom for awhile like a garden ; and the best winea 
 of Europe will slake your thirst in lieu of that miserable 
 tisane.' 
 
 *It is very kind,' murmured Leon Ramon, languidly ; life 
 was too feeble in him to leave him vivid pleasures in aught. 
 * But I am ungrateful. La Cigarette here — she has been so 
 good, so tender, so pitiful. For once I have almost not missed 
 you ! ' 
 
 Cigarette, thus alluded to, sprang to her feet with her head 
 tossed back, and all her cynicism back again ; a hot colour was 
 on her cheeks, the light had passed from her face, she struck 
 hev white teeth together. She had thought * Bel-^-faire- 
 peur ' chained to his regiment in the field of manoeuvre, or 
 she would never have come thither to tend his friend. She 
 had felt happy in her self-sacrifice ; she had grown into a 
 gentle, pensive, merciful mood singing here by the side of 
 the dying soldier, and now the first thing she heard was of 
 the charities of Madame la Princesse ! 
 
 That was all her reward ! Cigarette received the recom- 
 pense that usually comes to generous natures which have 
 strung themselves to some self- surrender that costs them 
 dear. 
 
 Cecil looked at her surprised, and smiled. 
 
 * Ma belle, is it you ? That is indeed good. You were 
 the good angel of my life the other night, and to-day come to 
 bring consolation to my friend ' 
 
 * " Good angel ! " Chut, M. Victor I One does not know 
 those nwts sucres in Algiers. There is nothing of the angel 
 about me, I hope. Your friend, too ! Prut-tut 1 Do you 
 think I have never been used to taking care of my comrades 
 in hospital before you played the sick-nurse here ? ' 
 
 f She spoke with all her brusque petulance in arms again ; 
 
 ' she hated that he should imagine she had sacrificed her fete- 
 day to L6on Ramon, because the artist-trooper was dear to 
 him ; she hated him to suppose that she had waited there all 
 
 I 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 351 
 
 the hours through on the chance that he would find her at her 
 post, and admire her for her charity. Cigarette waa far too 
 proud and disdainful a young soldier to seek either his presence 
 or his praise. 
 
 He smiled again ; he did not understand the caprices of her 
 changeful moods, and he did not feel that interest in her which 
 would have made him divine the threads of their vagaries. 
 
 ' I did not think to offend you, my little one,' he said, 
 gently. * I meant only to thank you for your goodness to 
 Ramon in my absence.' 
 
 Cigarette shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 * There was no goodness, and there need be no thanks. Ask 
 Pere Matou how often I have sat with him hours through.' 
 
 ' But on a fete-day ! And you who love pleasure, and 
 gi'ace it so well ' 
 
 * Ouf ! I have had so much of it,* said the Little One, 
 contemptuously. * It is so tame to me. Clouds of dust, 
 scurry of horses, fanfare of trumpets, thunder of drums, and 
 all for nothing ! Bah ! I have been in a dozen battles — I— 
 and I am not likely to care much for a sham fight.' 
 
 * Nay, she is unjust to herself,' murmured L^on Ramon. 
 
 * She gave up the fete to do this mercy — it has been a great 
 one. She is more generous than she will ever allow. Here, 
 Cigarette, look at these scarlet rosebuds ; they are like your 
 bright cheeks. Will you have them ? I have nothing else 
 to give.' 
 
 * Rosebuds ! ' echoed Cigarette, with supreme scorn. 
 
 * Rosebuds for me ? I know no rose but the red of the tri- 
 color ; and I could not tell a weed from a flower. Besides, 
 I told Miou- Matou just now, if my children do as I tell 
 them, they will not take a leaf or a peach-stone from this 
 grajide dame — how does she call herself? — Madame Corona 
 d'Amagiie I ' 
 
 Cecil looked up quickly : * Why not ? ' 
 Cigarette flashed on him her brilliant brown eyes with a 
 fire that amazed him. 
 
 * Because we are soldiers, not paupers 1 * 
 'Surely; but ' 
 
 ' And it is not for the silver pheasants, who have done 
 nothing to deserve their life but lain in nests of cotton wool, 
 ajid eaten grain that others sow and sheU for them and spread 
 their shining plumage in a sun that never clouds above their 
 
352 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 heads, to insult, with the insolence of their " pity ** and their 
 ^* charity," the heroes of France, who perish, as they have 
 lived, for their Country and their Flag ! ' 
 
 It was a superb peroration ! If the hapless flowers lying 
 there had been a cartel of outrage to the concrete majesty of 
 the French Army, the Army's champion could not have spoken 
 ' with more impassioned force and scorn. 
 
 Cecil laughed slightly; but he answered, with a certain 
 annoyance : 
 
 ' There is no '* insolence " here ; uo question of it. Madame 
 la Princesse desired to offer some gift to the soldiers of Algiers ; 
 I suggested to her that to increase the scant comforts of the 
 hospital, and gladden the weary eyes of sick men with beauties 
 that the Executive never dreams of bestowing, would be the 
 most merciful and acceptable mode of exercising her kindness. 
 If blame there be in the matter, it is mine.' 
 
 In defending the generosity of what he knew to be a genuine 
 and sincere wish to gratify his comrades, he betrayed what he 
 did not intend to have revealed, namely, the conversation that 
 had passed between himself and the Spanish princess. Ciga- 
 rette caught at the inference with the quickness of her light- 
 ning-like thought. 
 
 *0h-h6! So it is she/* 
 
 There was a whole world of emphasis, scorn, meaning 
 wrath, comprehension, and irony in the four monosyllables ; 
 jhe dying man looked at her with languid wonder. 
 
 ' She ? Who ? What story goes with these roses ? ' 
 
 * None,' said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance 
 in his voice ; to have his passing encounter with this beautif u 
 patrician pass into a barrack canard, through the unsparinf 
 jests of the soldiery around him, was a prospect very unwel 
 come to him. ' None whatever. A generous thoughtfulnes; 
 
 yX for our common necessities as soldiers ' 
 
 » f^ * ^'^^ ' ' interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one 
 \'V I ^^^^^ finished. ' The stalled mare will not go with the wili 
 ^^ I coursers ; an aristocrat may live with us, but he will alway 
 cling to his old order. This is the story that runs with th 
 roses. Miladi was languidly insolent over some ivory chess 
 men, and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languc 
 and insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu 
 Miladi, knowing no gods but those two, worships them, an 
 sends to the soldiers of France, as the sort of sacrifice h€ 
 
THE LHTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 355 
 
 gods love, fruits and wines that, day after day, are set on her 
 table, to be touched, if tasted at all, with a butterfly's sip ; 
 and Corporal Victor finds this a charity sublime ; — to give 
 what cost nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out from the 
 profusion of a life of waste and indulgence ! And I say that 
 if my children are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke 
 like dogs dying of thirst rather than slake their throats with 
 alms cast to them as if they were beggars 1 ' - — 
 
 With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on 
 the gifts of the Princess Corona d'Amagiie, Cigarette struck 
 light to her briXle-gueule, and thrusting it between her lips, 
 with her hands in the folds of her scarlet waist-sash, went off 
 with the light, swift step natural to her, exaggerated into the 
 carriage she had learned of the Zouaves, laughing her good- 
 morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their 
 couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the 
 place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, 
 the most impudent drinking-song out oi the taverns of the 
 Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the law- 
 lessness of the lingua Sabir. 
 
 Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her. She 
 had given up her whole fete-day to wait on the anguish and 
 to soothe the soUtude of his friend lying dying there ; and her 
 reward had been to hear him speak of this aristocrat's dona- 
 tions, that cost her nothing but the trouble of a few words of 
 command to her household, as though they were the saintly 
 charities of some angel from heaven ! 
 
 * Diantre 1 ' she muttered, as her hand wandered to the ever 
 beloved forms of the pistols within her sash. ' Cliaffaur^es 
 or Achmet, or any of them, would throw a draugh: of wine in 
 his face, and lay him dead for me with a pass or two ten 
 minutes after. Why don't I bid them ? I have a mind * 
 
 In that moment she could have shot him dead herself with- 
 out a second's thought. Storm and sunUght swept, one after 
 another, with electrical rapidity at all times through her vivid, 
 changeful temper ; and here she had been wounded and been 
 stung in the very hour in which she had subdued her national 
 love of mirth, and her childhke passion for show, and her 
 impatience of all confinement, and her hatred of all things 
 mournful, to the attainment of this self-negation ! Moreover, 
 there mingled with it the fierce and intolerant heat of 
 the passionate and scarce-conscious jealousy of an utterly 
 
354 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 untamed nature, and of Gallic blood, quick and hot as the 
 Bteaming springs of the Geyser. 
 
 * You have vexed her, Victor,' said Leon Ramon, as she was 
 lost to sight through the doors of the great desolate chamber. 
 
 ' I hope not ! I do not know how,' answered Cecil. ' It 
 is impossible to follow the windings of her wayward caprices. 
 A child — a soldier — a dancer — a brigand — a spoilt beauty — 
 a mischievous gamin — how is one to treat such a httle fagot 
 of opposites ? ' 
 
 The other smiled. 
 
 * Ah ! you do not know the Little One yet. She is worth 
 a study. I painted her years ago — " La Vivandiere k Sept 
 Ans." There was not a picture in the Salon that winter that 
 was sought like it. I had travelled in Algeria then ; I had 
 not entered the army. The first thing I saw of Cigarette was 
 this : She was seven years old ; she had been beaten black 
 and blue ; she had had two of tier tiny teeth knocked out. 
 The men were furious, she was a pet with them ; and she 
 would not say who had done it, though she knew twenty 
 swords would have beaten him flat as a fritter if she had 
 given his name. I got her to sit to me some days after. I 
 pleased her with her own picture. I asked her to tell me why 
 she would not say who had ill-treated her. She put her head 
 on one side like a robin, and told me, in a whisper : "It was 
 one of my comrades — because I would not steal for him. I 
 would not have the army know — it would demorahse them. 
 If a French soldier ever does a cowardly thing, another French 
 soldier must not betray it." That was Cigarette — at seven 
 years. The esprit du corps was stronger than her own wrongs. 
 What do you say to that nature ? ' 
 
 ' That it is superb I — that it might be moulded to anything. 
 The pity is * 
 
 * Ah, tais-toi I ' said the artist- trooper, half wearily, half 
 laughingly. * Spare me the old world-worn, threadbare for- 
 mulas. Because the flax and the laleza blossom for use, and 
 the garden -flowers grow trained and pruned, must there be no 
 bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and swings free in the 
 wind in its fearless fair- fashion ? Believe me, dear Victor, it 
 is the lives which follow no previous rule that do the most 
 good and give the most harvest.' 
 
 * Surely. Only for this child — a woman — in her fa- 
 tura -' 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE ' ^55 
 
 * Her future ? Well, she will die, I dare say, some bright / 
 day or another, at the head of a regiment, with some desperate 
 battle turned by the valour of her charge, and the sight of the 
 torn tricolor upheld in her little hands. That is what Ciga- j j 
 rette hopes for — why not ? There will always be a million of ' ^ 
 commonplace women readj^to keep up the decorous traditions 
 
 of their sex, and sit in safety over their needles by the side of 
 their hearths. One little lioness here and there in a genera-^ 
 tion cannot do overmuch harm.* 
 
 Cecil was silent. He would not cross the words of the 
 wounded man by saying what might bring a train of less 
 pleasant thoughts — saying what, in truth, was in his mind, . 
 that the future which he had meant for the little Friend of •■ .<^ 
 the Flag was not that of any glorious death by combat, but; ^^ 
 that of a Hfe (unless no buUet early cut its silver cord in! j» 
 twain) when youth should have fled, and have carried fori •** 
 ever with it her numberless graces, and left in its stead that; 5 
 ribaldry-stained, drink-defiled, hardened, battered, joyless,! -.^ 
 cruel, terrible thing which is unsightly and repugnant to even 
 the lowest among men, which is as the lees of the drunk wine, 
 as the ashes of the burnt-out fires, as the discord of the i "^ 
 broken and earth -clogged lyre. 
 
 Cigarette was charming now — a fairy-story set into living 11 t 
 motion — a fantastic little firework out of an extravaganza, 
 with the impudence of a boy-harlequin and the witching 
 kittenhood of a girl's beauty. But when this youth that 
 made it all fair should have passed (and youth passes soon 
 when thus adrift on the world), when there should be left in 
 its stead only shamelessness, hardihood, vice, weariness — 
 those who found the prettiest jest in her now would be the 
 first to cast aside, with an oath, the charred wrecked 
 rocket-stick of a life from which no golden careless stream of 
 many-coloured fires of coquette caprices would rise and en- 
 chant them then. 
 
 ' Who is it that sent these ? ' asked Leon Ramon, later 
 on, as his hands still wandered am.ong the flowers : for the 
 moment he was at peace ; the ice and the hours of quietude 
 had calmed him. 
 
 Cecil told him again. 
 
 * What does Cigarette know of her ? ' he pursued. 
 
 * Nothing, except, I believe, she knew that Madame Corona 
 accepted my chess -carvings,' 
 
 4 A 2 
 
 •5 
 
356 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Ah I I thought the Little One was jealous, Victor.' 
 * Jealous ? Pshaw I Of whom ? * 
 
 * Of any one you admire — especially of this grande dame,* 
 
 ' Absurd ! ' said Cecil, with a sense of annoyance. ' Ciga- 
 rette is far too bold a little trooper to have any thoughts of 
 those folUes ; and as for this grande dame, as you call her, I 
 shall, in every likelihood, never see her again — unless when 
 the word is given to "Carry Swords" or "Lances" at the 
 General's Salute, where she reins her horse beside M. le Ma- 
 rechal's at a review, as I have done this morning.' 
 
 The keen ear of the sick man caught the inflection of an 
 impatience, of a mortification, in the tone that the speaker 
 himself was unconscious of. He guessed the truth — that 
 Cecil had never felt more restless under the shadow of the 
 Eagles than he had done when he had carried his sword up 
 in the salute as he passed with his regiment the flagstaff 
 where the aristocracy of Algiers had been gathered about the 
 Marshal and his staff, and the azure eyes of Madame la Prin- 
 cesse had glanced carelessly and critically over the long line 
 of grey horses of those Chasseurs d'Afrique among whom he 
 rode a bas-officier. 
 
 * Cigarette is right,' said Ramon, with a slight smile. 
 * Your heart is with your old order. You are " a/ristocrat au 
 bout des ongles.*' ' 
 
 * Indeed, I am not, mon ami ; I am a mere trooper.' 
 
 ' Now ! Well, keep your history as you have always done, 
 if you will. What my friend was matters nothing ; I know 
 well what he is, and how true a friend. As for Miladi, she 
 will be best out of your path, Victor. WoiagnJLGpdJ:7-they 
 are so fatal ! * 
 
 * Does not our folly make their fatality ? * 
 
 ' Not always ; not often. The madness may be ours, but 
 they sow it. Ah 1 do they not know how to rouse and enrage 
 it ; how to fan, to burn, to lull, to pierce, to slake, to inflame, 
 to entice, to sting ? Heavens 1 so well they know — that their 
 beauty must come, one thinks, out of hell itself I * 
 
 His great eyes gleamed like fire, his hollow chest panted 
 for breath, the sweat stood out on his temples. Cecil sought 
 to soothe him, but his words rushed on with the impetuous 
 course of the passionate memories that arose in him. 
 
 * Do you know what brought me here ? No 1 As little as 
 I know what brought you, though we have bee^? close com- 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE ,ii(;t$7 
 
 rades all these years. Well, it was she 1 I was an artist. 
 I had no money, I had few friends ; but I had youth, I had ' 
 ambition, I had, I think, genius, till she killed it. I loved 
 my art with a great love, and I was happy. Even in Pa^ia 
 one can be so happy without wealth, while one is young. 
 The mirth of the Barriere — the grotesques of the Halles — 
 the wooden booths on New Year's Day — the bright midnight 
 crowds under the gaslights — the bursts of music from the gay 
 caf^s — the grey little nuns flitting through the snow — the 
 Mardi Gras and the Old- World fooleries — the summer Sun- 
 days under the leaves while we laughed like children — the 
 silent dreams through the length of the Louvre — dreams that 
 went home with us and made our garret bright with their 
 visions — one was happy in them — happy, happy ! ' 
 
 His eyes were still fastened on the blank white wall before 
 him while he spoke, as though the things that his words 
 sketched so faintly were painted in all their vivid colours on 
 the dull blank surface. And so in truth they were, as re- 
 membrance pictured all the l^hcusand perished hours of his 
 youth. 
 
 ' Happy — until she looked at me,' he pursued, while his 
 voice flew in feverish haste over the words. ' Why would 
 she not let me be ? She had them all in her golden nets ; 
 nobles, and princes, and poets, and soldiers, she swept them 
 in far and wide. She had her empire ; why must she seek 
 out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those ? 
 Women are so insatiate, look you ; though they held all the 
 world, they would not rest if one mote in the air swam in 
 sunshine free of them I It was the first year I touched 
 triumph that I saw her. They began for the first time to ' 
 speak of me ; it was the little painting of Cigarette, as a 
 child of the army, that did it. Ah, God ! I thought myself 
 already so famous 1 Well, she sent for me to take her picture, 
 and I went. I went and I painted her as Cleopatra — by her 
 wish. Ah ! it was a face for Cleopatra — the eyes that burn 
 your youth dead, the lips that kiss your honour blind 1 A face 
 — my God I how beautiful 1 She had set herself to gain my 
 soul ; and as the picture grew, and grew, and grew, so my Ufe 
 grew into hers tiU I lived only by her breath. Why did she 
 want my life *? she had so many I She had rich lives, great 
 lives, grand lives at her bidding ; and yet she knew no rest 
 fcill she had leaned down from her cruel height and had seized 
 
3S8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 mine, that had nothing on earth but the joys of the sun and 
 the dew, and the falling of night, and the dawning of day 
 that are given to the birds of the fields.' 
 
 His chest heaved with the spasms that with each throe 
 seemed to tear his frame asunder. Still he conquered them, 
 and his words went on, his eyes fastened on the burning white 
 glare of the wall as though all the beauty of this woman 
 glowed afresh there to his sight. 
 
 ' She was great ; no matter her name, she lives still. She 
 was vile ; ay, but not in my sight till too late. Why is it 
 that men never love so well as where they love their own 
 ruin ? that the heart which is pure never makes ours beat 
 upon it with the rapture sin gives ? Through month on 
 month my picture grew, and my passion grew with it, fanned 
 by her hand. She knew that never would a man paint her 
 beauty like one who gave his soul for the price of success. I 
 had my paradise ; I was drunk ; and I painted as never the 
 colours of mortals painted a woman. I think even she was 
 content ; even she, who in her superb arrogance thought she 
 was matchless and deathless. Then came my reward ; when 
 the picture was done, her fancy had changed 1 A light 
 scorn, a careless laugh, a touch of her fan on my cheek ; 
 could I not understand ? Was I still such a child ? Must I 
 be broken more harshly in to learn to give place ? That was 
 all ! And at last her lackey pushed me back with his wand 
 from her gates ! What would you ? I had not known what 
 a great lady's illicit caprices meant ; I was still but a boy ! 
 She had killed me ; she had struck my genius dead ; she had 
 made earth my hell — what of that? She had her beauty 
 eternal in the picture she needed, and the whole city rang 
 with her loveliness as they looked on my work. I have never 
 painted again. I came here. What of that ? An artist the 
 less then, the world did not care ; r. life the less soon, she will 
 not care either ! ' 
 
 Then, as the words ended, a great wave of blood beat back 
 his breath and burst from the pent-up torture of his striving 
 lungs, and stained red the dark and silken masses of his 
 beard. His comrade had seen the hemorrhage many times, 
 yet now he knew, as he had never known before, that this 
 was death. 
 
 As he held him upward in his arms, and shouted loud for 
 help, the great luminous eyes of the French soldier looked up 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 359 
 
 at him through their mist with the deep, fond gratitude that 
 beams in the eyes of a dog as it drops down to die, knowing 
 one touch and one voice to the last. 
 
 ^You do not forsake,' he murmured brokenly, while his 
 voice ebbed faintly away as the stream of his life flowed faster 
 and faster out. * It is over now — so best 1 If only I could 
 ha\'e seen France once more. France ' 
 
 He stretched his arms outward as he spoke with the vain 
 longing of a hopeless love. Then a deep sigh quivered through 
 his lips ; his hand strove to close on the hand of his comrade, 
 and his head fell, resting on the flushed blossoms of the rose- 
 buds of Provence. 
 
 He was dead. — » 
 
 * « * * « 
 
 An hour later Cecil left the hospital, seeing and hearing 
 nothing of the gay riot of the town about him, though the 
 folds of many- coloured silk and bunting fluttered across the 
 narrow Moorish streets, and the whole of the populace was 
 swarming through them with the vivacious enjoyment of 
 Paris mingling with the stately picturesque life of Arab habit 
 and custom. He was well used to pain of every sort ; his 
 bread had long been the bread of bitterness, and the waters of 
 his draught been of gall. Yet this stroke, though looked for, 
 fell heavily and cut far. ,,„..^^ 
 
 Yonder, in the dead-room, there lay a broken, useless mass } 
 of flesh and bone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was 
 only a worn-out machine that had paid its due toll to the wars 
 of the Second Empire, and was now valueless ; only fit to be 
 cast in to rot, unmourned, in the devouring African soil. But 
 to him that lifeless, useless mass was dear still ; was the 
 wreck of the bravest, tenderest, and best-beloved friend that 
 he had found in his adversity. 
 
 In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, 
 and who had loved him. They had suffered much, and much 
 endured together; their very dissimilarities had seemed to 
 draw them nearer to each other. The gentle impassiveness 
 of the Englishman had been like rest to the ardent impe- 
 tuosity of the French soldier; the passionate and poetic temper- 
 ament of the artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand 
 views of thought and of feeling which had never before then 
 dawned on him. And now that the one lay dead, a heavy, 
 weary sense of loneliness rested on the other. They died 
 
36o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 around him every day ; the fearless, fiery blood of Franot 
 watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields of 
 Northern Africa ; death was so common, that the fall of a 
 comrade was no more noted by them than the fall of a loose 
 stone that their horse's foot shook down a precipice. Yet 
 this death was very bitter to him ; he wondered with a dull 
 sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet, no Arab 
 sabre, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thralls 
 asunder. 
 
 The evening had just followed on the glow of the day — 
 evening, more lustrous even than ever, for the houses were 
 al) a-glitter with endless lines of coloured lamps and strings of 
 sparkling illuminations, a very sea of bright-hued fire. The 
 noise, the mirth, the sudden swell of music, the pleasure- 
 seeking crowds, all that were about him, served only to make 
 more desolate and more oppressive by their contrast his 
 memories of that life, once gracious, and gifted, and content 
 with the dower of its youth, ruined by a woman, and now 
 slaughtered here, for no avail and with no honour, by a lance- 
 thrust in a midnight skirmish, which had been unrecorded 
 even in the few lines of the gazette that chronicled the war 
 news of Algeria. 
 
 Passing one of the caf6s, a favourite resort of the officers of 
 his own regiment, he saw Cigarette. A sheaf of blue, and 
 white, and scarlet lights flashed with tongues of golden flame 
 over her head, and a great tricolor flag with the brass eagle 
 above it, was hanging in the still, hot air from the balcony 
 from which she leaned. Her tunic-skirt was full of bonbons 
 and crackers that she was flinging down among the crowd 
 while she sang, stopping every now and then to exchange 
 some passage of gaulois wit with them that made her hearers 
 scream with laughter, while behind her was a tlirong of young 
 officers drinking champagne, eating ices, and smoking, echoing 
 her songs and her satires with enthusiastic voices and stamps 
 of their spurred boot-heels. As he glanced upward, she 
 looked literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow 
 tones of her voice ringing out in the * Rien n*est sacrd pour 
 un Sapeur,' sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed beside 
 which they had both so late stood together. 
 
 * She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the 
 cruelty, lie tliou^ht, v^nth a sense of disgust, forgetting that 
 she did oui kiiuw what he knew, and that if Cigarette had 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 361 
 
 ;vaited to laugh until death had passed by she would have 
 never laughed all her Ufe through in the battalions of Africa. 
 
 She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony ; and she 
 sung all the louder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with 
 the reckless force of a Roman Carnivalist, she launched bolta 
 of tenfold more audacious raillery at the delighted mob below. 
 Cigarette was * bon soldat ; ' when she was wounded, she 
 wound her scarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed 
 the gayer. 
 
 And he did her that injustice which the best among us are 
 apt to do to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to 
 study with that closeness which can alone give comprehension 
 of the intricate and complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so 
 marvellously involved, of human nature. 
 
 He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and 
 her inborn blood-thirstiness. 
 
 Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough 
 that evening. Algiers was enfite, and Cigarette was spark- 
 hng over the whole of the town like a humming-bird or a 
 fire-fly — here and there, and everywhere, in a thousand places 
 at once, as it seemed ; staying long with none, making music 
 and mirth with all. Waltzing hke a thing possessed, pelting 
 her lovers with a tempest storm of dragees, standing on the 
 head of a gigantic Spahi en tableau amid a shower of fire- 
 works, improvising slang songs worthy of Jean Vad6 and his 
 Poissardes, and chorused by a hundred lusty lungs that yelled 
 the burden in riotous glee as furiously as they were accus- 
 tomed to shout * En avant I ' in assault and in charge, 
 Cigarette made amends to herself at night for her vain self- 
 sacrifice of the fete-day. 
 
 She had her wound ; yes, it throbbed still now and then, 
 and stung like a bee in the warm core of a rose. But she was 
 young, she was gay, she was a little philosopher, above all 
 she was French, and in the real French blood happiness runs 
 so richly that it will hardly be utterly chilled until the veins 
 freeze in the coldness of death. She enjoyed — enjoyed all 
 the more fiercely, perhaps, because a certain desperate bitter- 
 ness mingled with the abandonment of her Queen Mab-like 
 revelries. Until now Cigarette had been as absolutely heed- 
 less and without a care as any young bird taking its first 
 summer circles downward through the intoxication of the 
 sunny air. It was not without fiery resistance and scornful 
 
36a UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 revolt that the madcap Figlia del Reggimento would be pi*e- 
 vailed on to admit that any shadow could have power to rest 
 on her. 
 
 She played through more than half the night, the agile 
 bounding graceful play of the young leopard to which he had 
 likened her, and with a quick punishment from her velvet- 
 sheathed talona if any durst offend her. Then when the 
 dawn was nigh, leopard-like, the Little One sought her 
 den. 
 
 She was most commonly under canvas ; but when she was 
 in the town it was at one with the proud independence of her 
 nature that she rejected all offers made her, and would have 
 her own nook to live in, even though she were not there one 
 hour out of the twenty-four. 
 
 ' Le Chateau de Cigarette ' was a standing jest of the 
 Army ; for none was ever allowed to follow her thither, or 
 10 behold the interior of her fortress, and one over- venturous 
 Spahi scaling the ramparts had been rewarded with so hot a 
 deluge of lentil soup from a boiling casserole poured on his 
 head from above, that he had beaten a hasty and ignominious 
 retreat, which was more than a whole tribe of the most war- 
 like of his countrymen could ever have made him do. 
 
 * Le Chateau de Cigarette ' was neither more nor less than 
 a couple of garrets, high in the air, in an old Moorish house, 
 in an old Moorish court, decayed, silent, poverty- struck, with 
 the wild pumpkin thrusting its leaves through the broken 
 fretwork, and the green lizard shooting over the broad pave- 
 ments, once brilliant in mosaic, that the robes of the princes 
 of Islam had swept, now carpeted deep with the dry v* hite 
 drifted dust, and only crossed by the tottering feet of aged 
 Jews or the laden steps of Algerine women. 
 
 Up a long winding rickety stair Cigarette approached her 
 castle, which was very near the sky indeed. * I like the 
 blue,' said the chatelaine laconically, 'and the pigeons fly 
 close by my window.' And through it, too, she might have 
 added, for though no human thing might invade her chateau, 
 the pigeons circling in the sunrise light always knew well 
 there were rice and crumbs spread for them in that eyelet- 
 hole of a casement. 
 
 Cigarette threaded her agile way up the dark ladder-like 
 shaft, and opened her door. There was a dim oil wick burn- 
 ing ; the garret was large, and as clean as a palace could be, 
 
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE 363 
 
 Us occupants were various, and all sound asleep except one, 
 who, rough, and hard, and small, and three-legged, limped up 
 to her and rubbed a little bullet head against her lovingly. 
 
 * Bouffarick — p'tit Bouffarick ! ' returned Cigarette, caress- 
 ingly, in a whisper, and Bouffarick, content, limped back to 
 a nest of hay, being a little wiry dog that had lost a leg in 
 one of the most famous battles of Gran, and lain in its dead 
 master's breast through three days and nights on the field. 
 Cigarette, shading the lamp with one hand, glanced round on 
 her family. 
 
 They had all histories — histories in the French Army, 
 which was the only history she considered of any import to 
 the universe. There was a raven perched high, by name 
 Vole-qui-Veut ; he was a noted character among the Zouaves, 
 and had made many a campaign riding on his owner's bayonet ; 
 he loved a combat, and was specially famed for screaming 
 ' Tue I tue I tue T all over a battle-field ; he was very grey 
 now, and the Zouave's bones had long bleached on the edge 
 of the desert. 
 
 There was a tame rat who was a vieille moustache, and who 
 had lived many years in a Lignard's pocket, and munched 
 waifs and strays of the military rations, until the enormous 
 crime being discovered that it was taught to sit up and dress 
 its whiskers to the heinous air of the Marseillaise, the Lignard 
 got the matraque, and the rat was condemned to be killed, 
 had not Cigarette dashed in to the rescue and carried the long- 
 tailed revolutionist off in safety. 
 
 There was a big white cat curled in a ball, who had been 
 the darhng of a Tringlo, and had travelled all over North 
 Africa on the top of his mule's back, seven seasons through ; 
 in the eighth the Tringlo was picked off by a flying shot, and 
 an Indigene was about to skin the shrieking Boule Blanche 
 for the soup-pot, when a bullet broke his wrist, making him 
 drop the cat with a yell of pain, and the Friend of the Flag, 
 catching it up, laughed in his face, ' A lead comfit instead of 
 slaughter soup, my friend ! ' 
 
 There was little Bouffarick and three other brother-dogs of 
 equal celebrity, one, in especial, who had been brought from 
 Cifalons, in defiance of the regulations, inside the drum of his 
 regiment, and had been wounded a dozen times, always seek- 
 ing the hottest heat of the skirmish. And there was, besides 
 khese, sleeping serenely on a straw palliasse, a very old man 
 
3^4 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 with a snowy beard, and a head fit for G6r6mG to give to an 
 Abraham. 
 
 A very old man — one who had been a conscript in the 
 bands of Young France, and marched from his Pyren6an 
 village to the battle tramp of the Marseillaise, and charged 
 with the Enfans de Paris across the plains of Gemappes ; who 
 had known the passage of the Alps, and lifted the long curls 
 from the dead brow of D^saix at Marengo, and seen in the 
 sultry noonday dust of a glorious summer the Guard march 
 into Paris, while the people laughed and wept with joy, 
 surging like the mighty sea around one pale frail form, so 
 young by years, so absolute by genius. 
 
 A very old man ; long broken with poverty, with pain, 
 with bereavement, with extreme old age ; and, by a long 
 course of cruel accidents, alone, here in Africa, without one 
 left of the friends of his youth, or of the children of his name, 
 and deprived even of the charities due from his country to his 
 services — alone save for the little Friend of the Flag, who, for 
 four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, 
 in this Moorish attic, tending him herself when in town, 
 taking heed that he should want for nothing when she was 
 campaigning. 
 
 * I wiJl have a care of him,' she had said, curtly, when she 
 had found him in great misery and learned his history from 
 others ; and she had had the care accordingly, maintaining 
 him at her own cost in the Moorish building, and paying a 
 good Jewess of the quarter to tend him when she was not 
 herself in Algiers. 
 
 The old man was almost dead, mentally, though in bodily 
 strength still well able to know the physical comforts of food, 
 and rest, and attendance ; he was in his second childhood, in 
 his ninetieth year, and was unconscious of the debt he owed 
 her ; even, with a curious caprice of decrepitude, he disliked 
 her, and noticed nothing except the raven when it shrieked its 
 ' T^le I tue I tice I ' But to Cigarette he was as sacred as a 
 god ; had he not fought beneath the glance, and gazed upon 
 the face, of the First Consul ? 
 
 She bent over him now, saw that he slept, busied herself 
 noiselessly in brewing a little tin pot full of coffee and hot 
 milk, set it over the lamp to keep it warm, and placed it 
 beside him ready for his morning meal, with a roll of white 
 wheat bread ; then, with a glance round to see that her other 
 
♦MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS' 365 
 
 dependants wanted for nothing, went to her own garret ad- 
 joinmg, and with the lattice fastened back, that the first rays 
 of sunrise and the first white flash of her friends the pigeons' 
 gleaming wings might awaken her, threw herself on her straw 
 and slept with all the graceful careless rest of the childhood 
 which though in one sense she had never known, yet in another 
 had never forsaken her. 
 
 She hid, as her lawless courage would not have stooped to 
 hide a sin, had she chosen to commit one, this compassion 
 which she, the young condottiera of Algeria, showed with 
 so tender a charity to the soldier of Bonaparte. To him, 
 moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as the dove, 
 her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her con- 
 temptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an 
 altar. In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was 
 sacred ; sacred the eyes which, when full of light, had seen 
 the sun glitter on the breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, 
 the Dragoons of Kellerman, the Cuirassiers of Milhaud : 
 sacred the hands which, when nervous with youth, had borne 
 the standard of the Kepublic victorious against the gathered 
 Teuton host in the ThermopylaB of Champagne ; sacred the 
 ears which, when quick to hear, had heard the thunder of 
 Areola, of Lodi, of Eivoli, and, above even the tempest of 
 war, the clear, still voice of Napoleon ; sacred the Ups which, 
 when their beard was dark in the fulness of manhood, had 
 quivered, as with a woman's weeping, at the farewell, in the 
 spring night, in the moonlit Cour des Adieux. 
 
 Cigarette had a religion of her own ; and followed it more 
 closely than most disciples follow other creeds. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 ' MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS * 
 
 Early that morning, when the snowy cloud of pigeons were 
 circling down to take their daily alms from Cigarette, where 
 her bright brown face looked out from the lattice-hole, Cecil 
 with some of the rough-riders of his regiment was sent far 
 
366 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 into the interior to bring in a string of colts, bought of a 
 friendly desert tribe, and destined to be shipped to France for 
 the Imperial Haras. The mission took two days ; early on 
 the third day they returned with the string of wild young 
 horses, whom it had taken not a little exertion and address to 
 conduct successfully through the country into Algiers. 
 
 He was usually kepi in incessant activity, because those 
 in command over him had quickly discovered the immeasurable 
 value of a bas-officier who was certain to enforce and obtain 
 implicit obedience, and certain to execute any command given 
 him with perfect address and surety, yet who, at the same 
 time, was adored by his men, and had acquired a most singu- 
 larly advantageous influence over them. But of this he was 
 always glad : throughout his twelve years' service under the 
 Emperor's flag, he had only found those moments in which 
 he was unemployed intolerable ; he would wilUngly have been 
 in the saddle from dawn till midnight. 
 
 Chateauroy was himself present when the colts were taken 
 into the stable-yard ; and himself inquired, without the medium 
 of any third person, the whole details of the sale and of the 
 transit. It was impossible, with all his incUnation, to find 
 any fault either with the execution of the errand or with the 
 brief respectful answers by which his corporal replied to his 
 rapid and imperious cross-questionings. There were a great 
 number of men within hearing, many of them the most daring 
 and rebellious pratiques of the regiment ; and Cecil would have 
 let the coarsest upbraidings scourge him rather than put the 
 temptation to mutiny in their way which one insubordinate or 
 even not strictly deferential word from him would have given. 
 Hence the inspection passed off peaceably ; as the Marquis 
 turned on his heel, however, he paused a moment. 
 
 ' Victor ! ' 
 
 ' Mon Commandant ? ' 
 
 ' I have not forgotten your insolence with those ivory toys. 
 But Madame la Princesse herself has deigned to solicit that it 
 shall be passed over unpunished. She cannot, of course, yield 
 to your impertinent request to remain also unpaid for them. 
 I charged myself with the fulfilment of her wishes. You 
 deserve the matraque^ but since Miladi herself is lenient enough 
 to pardon you, you are to take this instead. Hold your hand, 
 6irl' 
 
 Cecil put out his hand; he expected to receive a heavy blow 
 
«MILAD1 AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS ' 367 
 
 from his commander's sabre, that possibly might break the / 
 wrist. These Uttle trifles were common in Africa. -^ 
 
 Instead a rouleau of napoleons was laid on his open palm. 
 Chateauroy knew the gold would sting more than the blow. 
 
 For the moment Cecil had but one impulse — to dash the pieces 
 in the giver's face. In time to restrain the impulse, he 
 caught sight of the wild eager hatred gleaming in the eyes of 
 Rake, of Petit Picpon, of a score of others who loved him and 
 cursed their Colonel, and would at one signal from him have 
 sheathed their swords in the mighty frame of the Marquis, 
 though they should have been fired down the next moment 
 themselves for the murder. The warning of Cigarette came 
 to his memory : his hand clasped on the gold ; he gave the 
 salute calmly as Chateauroy swung himself away. 
 
 The troops looked at him with longing, questioning eyes ; 
 they knew enough of him by now to know the bitterness such 
 gold, so given, had for him. Any other, even a corporal, 
 would have been challenged with a storm of raillery, a volley 
 of congratulation, and would have had shouted or hissed after 
 him opprobrious accusations of ^ faisant Suisse ' if he had not 
 forthwith treated his comrades royally from such largesse. 
 With Bel-^-faire-peur they held their peace, they kept the 
 silence which they saw that he wished to keep, as, his hour 
 of liberty being come, he went slowly out of the great court 
 with the handful of napoleons thrust in the folds of his sash. 
 
 Rather unconsciously than by premeditation, his steps 
 turned through the streets that led to his old familiar haunt, 
 the As de Pique, and, dropping down on a bench under the 
 awning, he asked for a draught of water. It was brought 
 him at once, the hostess, a quick brown little woman from 
 Paris, whom the lovers^f Eugene^ufi called Rigolette, adding 
 of her own accord a lump of ice^ and a slice or two of lemon, 
 for which she vivaciously refused payment, though generosity 
 was by no means her cardinal virtue. 
 
 *Bel-^-faire-peur ' awakened general interest through 
 Algiers ; he brought so fiery and so daring a reputation with 
 him from the wars and raids of the interior, yet he was so 
 calm, so grave, so gentle, so listless ; it was known that he 
 had made himself the terror of Kabyle and Bedouin, yet here 
 in the city he thanked the negro boy who took him a glass of 
 lemonade at an estaminet, and sharply rebuked one of his 
 men for knocking down an old colon with a burden of gourds 
 
1 
 
 W 'ii m m 
 
 368 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and of melons; such a Boumi as this the good people of 
 the Franco-African capital held as a perfect gift of the gods, 
 and not understanding one whit, nevertheless fully appre- 
 ciated. 
 
 He did not look at the newspapers she offered him ; but sat 
 gazing out from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Nea- 
 politan felucca, down the chequered shadows and the many- 
 coloured masses of the little, crooked, rambling, semi-barbaric 
 alley. He was thinking of the napoleons in his sash and of 
 the promise he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would 
 keep it he was resolved. The few impressive vivid words of 
 the young vivandiere had painted before him hke a picture 
 the horrors of mutiny and its Lopelessness ; rather than that, 
 through him, these should befall the men who had become 
 his brethren-in-arms, he felt ready to let the Black Hawk do 
 his worst on his own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness, he 
 had never known in the excitement of active service came on 
 him, brought by this sting of insult brought from the fair 
 hand of an aristocrate. 
 
 There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The 
 uttermost that could ever come to him would be a grade 
 something higher in the army that now enrolled him ; the 
 gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau. Algerine warfare 
 was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy or the 
 Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with un- 
 erring omniscience a leader's genius under the kepi of a com- 
 mon trooper. Though he should show the qualities of a 
 Mass^na or a Either, the chances were a million to one that 
 he would never get even so much as a lieutenancy ; and the 
 raids on the decimated tribes, the obscure skirmishes of the 
 interior, though terrible in slaughter and venturesome enough, 
 were not the fields on which great military successes were 
 won and great military honours acquired. The French fought 
 for a barren strip of brown plateau that, gained, would be of 
 little use or profit to them ; he thought that he did much the 
 same, that his future was much like those arid sand-plains, 
 those thirsty verdureless stretches of burnt earth — very little 
 worth the reaching. 
 
 The heavy folds of a Bedouin's haick, brushing the papers 
 off the bench, broke the thread of his musings. As he stooped 
 for them, he saw that one was an English journal some weeks 
 old. His own name caught his eye — the name buried 90 
 
*MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS' 369 
 
 utterly, whose utterance in the Sheik's tent had struck him 
 like a dagger's thrust. The flickering Ught and darkness, as 
 the awning waved to and fro, made the hues move dizzily 
 upward and downward as he read — read the short paragraph 
 touching the fortunes of the race that had disowned him : 
 
 * The Rotallieu Succession. — We regret to learn that the 
 Right Hon. Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to 
 the family title on his father's death, has expired at Men tone, 
 whither his health had induced him to go some months 
 previous. The late Lord was unmarried. His next brother 
 was, it will be remembered, many years ago, killed on a 
 southern railway. The title, therefore, now falls to the i 
 third and only remaining son, the Hon. Ber^aley Cecil, who, } 
 having lately inherited considerable properties from a distant j 
 Relative, will, we believe, revive all the old glories of this 
 Peerage, which have, from a variety of causes, lost somewhat 
 of their ancient brilliancy.* 
 
 Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the 
 record of his father's death, when Cigarette had rallied him 
 with her gay challenge among the Moresco ruins. His face 
 flushed hotly under the warm golden hue of the desert bronze, 
 then lost all its colour as suddenly, till it was as pale as any 
 of the ivory he carved. The letters of the paper reeled and 
 wavered, and grew misty before his eyes ; he lost all sense of 
 the noisy changing polyglot crowd thronging past him ; he, a 
 common soldier in the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every 
 law of birthright, he was now a Peer of England. 
 
 His first thought was for the dead man. True, there had 
 been Httle amity, little intimacy, between them ; a negligent 
 friendliness whenever they had met had been all that they 
 had ever reached. But in their childhood they had been 
 carelessly kind to one another, and the memory of the boy 
 who had once played beside him down the old galleries 
 and under the old forests, of the man who had now died 
 yonder where the southern sea-board lay across the warm 
 blue Mediterranean, was alone on him for the moment. His 
 thoughts had gone back, with a pang, almost ere he had read 
 the opening lines, to autumn mornings in his youngest years, 
 when the leaves had been flushed with their earliest red, and 
 the brown still pools had been alive with water-birds, -ind 
 
 B B 
 
370 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the dogs had dropped down charging among the flags and 
 rushes, and his brother's boyish face had laughed on him 
 from the wilderness of willows, and his brother's boyish hands 
 had taught him to handle his first cartridge, and to fire hia 
 first shot. The many years of indifference and estrangement 
 were forgotten, the few years of childhood's confidence and 
 comradeship alone remembered, as he saw the words that 
 brought him in his exile the story of his brethren's fate and 
 of his race's fortunes. His head sank, his face was still 
 colourless, he sat motionless with the printed sheet in his hand. 
 Once his eyes flashed, his breath came fast and uneven ; he 
 rose with a sudden impulse, with a proud bold instinct of birth 
 and freedom. Let him stand here in what grade he would, 
 with the badge of a Corporal of the Army of Africa on his 
 arm, this inheritance that had come to him was his ; he bore 
 the name and the title of his house as surely as any had ever 
 borne it since the first of the Norman owners of Royallieu 
 had followed the Bastard's banner. 
 
 The vagabond throngs, Moorish, Frank, Negro, Colan, 
 paused as they pushed their way over the uneven road, and 
 stared at him vacantly where he stood. There was something 
 in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing 
 none of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited 
 fire in his eyes, that arrested all, from the dullest muleteer 
 plodding on with his string of patient beasts, to the most 
 volatile French girl laughing on her way with a group of 
 fantassins. He did not note them, hear them, think of them ; 
 the whole of the Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no 
 place before him ; he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier 
 of the Empire ; he saw nothing but the green wealth of the 
 old home woods far away in England ; he remembered 
 nothing save that he, and he alone, was the rightful Lord of 
 Royallieu. 
 
 * TienSi est-tu fouy mon brave ? Bois de m'avome,^ Bel-d 
 faire-peur t ' 
 
 The coarse good-humoured challenge, as the hand of a 
 broad-chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on his 
 shoulder, and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust 
 toward him with the proffered drink, startled him and recalled 
 him to the consciousness of where he was. He stared one 
 
 ' Brandy. 
 
*MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS' 371 
 
 moment absently in the trooper's amazed face, and then shook 
 him off with a suddenness that tossed back the cup to the 
 ground, and, holding the journal clinched close in his hand, 
 went swiftly through the masses of the people out and away, 
 he little noted where, till he had forced his road beyond the 
 gates, beyond the town, beyond all reach of its dust and its 
 babble and its discord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, 
 where to the north the calm sunht bay slept peacefully with 
 a few scattered ships riding at anchor, and southward the 
 luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet the wide and cheer- 
 less plateaux, dotted with the conical houses of hair, and 
 desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there 
 to lay them waste. 
 
 Reaching the heights, he stood still involuntarily, and looked ^ 
 down once more on the words that told him of his birthright ; ^yf^ 
 in the blinding intense light of the African day they seemed, ^"v>' 
 to stand out as though carved in stone, and as he read them^ -^ 
 once more a great darkness passed over his face ; — this heri- \ 
 tage was bis, and he could never take it up ; this thing had 
 come to him, and he must never claim it. He was Viscount 
 Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before 
 him, and he was dead for ever in the world's belief ; he must 
 live, and grow old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or 
 by age, with his name and his rights buried, and his years / 
 passed as a private soldier of France. ■■—' 
 
 The momentary glow which had come to him with the 
 sudden resurrection of hope and of pride faded utterly as he 
 slowly read and re-read the lines of the journal on the broken 
 terraces of the hill-side, where the great fig-trees spread their 
 fantastic shadows, and through a rocky channel a russet stream 
 of shallow waters threaded its downward path under the reeds, 
 and no living thing was near him save some quiet browsing 
 herds far off, and their Arab shepherd-lad that an artist might 
 have sketched as Ishmael. What his future might have been 
 rose before his thoughts ; what it must be rose also, bitterly, 
 blackly, drearily, in contrast. A noble without even a name ; 
 a chief of his race without even the power to claim kinship 
 with that race ; owner by law of three thousand broad English 
 acres, yet an exile without freedom to set foot on his native 
 land ; by heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by 
 circumstances, now and for ever, till an Arah bullet should 
 out in twain his ihread of life, a soldier of the Afrioan legions, 
 
 B b2 
 
$73 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 bound to obey the commonest and coarsest boor that had risen 
 to a rank above hhn : this was what he linew himself to be. 
 and knew that he must continue to be without one appeal 
 against it, without once stretching out his hand towards his 
 right of birth and station. 
 
 There was a passionate revolt, a bitter heart- sickness on 
 him ; all the old freedom and peace and luxury and pleasure 
 of the life he had left so long allured him with a terrible 
 temptation ; the honours of the rank that he should now have 
 filled were not what he remembered ; what he longed for with 
 an agonised desire was to stand once more stainless among his 
 equals, to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged unfet- 
 tered life, to return once more to those who held him but as a 
 dishonoured memory, as one whom violent death had well 
 snatched from the shame of a criminal career. 
 
 * But who would bilieve me now ? ' he thought. * Be- 
 sides, this makes no difference. If three words spoken would 
 reinstate me, I could not speak them at that cost. The be- 
 ginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer justice sake there is 
 no drawing back now. Let him enjoy it ; God knows I do 
 not grude him it.' 
 
 Yet though it was true to the very core that no envy and 
 no evil lay in his heart against the younger brother to whose 
 lot had fallen all good gifts of men and fate, there was almost 
 unbearable anguish on him in this hour in which he learned 
 the inheritance that had come to him, and remembered that 
 he could never take again even so much of it as lay in the 
 name of his fathers. When he had given his memory up to 
 slander and oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame, when 
 he had let his life die out from the world that had known him, 
 and buried it beneath the rough, weather-stained, blood-soaked 
 cloth of a private soldier's uniform, ho had not counted the 
 cost then, nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had fallen on 
 him very heavily now. 
 
 Where he stood under some sheltered cc'umns of a long- 
 ruined mosque whose shafts were bound together by a thou- 
 sand withes and wreaths of the rich fantastic Sahel foliage, an 
 exceeding weariness of longing was upon him — longing for all 
 that he had forfeited, for all that was his own, yet never could 
 be claimed as his. 
 
 The day was intensely still : there was not a sound except 
 when here and there the movement of a lizard under the dry 
 
*MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS'* 373 
 
 grasses gave a low crackling rustle. He_ wondered almost ^ ^ 
 which was the dream and which the truth ; thai oldT^Iife' that 
 he had once led and that looked now so far away and so 
 unreal, or this which had been about him for so many years 
 in the camps and the bivouacs, the barracks and the battle- 
 fields. He won dered almost which he himself was — an Eng- 
 lish peerl)h wBom the fitleof his line had fallen, or a Corporal 
 of Chasseurs who must take his chief's insults as patiently as 
 a cur takes the blows of its master ; that he was both seemed yi< 
 to him, as he stood there with the glisten of the sea before and 
 the sweUing slopes of the hillside above, a vague distorted, 
 nightmare. =J 
 
 Hours might have passed, or only moments, he could not 
 have told ; his eyes looked blankly out at the sun -glow, his 
 hand instinctively clinched on the journal whose stray lines 
 had told him in an Algerine trattoria that he had inherited 
 what he never could enjoy. 
 
 * Are they content, I wonder ? ' he thought, gazing down 
 that fiery blaze of shadowless light ; * do they ever re- 
 member ? * 
 
 He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what 
 he was. 
 
 The distant mellow ringing notes of a trumpet-call floated 
 to his ear from the town at his feet ; it was sounding the 
 ^ rentrie en caserne* Old instinct, long habit, made him 
 start and shake his harness together and Usten. The trumpet- 
 blast winding cheerily from afar o£f recalled him to the truth : 
 summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of 
 daily life. It woke him as it wakes a sleeping charger ; it 
 roused him as it rouses a wounded trooper. 
 
 He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died 
 away, spirited, yet still lingering; full of fire, yet fading 
 softly down the wind. He listened till the last echo ceased ; 
 then he tore the paper that he held in strips, and let it float 
 avvay, drifting down the yellow current of the reedy river- 
 channel ; and he half drew from its scabbard the sabre whose 
 blade had been notched and dinted and stained in many mid- 
 night skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert 
 suns, and looked at it as though a friend's eye gazed at him in 
 the gleam of the trusty steel. And his soldier-like philosophy, 
 his campaigner's carelessness, his habitual easy negligence 
 that had sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic 
 
374 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 as martrydom, came back to him with a deeper shadow on it, 
 that was grave, with a calm, resolute, silent courage. 
 
 * So best after all, perhaps,' he said half aloud in the soli- 
 tude of the ruined and abandoned mosque. * He cannot well 
 come to shipwreck with such a fair wind and such a smooth 
 sea. And I — I am just as well here. To ride with the 
 Chasseurs is more exciting than to ride with the Pytchley ; 
 and the rules of the Chambr^e are scarce more tedious than 
 the rules of a Court. Nature turned me out for a soldier, 
 though Fashion spoiled me for one. I can make a good cam- 
 paigner — I should never make anything else.' 
 
 And he let his sword drop back again into the scabbard, and 
 quarrelled no more with fate. 
 
 His hand touched the thirty gold pieces in his sash. 
 
 He started, as the recollection of the forgotten insult came 
 back on him. He stood awhile in thought ; then he took hia 
 resolve. 
 
 A half -hour of quick movement, for he had become used to 
 the heat as an Arab, and heeded it as little, brought him before 
 the entrance gates of the Villa Aioussa. A native of Soudan, 
 in a rich dress, who had the office of porter, asked him politely 
 his errand. Every indigene learns by hard experience to be 
 courteous to a French soldier. Cecil simply asked, in answer, 
 if Madame la Princesse were visible. The negro returnedf 
 cautiously, that she was at home, but doubted her being ac- 
 cessible. * You come from M. le Marquis ? ' he inquired. 
 
 * No ; on my own errand.' 
 
 ' You I ' Not all the native African awe of a Boumi could 
 restrain the contemptuous amaze in the word. 
 
 * I. Ask if Corporal Victor, of the Chasseurs, can be per- 
 mitted a moment's interview with your mistress. I come by 
 permission,' he added, as the native hesitated between his 
 fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness 
 of a private soldier seeking audience of a Spanish princess. 
 The message was passed about between several of the house- 
 hold ; at last a servant of higher authority appeared : 
 
 'Madame permitted Corporal Victor to be taken to her 
 presence. Would he follow ? ' 
 
 He uncovered his head and entered, passing through several 
 passages and chambers, richly hung and furnished ; for the 
 villa had been the * campagne ' of an illustrious French per- 
 sonage, who had offered it to the Princess Corona when, for 
 
'MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS ' '"ays 
 
 aome sL'ght delicacy of health, the air of Algeria was advo* 
 oated. A singular sensation came on him, half of familiarity, 
 half of strangeness, as he advanced along them ; for twelve 
 years he had seen nothing but the bare walls of barrack-roomg, 
 the goat-skin of douars, and the canvas of his own camp-tent. 
 To come once more, after so long an interval, amid the old 
 things of luxury and grace that had been so long unseen 
 wrought curiously on him. He could not fairly disentangle 
 past and present. For the moment, as his feet fell once more 
 on soft carpets, and his eyes glanced over gold and silver, 
 malachite and bronze, white silk and violet damasks, he almost 
 thought the Algerian years were a disordered dream of the night. 
 
 His spur caught in the yielding carpet, and his sabre 
 clashed slightly against it ; as the rentrie au caserne had done 
 an hour before, the sound recalled the actual present to him. 
 He was but a French soldier, who went on sufferance into the 
 presence of a great lady. All the rest was dead and buried. 
 
 Some half-dozen apartments, large and small, were crossed ; 
 then into that presence he was ushered. The room waa 
 deeply shaded, and fragrant with the odours of the innu- 
 merable flowers of the Sahel soil ; there was that about it 
 which struck on him as some air, long unheard but once 
 intimately familiar, on the ear will revive innumerable 
 memories ; like the ' vieil air languissant et fun^bre,' for 
 which Gerard de Nerval was willing to give * all Rossini and 
 Weber.' She was at some distance from him, with the 
 trailing draperies of Eastern fabrics falling about her in a 
 rich, unbroken, shadowy cloud of melting colour, through 
 which, here and there, broke threads of gold ; involuntarily 
 he paused on the threshold looking at her. Some faint, far-off 
 remembrance stirred in him, but deep down in the closed 
 grave of his past ; some vague intangible association of for- 
 gotten days, forgotten thoughts, drifted before him as it had 
 drifted before him when first in the Chambr^e of his barracks 
 he had beheld the Venetia Corona. 
 
 She moved forward as her servant announced him ; she 
 saw him pause there like one spellbound, and thought it the 
 hesitation of one who felt sensitively his own low grade in 
 Hfe. She came towards him with the silent sweeping grace 
 that gave her the carriage of an empress ; her voice fell on 
 his ear with the accent of a woman immeasurably proud, but 
 too proud not to bend softly and graciously to those who 
 
376 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 were so far beneath her that without such aid from her they 
 could never have addressed or have approached her. 
 
 ' You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition ? 
 Nothing will give me greater pleasure then to bring his 
 Majesty's notice to one of the best soldiers his army holds.* 
 
 There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, 
 that recalled him suddenly to himself ; they had that negligent, 
 courteous pity she would have shown to some colon begging 
 at her gates ! He forgot — forgot utterly — that he was only 
 an African trooper. He only remembered that he had once 
 been a gentleman, that — if a life of honour and of self -negation 
 can make any so — he was one still. He advanced and bowed 
 with the old serene elegance that his bow had cnce been famed 
 for ; and she, well used to be even overcritical in such trifles, 
 thought, * That man has once lived in courts 1 ' 
 
 ' Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far 
 upon your benignity,' he answered, as he bent before her. * I 
 come to express, rather, my regret that you should have made 
 one single error.' 
 
 'Error!' — a haughty surprise glanced from her eyes aa 
 they swept over him. Such a word had never been used to 
 her in the whole course of her brilliant and pampered life of 
 sovereignty and indulgence. 
 
 * One common enough, madame, in your order. The error 
 to suppose that under the rough cloth of a private trooper's 
 uniform there cannot possibly be such aristocratic monopolies 
 as nerves to wound.* 
 
 * I do not comprehend you.* She spoke very coldly ; she 
 repented her profoundly of her concession in admitting a 
 Chasseur d'Afrique to her presence. 
 
 ' Possibly not. Mine was the folly to dream that you 
 would ever do so. I should not have intruded on you now, 
 but for this reason : the humiliation you were pleased to pass 
 on me I could neither refuse nor resent to the dealer of it. 
 Had I done so, men who are only too loyal to me would have 
 resented with me, and been thrashed or been shot, as payment. 
 I was compelled to accept it, and to wait until I could return 
 your gift to you. I have no right to complain that you pained 
 me with it, since one who occupies my position ought, I 
 presume, to consider remembrance, even by an outrage, an 
 honour done to him by the Princess Corona.' 
 
 As he said the last words he laid on a table that stood near 
 
•MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS' 377 
 
 him the gold of Chateauroy's insult. She had listened with 
 a bewildered wonder, held in check by the haughtier impulse 
 of offence, that a man in this grade could venture thus to 
 address, thus to arraign her. His words were totally incom- 
 prehensible to her, though, by the grave rebuke of his manner, 
 she saw that they were fully meant, and, as he considered, 
 fully authorised by some wrong done to him. As he laid the 
 gold pieces down upon her table, an idea of the truth came to 
 her. 
 
 ' I know nothing of what you complain of \ I sent you no 
 money. What is it you would imply ? * she asked him, look- 
 ing up from where she leaned back in the low couch into whose 
 depth she had sunk as he had spoken. 
 
 * You did not send me these ? Not as payment for the 
 chess service ? * 
 
 * Assuredly not. After what you said the other day, I should 
 have scarcely been so ill-bred and so heedless of inflicting 
 pain. Who used my name thus ? ' 
 
 His face lightened with a pleasure and a relief that changed 
 it wonderfully ; thr^.t brighter look of gladness had been a 
 stranger to it for so many years. 
 
 *You give me infinite happiness, madame. You little 
 dream how bitter such slights are where one has lost the 
 power to resent them 1 It was M. de Chateauroy, who this 
 morning ' 
 
 ' Dared to tell you I sent you those coins ? ' 
 
 The serenity of a courtly woman of the world was unbroken, 
 but her blue and brilliant eyes darkened and gleamed beneath 
 the sweep of their lashes. 
 
 * Perhaps I can scarcely say so much. He gave them, and 
 he implied that he gave them from you. The words he spoke 
 were these.* 
 
 He told her them as they had been uttered, adding no 
 more ; she saw the construction they had been intended to 
 bear, and that which they had borne naturally to his ear ; she 
 listened earnestly to the end. Then she turned to him with 
 the exquisite softness of grace which, when she was moved to 
 it, contrasted so vividly with the haughty and almost chill 
 languor of her habitual manner. 
 
 * Believe me, I regret deeply that you should have been 
 wounded by this most coarse indignity; I grieve sincerely 
 that through myself in any way it should have been brought 
 
378 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 upon you. As for the perpetrator of it, jM. de OhAteauroy 
 will be received here no more ; and it shall be my care that 
 he learns not only how I resent his unpardonable use of my 
 name, but how I esteem his cruel outrage to a defender of hig 
 own Flag. You did exceedingly well and wisely to acquaint 
 me ; in your treatment of it as an affront that I was without 
 warrant to offer you, you showed the just indignation of 
 a soldier, and — of what I am very sure that you are — a 
 gentleman.* 
 
 He bowed low before her. 
 
 ' Madame, you have made me the debtor of my enemy's 
 outrage. Those words from you are more than sufficient 
 compensation for it.' 
 
 * A poor one, I fear 1 Your Colonel is your enemy, then ? 
 And wherefore ? ' 
 
 He paused a moment : 
 
 * Why at first I scarcely know. We are antagonistic, I 
 suppose.' 
 
 * But is it usual for officers of his high grade to show such 
 malice to their soldiers ? ' 
 
 ' Most unusual. In this service especially so ; although 
 officers rising from the ranks themselves are more apt to con- 
 tract prejudices and ill-feeling against, as they are to feel 
 favouritism to, their men, than where they enter the regiment 
 in a superior grade at once. At least, that is the opinion I 
 myself have formed, studying the working of the different 
 systems.' 
 
 * You know the English service, then ? ' 
 
 * I know something of it.' 
 
 ' And still, though thinking this, you prefer the French ? ' 
 ' I distinctly prefer it, as one that knows how to make fine 
 soldiers, and how to reward them ; as one in which a brave 
 man will be valued, and a worn-out veteran will not be left to 
 die like a horse at a knacker's.* 
 
 * A brave man valued, and yet you are a corporal ? ' thought 
 Miladi, as he pursued : 
 
 * Since lam here, madame, let me thank you, in the Army's 
 name, for your infinite goodness in acting so munificently on 
 my slight hint. Your generosity has made many happy 
 hearts in the hospital.' 
 
 ' Generosity I Oh, do not call it by any such name ! What 
 did it cost me ? We are terribly selfish here. I am indebted 
 
»MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS' 379 
 
 to you that for once you made me remember those who 
 suffered.' 
 
 She spoke with a certain impulse of candour and of self- 
 accusation that broke with great sweetness the somewhat 
 careless coldness of her general manner ; it was like a gleam 
 of light that showed all the depth and the warmth that in 
 truth lay beneath that imperious languor of habit. It broke 
 further the ice of distance that severed the grande dame from 
 the cavalry soldier. 
 
 Insensibly to himself, the knowledge that he had, in fact, 
 the right to stand before her as an equal gave him the bearing 
 of one who exercised that right, and her rapid perception had 
 felt before now that this Boumi of Africa was as true a gentle- 
 man as any that had ever thronged about her in palaces. 
 Her own Ufe had been an uninterrupted course of luxury, 
 prosperity, serenity, and power : the adversity which she 
 could not but perceive had weighed on his had a strange 
 interest to her. She had heard of many calamities, and aided 
 many ; but they had always been far sundered from her, they 
 had never touched her : in this man's presence they seemed 
 to grow very close, terribly real. She led him on to speak of 
 his comrades, of his daily life, of his harassing routine of 
 duties in peace, and of his various experiences in war. He 
 told her, too, of L^on Ramon's history ; and, as she listened, 
 he saw a mist arise and dim the brilliancy of those eyes that 
 men complained would never soften. The very fidelity with 
 which he sketched to her the bitter sufferings and the rough 
 nobility that were momentarily borne and seen in that great 
 military family of which he had become a son by adoption, 
 interested her by its very unlikeness to anything in her own 
 world. 
 
 His voice had still its old sweetness, his manner still its 
 old grace ; and added to these were a grave earnestness and a 
 natural eloquence that the darkness of his own fortunes and 
 the sympathies with others that pain had awakened had 
 brought to him. He wholly forgot their respective station ; 
 he only remembered that for the first time for so many years 
 he had the charm of converse with a woman of high breeding, 
 of inexpressible beauty, and of keen and delicate intuition. 
 He wholly forgot how time passed, and she did not seek to 
 remind him ; indeed, she but little noted it herself. 
 
 At last the conversation turned back to his Chief. 
 
380 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * You seem to be aware of some motive for your comman- 
 dant's dislike?' she asked him. 'Tell me to what you 
 attribute it ? * 
 
 * It is a long tale, madame.* 
 
 ' No matter, I would hear it,* 
 
 * I fear it would only weary you ? ' 
 ' Do not fear that. Tell it me ! ' 
 
 He obeyed, and told to her the story of the Emir and of 
 the Pearl of the Desert ; and Venetia Corona listened, as she 
 had listened to him throughout, with an interest that she 
 rarely vouchsafed to the recitals and the witticisms of her 
 own circle. He gave to the narrative a soldierly simplicity, 
 and a picturesque colouring that lent a new interest to her ; and 
 she was of that nature which, however it may be led to 
 conceal feeling from pride and from hatred, never fails to 
 awaken to indignant sympathy at wrong. 
 
 ' This barbarian is your chief ? * she said, as the tale 
 closed. * His enmity is your honour 1 I can well credit that 
 he will never pardon your having stood between him and his 
 crime.' 
 
 * He has never pardoned it yet, of a surety.' 
 
 ' I will not tell you it was a noble action,' she said, with a 
 smile sweet as the morning, a smile that few saw light on 
 them. * It came too naturally to a man of honour for you to 
 care for the epithet. Yet it was a great one, a most generous 
 one. But I have not heard one thing ; — what argument did 
 you use to obtain her release ? ' 
 
 'No one has ever heard it,* he answered her, while his 
 voice sank low. * I will trust you with it ; it will not pass 
 elsewhere. I told him enough of — of my own past life to 
 show him that I knew what his had been, and that I knew, 
 moreover, though they were dead to me now, men in that 
 greater world of Europe who would believe my statement if 
 I wrote them this outrage on the Emir, and would avenge it 
 for the reputation of the Empire. And unless he released the 
 Emir's wife, I swore to him that I would so write, though he 
 had me shot on the morrow ; and he knew I should keep my 
 word.' 
 
 She was silent some moments, looking on him with a 
 musing gaze, in which some pity and more honour for him 
 were blended. 
 
 ' You told him your past. Will you confess it to me ? ' 
 
•MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS ' 381 
 
 *I cannot, madame.* 
 
 * And why ? ' 
 
 * Because I am dead I Because, in your presence, it 
 becomes more bitter to me to remember that I ever lived.' 
 
 ' You speak strangely. Cannot your life have a resur- 
 rection ? ' 
 
 * Never, madame. For a brief hour you have given it one 
 — in dreams. It will have no other. 
 
 * But surely there may be ways — such a story as you have 
 told me brought to the Emperor's knowledge, you would see 
 your enemy disgraced, yourself honoured ? ' 
 
 * Possibly, madame. But it is out of the question that it 
 should ever be so brought. As I am now, so I desire to live 
 and die.* 
 
 ' You voluntarily condemn yourself to this ? * 
 
 * I have voluntarily chosen it. I am well sure that the 
 silence I entreat will be kept by you ? ' 
 
 * Assuredly ; unless by your wish it be broken. Yet — I 
 await my brother's arrival here; he is a soldier himself, I 
 shall hope that he will persuade you to think differently of 
 your future. At any rate, both his and my own influence will 
 always be exerted for you, if you will avail yourself of it.' 
 
 * You do me much honour, madame. AH I will ever ask 
 of you is to return those coins to my Colonel, and to forget 
 that your gentleness has made me forget, for one merciful half- 
 hour, the sufferance on which alone a trooper can present 
 himself here.' 
 
 He swept the ground with his k6pi as though it were the 
 plumed hat of a Marshal, and backed slowly from her presence, 
 as he had many a time long before backed out of a throne- 
 room. 
 
 As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chess- 
 men ; they stood under glass, and had not been broken by her 
 lapdog. 
 
 Miladi, left alone there in her luxurious morning-room, sat 
 awhile lost in thought. He attracted her ; he interested her ; 
 he aroused her sympathy and her wonder as the men of her 
 own world had failed to do — aroused them despite the pride 
 which made her impatient of lending so much attention to a 
 mere Chasseur d'Afrique. His knowledge of the fact that he 
 was in reaUty the representative of his race, although the 
 power to declare himself so had been for ever abandoned and 
 
383 UNDER TWO FLAGS ^ 
 
 lost, had given him in her presence that day a certain melan- 
 choly, and a certain grave dignity that would have shown a 1 
 far more superficial observer than she was that he had come 
 of a great race, and had memories that were of a very different \ 
 hue to the coarse and hard life which he led now. She had 
 seen much of the world, and was naturally far more penetra- 
 tive and more correct in judgment than are most women. ^ 
 She discovered the ring of true gold in his words, and the 
 carriage of pure breeding in his actions. He interested her ; 
 — more than it pleased her that he should. A man so utterly 
 beneath her ! — doubtless brought into the grade to which he 
 had fallen by every kind of error, of improvidence, of folly, 
 of probably worse than folly I | 
 
 It was too absurd that she, so difficult to interest, so in- 
 accessible, so fastidious, so satiated with all that was brilliant 
 and celebrated, should find herself seriously spending her 
 thoughts, her pity, and her speculation on an adventurer of 
 the African Army ! She laughed a little at herself as she 
 stretched out her hand for a new volume of French poems 
 dedicated to her by their accomplished writer, who was a 
 Parisian diplomatist. 
 
 'One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and 
 weaving a marvellous romance from a mystery and a tristesse, 
 because the first soldier I notice in Algeria has a gentleman's 
 voice, and is ill-treated by his officers ! ' she thought with a 
 smile, while she opened the poems which had that day arrived, 
 radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet, and the gold 
 of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona d' Amagiie 
 on their binding. The poems were sparkling with all the 
 grace of airy vers de socUU and elegant silvery harmonies; but 
 they served ill to chain her attention, for while she read her 
 eyes wandered at intervals to the chess battalions. 
 
 * Such a man as that buried in the ranks of this brutalised 
 army 1 ' she mused. * What fatal chance could bring him 
 here? Misfortune, not misconduct, surely. I wonder if 
 Lyon could learn ? He shall try.' 
 
 * Your Chasseur has the air of a Prince, my love,' said a 
 Yoice behind her. 
 
 * Equivocal compliment I A much better air than most 
 Princes,' said Madame Corona, glancing up with a slight 
 shrug of her shoulders, as her guest and travelling companion, 
 the Marquis« de R^nardi^re, entered. 
 
 I 
 
•MILADI AUX BEAUX YEUX BLEUS 383 
 
 ( 
 
 Indeed ! I saw him as he passed out ; and he salated me 
 as if he had been a Marshal. Why did he come ? ' 
 
 Venetia Corona pointed to the napoleons, and told the story ; 
 rather listlessly and briefly. 
 
 ' Ah I The man has been a gentleman, I dare say. So 
 many of them come to our army. I remember General Ville- 
 fleur's telling me — he commanded here awhile— that the ranks 
 of the Zephyrs and Zouaves were full of well-born men, utterly 
 good for nothing, the handsomest scoundrels possible, who had 
 every gift and every grace, and yet come to no better end than 
 a pistol-shot in a ditch or a mortal thrust from Bedouin steel. 
 I dare say your Corporal is one of them.* 
 
 ' It may be so.* 
 
 ' But you doubt it, I imagine.' 
 
 * I am not sure now that I do. But this person is certainly 
 unUke a man to whom disgrace has ever attached.* 
 
 'You think your proteg^, then, has become what he is 
 through adversity, I suppose ? Very interesting 1 ' 
 
 ' I really can tell you nothing of his antecedents. Through 
 his skill at sculpture, and my notice of it, considerable indig- 
 nity has been brought upon him ; and a soldier can feel, it 
 seems, though it is very absurd that he should I That is all 
 my concern with the matter, except that I have to teach his 
 commander not to play with my name in his barrack- 
 yard.' 
 
 She spoke with that negligence which always sounded very 
 cold, though the words were so gently spoken. Her best and 
 most familiar friends always knew when, with that courtly 
 chillness, she had signed them their line of demarcation. 
 
 And the Marquise de Renardidre said no more, but talked 
 of the Ambassador's poems. 
 
384 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 'LE BON ZIG' 
 
 Meanwhile the subject of their first discourse returned to the 
 Chambr^e. 
 
 He had encouraged the men to pursue those various indus- 
 tries and ingenuities, which, though they are affectedly con- 
 sidered against * discipline,' formed, as he knew well, the 
 best preservative from real insubordination, and the best in- 
 strument in humanising and ameliorating the condition of his 
 comrades. The habit of application alone was something 
 gained ; and if it kept them only for awhile from the haunts 
 of those coarsest debaucheries, which are the only possible 
 form in which the soldier can pursue the forbidden licence of 
 vice, it was better than that leisure should be spent in that 
 joyless bestiality which made Cecil, once used to every re- 
 finement of luxury and indulgence, sicken with a pitying 
 wonder for those who found in it the only shape they knew 
 of * pleasure.' 
 
 He had seen from the first, in many men of his tribu, capa- 
 bilities that might be turned to endless uses ; in the conscript 
 drawn from the populace of the provinces there was almost 
 /jilways a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, 
 coupled with habits of diligence ; in the soldier made from 
 the street- Arab of Paris there was always mconceivable intel- 
 ligence, rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity ; in the adven- 
 turers come, like himself, from higher grades of society, and 
 burying a broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there 
 were continually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, 
 that had run to seed and brought forth no fruit. Of all these 
 France always avails herself in a great degree ; but, as far as 
 Cecil's influence extended, they were developed much more 
 than usual. As his own character gradually changed under 
 the force of fate, the desire for some interest in life grew on 
 , him (every man, save one absolutely brainless and self -engrossed, 
 \J^ feels this sooner or later) ; and that interest he found, or rather 
 created, in his regiment. All that he could do to contribute 
 
•LE BON ZIG' j8s 
 
 to its efficiency in the field he did ; all that he could do to 
 further its internal excellence he did likewise. 
 
 Coarseness perceptibly abated, and violence became much 
 rarer in that portion of his corps with which he had imme- 
 diately to do ; the men gradually acquired from him a better, 
 a higher tone ; they learned to do duties inglorious and dis- 
 tasteful as well as they did those which led them to the danger 
 and the excitation that they loved ; and, having their good 
 faith and sympathy, heart and soul, with him, he met, in 
 these lawless leopards of African France, with loyalty, courage, 
 generosity, and self-abnegation far surpassing those which he 
 had ever met with in the pohshed civilisation of his early 
 experience. 
 
 For their sakes, he spent many of his free hours in the 
 Chambr^e. Many a man, seeing him there, came and worked 
 at some ingenious design, instead of going off to burn his 
 brains out with brandy, if he had sous enough to buy any, or 
 to do some dexterous bit of thieving on a native, if he had not. 
 Many a time knowing him to be there sufficed to restrain the 
 talk around from lewdness and from ribaldry, and turn it into 
 channels at once less loathsome and more mirthful, because 
 they felt that obscenity and vulgarity were alike jarring on his 
 ear, although he had never more than tacitly shown that they 
 were so. A precisian would have been covered with their 
 contumely and ridicule ; a saint would have been driven out 
 from their midst with every missile merciless tongues and 
 merciless hands could pelt with ; a martinet would have been 
 cursed aloud, and cheated, flouted, rebelled against, on every 
 possible occasion. But the man who was ' one of them 
 entirely, while yet simply and thoroughly a gentleman, had 
 great influence — an influence exclusively for good. 
 
 The Chambree was empty when he returned ; the men were 
 scattered over the town in one of their scant pauses of liberty ; 
 there was only the dog of the regiment, Flick -Flack, a snow- 
 white poodle, asleep in the heat, on a sack, who, without 
 waking, moved his tail in a sign of gratification as Cecil 
 stroked him, and sat down near, betaking himself to the work 
 he had in hand. 
 
 It was a stone for the grave of L6on Ramon. There was 
 no other to remember the dead Chasseur ; no other beside 
 himself, save an old woman sitting spinning at her wheel 
 under the low-sloping shingle roof of a cottage by the western 
 
 oc 
 
386 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Biscayan sea, wlio, as she spun, and as the thread flew, looked 
 with anxious aged eyes over the purple waves where she had 
 seen his father — the son of her youth — go down beneath the 
 waters, and murmured ever and again, * II r'viendra I il 
 r'viendra I ' 
 
 But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the 
 thread of her waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for 
 whom she watched would go back to her and to Languedoc. 
 
 For life is brutal ; and to none so brutal as to the aged who 
 remember so well, and yet are forgotten as though already 
 they were amid the dead. 
 
 Cecil's hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his 
 thoughts wandered far from the place where he was. Alone 
 there, in the great sun-scorched barrack-room, the news that 
 he had read, the presence he had quitted, seemed alike a dream. 
 
 He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had 
 «tood before the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial 
 eyes the light of other years seemed to lie, the memories of 
 other worlds seemed to slumber. 
 
 These blue, proud, fathomless eyes I Why had they looked 
 on him ? He had grown content with his fate ; he had been 
 satisfied to live and to fall a soldier of France ; he had set a 
 seal on that far-off life of his earUer time, and had grown to 
 forget that it had ever been. Why had chance flung him in 
 her way, that with one careless haughty glance, one smile of 
 courteous pity, she should have undone in a moment all the 
 work of a half- score years, and shattered in a day the serenity 
 which it had cost him such weary self-contest, such hard- 
 iought victory, to attain ? 
 
 She had come to pain, to weaken, to disturb, to influence 
 him, to shadow his peace, to wring his pride, to unman his 
 resolve, as women do mostly with men. Was Ufe not hard 
 enough here already, that she must make it more bitter yet 
 to bear ? 
 
 He had been content, with a soldier's contentment, in danger 
 and in duty ; and she must waken the old coiled serpent of 
 restless stinging regret which he had thought lulled to rest 
 for ever ! 
 
 * If I had my heritage ? ' he thought ; and the chisel fell 
 from his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack- 
 room with the blue glare of the African sky through the 
 casement. 
 
*LE BON ZIG' 387 
 
 Then he smiled at his owu folly, in dreaming idly thus of 
 things that might have been. 
 
 ' I will see her no more,' he said to himself. ' If I do 
 not take care, I shall end by thinking myself a martyr — the 
 last refuge and consolation of emasculate vanity, of impotent 
 egotism ! ' 
 
 For though his whole existence was a sacrifice, it never 
 occurred to him that there was anything whatever great in 
 its acceptation, or unjust in its endurance. He thought too 
 little of his life's value, or of its deserts, ever to consider by 
 any chance that it had been harshly dealt with, or unmeritedly 
 visited. 
 
 At that instant Petit Picpon's keen, pale, Parisian face 
 peered through the door, his great black eyes, that at times 
 had so pathetic a melancholy, and at others such a monkeyish 
 mirth and malice, were sparkling excitedly and gleefully. 
 
 ' Mon Caporal ! ' 
 
 ' You, Picpon ? What is it ? ' 
 
 ' Mon Caporal, there is great news. La danse commence 
 U-bas.' ^ 
 
 * Ah I Are you sure ? ' 
 
 ' Sure, mon Caporal. The Arbicos want a fantasia d la 
 clarinette.^ We are not to know just yet : we are to have 
 the ordre de route to-morrow. I overheard our officers say so. 
 They think we shall have brisk work. And for that they will 
 not punish the vieille lame.' 
 
 * Punish 1 Is there fresh disobedience ? In my squadron ; 
 in my absence ? ' 
 
 He rose instinctively, buckling on the sword which he had 
 put aside. 
 
 *Not in your tribu, moTi Caporal,' said Picpon quickly. 
 * It is not much, either. Only the bon-zig Rac' 
 
 * Rake ? What has he been doing ? ' 
 
 There was infinite anxiety and vexation in his voice. Rake 
 had recently been changed into another squadron of the regi- 
 ment, to his great loss and regret ; for not only did he miss 
 the man's bright face and familiar voice from the Chambree, 
 but he had much disquietude on the score of his safety, for 
 Rake was an incorrigible pratique, had only been kept from 
 
 * There is fighting broken out yonder. 
 
 * A skirmish to the miv^ic of musketry. 
 
 cc 2 
 
388 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 scrapes and mischief by Cecil's influence, and even despite 
 that had been often in hot water, and once even had been 
 drafted for a year or so of chastisement among the ' Zephyrs,' 
 a mode of punishment which, but for its separation of him 
 from his idol, would have given unmitigated dehght to the 
 audacious offender. 
 
 ' Very little, mon Caporal I ' said Picpon, eagerly. ' A 
 mere nothing— a bagatelle ! Run a Spahi through the 
 stomach, that is all. I don't think the man is so much as 
 dead, even ! ' 
 
 ' I hope not, indeed. When will you cease this brawling 
 among yourselves ? A soldier's blade should never be turned 
 upon men of his ow^n army. How did it happen ? ' 
 
 * Poicr si peu de chose, mon Caporal. A woman I They 
 quarrelled about a little fruitseller. The homard ^ was in 
 fault. Grache-au-nez-d'la-Mort was there before him ; and was 
 preferred by the girl ; and women should be allowed some- 
 thing to do with choosing their lovers, that I think, though it 
 is true they often take the worst man. They quarrelled ; the 
 homard drew first ; and then, pouf et passe ! quick as thought, 
 Rac lunged through him. He has always a most beautiful 
 stroke. Le Capitaine Argentier was passing, and made a 
 fuss; else nothing would have been done. They have put 
 him under arrest, but I heard them say they would let him 
 free to-night because we should march at dawn.' 
 
 *I will go and see him at once.' 
 
 * Wait, 711071 Caporal ; I have something to tell you,' said 
 Picpon quickly. * The zig has a motive in what he does. 
 Rac wanted to get the trou.^ He has done more than one bit 
 of mischief only for that.' 
 
 * Only for what ? He cannot be in love with the trotc ? ' 
 
 * It serves his turn,' said Picpon, mysteriously. 'Did you 
 never guess why, mon Caporal ? Well, I have. Crache-au- 
 nez-d'la-Mort is a risquetout.^ The officers know it; the 
 bureaus know it. He would have mounted, mounted, mounted, 
 and been a Captain long before now, if he had not been a 
 pratique.' 
 
 * I know that ; so would many of you.* 
 
 ' Ah, mon Caporal ; but that is just what Rac does not 
 choose. In the books his page beats every man's, except 
 
 ' Spahj. * Prison. 
 
 ' A fine fearlesM soldier. 
 
•LE BON ZIG' 389 
 
 yours. They have talked of him many times for the cross 
 and for promotion ; but whenever they do — cri-crac I he goes 
 off to a bit of mischief, and gets himself punished. Any 
 rahiat,^ long or short, serves his purpose. They think him 
 too wild to take out of the ranks. You remember, mon Ca- 
 poral, that splendid thing that he did five years ago at Saba- 
 sasta ? Well, you know they spoke of promoting him for it, 
 and he would have run up all the grades Uke a squirrel, and 
 died a Kdbir,'^ I dare say. What did he do to prevent it ? 
 Why, went that escapade into Oran disguised as a Dervish, 
 and got the trou instead.' 
 
 * To prevent it ? Not purposely ? * 
 
 * Purposely, mon Caporal,' said Petit Picpon, with a sapient 
 nod that spoke volumes. ' He always does something when 
 he thinks promotion is coming — something to get himself out 
 of its way, do you see ? And the reason is this : 'tis a good 
 zig, and loves you, and will not be put over your head. " Me 
 rise afore him ? " said the zig to me once. " I'll have the As 
 de Piqvs ^ on my collar fifty times over first ! He's a Prince, 
 and I'm a mongrel got in a gutter ! I owe him more'n I'll 
 ever pay, and I'U kill the K6bir himself afore I'll insult him 
 that way." So say little to him about the Spahi, mon Gaporal, 
 He loves you well, does your Rac' 
 
 ' Well, indeed ! Good God I What nobility I ' 
 Picpon glanced at him ; then, with the tact of his nation, 
 glided away and busied himself teaching Flick- Flack to 
 shoulder and present arms, the weapon being a long chi- 
 bouque-stick. 
 
 * After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau ^ 
 which side of the question to take,' mused Cecil as he crossed^ 
 the barrack-yard a few minutes later to visit the incarcerated— t 
 'pratique, * On my life, .cjviljsatiQB.,jdevelops comfort, but I / 
 do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, and ego- 
 tism grows strong and specious. Why is it that in a polished 
 life a man, while becoming incapable of sinking to crime, 
 almost always becomes also incapable of rising to greatness ? 
 Why is it that misery, tumult, privation, bloodshed, famine 
 beget, in such a life as this, such countless things of heroism, 
 of endurance, of self-sacrifice — things worthy of demigods — 
 
 * Term of punishment. ' General. 
 
 * A little mark in black cloth that distinguishes the battalion of the 
 ' Incorrigiblea.' 
 
390 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 1 in men who quarrel with the wolves for a wild-boar'a carcass, 
 Ijpr a sheep's oifal ? ' 
 
 ^^ A question which perplexes, very wearily, thinkers who 
 have more time, more subtlety, and more logic to bring to 
 its unravelment than Bertie had either leisure or inclination 
 to do. 
 
 * Is this true. Rake — that you intentionally commit these 
 freaks of misconduct to escape promotion ? ' he asked of the 
 man when he stood alone with him in his place of confine- 
 ment. 
 
 Rake flushed a little. 
 
 ' Mischief's bred in me, sir ; it must come out. It's just 
 bottled up in me like ale : if I didn't take the cork out now 
 and then, I should fly apieces I * 
 
 ' But many a time when you have been close on the reward 
 of your splendid gallantry in the field, you have frustrated 
 your own fortunes and the wishes of your superiors by wan- 
 tonly proving yourself unfit for the higher grade they were 
 going to raise you to ; why do you do that ? ' 
 
 Rake fidgeted restlessly, and, to avoid the awkwardness of 
 the question, replied, like a Parliamentary orator, by a flow of 
 rhetoric. 
 
 ' Sir, there's a many chaps like me. They can't help 
 nohow bustin' out when the fit takes 'em. 'Tain't reasonable 
 to blame 'em for it ; they're just made so, like a chestnut's 
 made to bust its pod, and a chicken to bust its shell. Well, 
 you see, sir, France she know that, and she say to herself, 
 *' Here are these madcaps, if I keep 'em tight in hand I shan't 
 do nothin' with 'em — they'll turn obstreperous and cram my 
 convict-cells. Now I want soldiers, I don't want convicts. 
 I can't let 'em stay in the Regulars, 'cause they'll be for 
 making all the army wildfire like 'era ; I'll just draft 'em by 
 theirselves, treat 'em different, and let 'em fire away. They've 
 got good stuff in 'em, thoiigh too much of the curb riles 'em." 
 Well, sir, she do that ; and aren't the Zephyrs as fine a lot of 
 fellows as any in the service ? Of course they are ; but if 
 
 they'd been in England — God bless her, the dear old d d 
 
 obstinate soul I — they'd have been druv' crazy along o' pipe- 
 clay and razors ; she'd never have seed what was in 'em, her 
 eyes are so bunged up with routine. If a pup riot in the 
 pack, she's no notion but to double-thong him, and a'oourse, 
 in double-quick time, she finds herself obliged to go further, 
 
*LE BON ZIG' 391 
 
 and hang him. She don't ever remember that it may be only 
 just along of his breedin', and that he may make a very good 
 hound elseways let out a bit, though he'll spile the whole pack 
 if she ivill be a fool and try to make a steady line-hunter oi 
 him straight agin his nature.' 
 
 Rake stopped breathless in his rhetoric, which contained 
 more truth in it, as also more roughness, than most rhetoric 
 does. 
 
 * You are right. But you wander from my question,' said 
 Cecil gently. " Do you avoid promotion ? " ' 
 
 * Yes, sir, I do,' said Rake, something sulkily ; for he felt 
 he was being driven * up a corner.' ^1 do. I ain't not one 
 bit fitter for an officer than that rioting pup I talk on is fit to 
 lead them crack packs at home. I should be in a strait-waist- 
 coat if I was promoted ; and as for the cross — Lord, sir, that 
 would get me into a world 0* trouble I I should pawn it for 
 a toss of wine the first day out, or give it to the first mou- 
 kiera that winked her black eye for it ! The star put on 
 my buttons suits me a deal better ; if you'll believe me, sir, 
 it do.' » 
 
 Cecil's eyes rested on him with a look that said far more 
 than his answer. 
 
 ' Rake, I know you better than you would let me do, if 
 you had your way. My noble fellow! you reject advance- 
 ment, and earn yourself an unjust reputation for mutinous 
 conduct, because you are too generous to be given a step 
 above mine in the regiment.' 
 
 ' Who's been a-telling you that trash, sir ? * retorted Rake 
 with ferocity. 
 
 * No matter who. It is no trash. It is a splendid loyalty, 
 of which I am utterly unworthy, and it shall be my care that 
 it is known at the Bureaus, so that henceforth your great 
 merits may be ' 
 
 * Stow that, sir ! ' cried Rake vehemently. * Stow that, 
 if you please I Promoted I wo7t't be — no, not if the Emperor 
 hisself was to order it, and come across here to see it done I 
 A pretty thing, surely ! Me a officer, and you never a one — 
 me a-commandin* of you, and you a-salutin' of me I By the 
 Lord, sir I we might as well see the camp- scullions a-ridin* 
 in state, and the Marshal a-scouring out the soup-pots I * 
 
 ' The star on the metal buttons of the insubordinates, or Zephyrs. 
 
392 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Not at all. This Army has not a finer soldier than your- 
 self ; you have a right to the reward of your services in it. 
 And I assure you you do me a great injustice if you think I 
 would not as willingly go out under your orders as under 
 those of all the Marshals of the Empire.' 
 
 The tears rushed into the hardy eyes of the redoubtable 
 * Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,* though he dashed them away in 
 a fury of eloquence. 
 
 * Sir, if you don't understand as how you've given me a 
 power more than all the crosses in the world in saying of 
 them there words, why you don't know 7?ze much either, that's 
 all. You're a gentleman — a right on rare thing that is — and 
 bein* a gentleman, a course you'd be too generous and too 
 proud like not to behave well to me, whether I was a-servin* 
 you as I've always served you, or a-insultin' of you by ridin* 
 over your head in that way as we're speakin' on. But I know 
 my place, sir, and I know yours. If it wasn't for that 'ere 
 Black Hawk — damn him 1 — I can't help it, sir, I will damn 
 him, if he shoot me for it — you'd been a Chef d'Escadron by 
 now. There ain't the leastest doubt of it. Ask all the zigs 
 what they think. Well, sir, now you know I'm a man what 
 do as I say ; if you don't let me have my own way, and if 
 you do the littlest thing to get me a step, why, sir, I swear as 
 I'm a livin' bein', that I'll draw on Chateauroy the first time 
 I see him afterwards, and slit his throat as I'd slit a jackal's 1 
 There — my oath's took 1 ' 
 
 And Cecil saw that it would also be kept. The natural 
 lawlessness and fiery passion inborn in Eake had of course 
 not been cooled by the teachings of African warfare ; and his 
 hate was intense against the all-potent Chief of his regiment, 
 as intense as the love he bore to the man whom he had 
 followed out into exile. 
 
 Cecil tried vainly to argue with him ; all his reasonings fell 
 like hailstones on a cuirass, and made no more impression ; 
 he was resolute. 
 
 * But listen to one thing,' he urged at last. ' Can you not 
 see how you pain me by this self-sacrifice ? If I knew that 
 you had attained a higher grade, and wore your epaulettes in 
 this service, can you not fancy I should feel pleasure then (as 
 I feel regret, even remorse, now) that I brought you to Africa 
 through my own follies and misfortunes ? ' 
 
 * Do you, sir ? Their ain't the least cause for it, then,' 
 
♦LE BON ZIG' 393 
 
 returned Rake, sturdily. * Lor' bless you, sir, why, this life's 
 made a-purpose for me 1 If ever a round peg went trim and 
 neat into a round hole, it was when I came into this here 
 Army. I never was so happy in all my days before. They're 
 right on good fellows, and '11 back you to the death if so be aa 
 you've allays been share-and-share-alike with 'em, as a zig 
 should. As a private, sir, I'm happy and I'm safe ; as a 
 officer, I should be kicking over the traces, and blunderin* 
 everlastingly. However, there P-in't no need to say a word 
 more about it ; I've sworn, and you've heerd me swear, sir, 
 and you know as how I shall keep my oath if ever I'm pro- 
 voked to it by bein' took notice of. I stuck that homard just 
 now just by way of a lark, and only 'cause he come where 
 he'd no business to poke his turbaned old pate ; 'tain't likely 
 as I shall stop at giving the Hawk two inclies of steel if he 
 comes such an insult over us both as to offer a blackguard like 
 me the epaulettes as you ought to be a-wearin' I * 
 
 And Cecil knew that it was hopeless either to persuade him 
 to his own advantage or to convince him of his . disobedience 
 in speaking thus of his supreme, before his non-commissioned, 
 officer. He was Mmself, moreover, deeply moved by the 
 man's fidelity. 
 
 He stretched his hand out : 
 
 * I wish there were more blackguards with hearts like 
 yours. I cannot repay your love. Rake, but I can value it.' 
 
 Rake put his own hands behind his back. 
 
 * God bless you, sir, you've repaid it ten dozen times over. 
 But you shan't do that, sir. I told you long ago, I'm too 
 much of a scamp ! Some day, p'raps, as I Raid, when I've 
 settled scores with myself, and wiped oS all the bad 'una with 
 a clear sweep, tolerably clean. Not afore, sir ! ' 
 
 And Rake was too sturdily obstinate not to always carry 
 his point. 
 
 The love that he bore to Cecil was very much such a wild, 
 chivalric, romantic fidelity as the Cavaliers or the Gentlemen 
 of the North bore to their Stuart Idols. That his benefactor 
 had become a soldier of Africa in no way lessened the reverent 
 love of his loyalty, any more than theirs was lessened by the 
 adversities of their royal masters. Like theirs, also, it had 
 beauty in its blindness — the beauty that lies in every pure 
 unselfishness. 
 
 Meanwhile, Picpon's news waa correct. 
 
394 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 The regiment was ordered out d la danse.^ There was 
 fresh war in the interior ; and wherever there was the hottest 
 slaughter, there the Black Hawk always flew down with his 
 falcon-flock. When Cecil left his incorrigible zigy the trum- 
 pets were sounding an assembly; there were noise, tumult, 
 eagerness, excitement, delighted zest on every side ; a general 
 order was read to the enraptured squadrons ; they were to 
 leave the town at the first streak of dawn. 
 
 There were before them death, deprivation, long days of 
 famine, long days of drought and thirst ; parching sun-baked 
 roads; bitter chilly nights; fiery furnace- blasts of sirocco; 
 killing, pitiless, northern winds ; hunger, only sharpened by 
 a snatch of raw meat or a handful of maize ; and the proba- 
 bilities, ten to one, of being thrust under the sand to rot, or 
 left to have their skeletons picked clean by the vultures. But 
 what of that ? There were also the wild delight of combat, 
 the freedom of lawless warfare, the joy of deep strokes thrust 
 home, the chance of plunder, of wine-skins, of cattle, of 
 women ; above all, that lust for slaughter which burns so 
 deep down in the hidden souls of men, and gives them such 
 brotherhood with wolf, and vulture, and tiger, when once its 
 flame bursts forth. 
 
 That evening, at the Villa Aioussa there gathered a courtly 
 assembly, of much higher rank than Algiers can commonly 
 afford, because many of station as lofty as her own had been 
 drawn thither to follow her to what the Princess Corona 
 called her banishment — an endurable banishment enough 
 under those azure skies, in that clear elastic air, and with 
 that charming * bonbonni^re ' in which to dwell, yet still a 
 banishment to the reigning beauty of Paris, to one who had 
 the hahits and the commands of a wholly undisputed sove- 
 reignty in the royal splendour of her womanhood. 
 
 There was a variety of distractions to prevent ennui ; there 
 were half a dozen clever Paris actors playing the airiest of 
 vaudevilles in the Bijou theatre, beyond the drawing-rooms ; 
 there were some celebrated Italian singers whom an Imperial 
 Prince had brought over in his yacht; there was the best 
 music ; there was wit as well as homage whispered in her 
 ear. Yet she was not altogether amused ; she was a little 
 touched with ennui. 
 
 ' Oq the inaroh. 
 
•LE BON 2IG* 395 
 
 'Those men are very stupid. They have not half the 
 talent of that soldier 1 ' she thought once, turning from a 
 Peer of France, an Austrian Archduke, and a Russian diplo- 
 matist. And she smiled a little, furling her fan and musing 
 on the horror that the triad of fashionable conquerors near 
 her would feel if they knew that she thought them duller 
 than an African lascar 1 
 
 But they only told her things of which she had been long 
 weary, specially of her own beauty ; he had told her of things 
 totally unknown to her, things real, terrible, vivid, strong, 
 sorrowful — strong as life, sorrowful as death. 
 
 * Chateauroy and his Chasseurs have an ordre de route,' a 
 voice was saying, that moment, behind her chair. 
 
 * Indeed ? ' said another. * The Black Hawk is never so 
 happy as when unhooded. When do they go ? ' 
 
 ' To-morrow. At dawn.' 
 
 ' There is always fighting here, I suppose ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, yes. The losses in men are immense ; only the 
 journals would get a communiqu^y or worse, if they ventured 
 to say so in France. How delicious La Doche is ! She 
 comes in again with the next scene.' 
 
 The Princess Corona listened ; and her attention wandered 
 farther from the Archduke, the Peer, and the diplomatist, 
 as from the vaudeville. She did not find Mme. Doche very 
 charming ; and she was absorbed for a time looking at the 
 miniatures on her fan. 
 
 At the same moment, through the lighted streets of Algiers, 
 Cigarette, like a union of fairy and of fury, was flying with 
 the news. Cigarette had seen the flame of war at its height, 
 and had danced in the midst of its whitest heat, as young 
 children dance to see the fires leap red in the black winter's 
 night. Cigarette loved the battle, the charge, the wild music 
 of bugles, the thunder tramp of battalions, the sirocco-sweep 
 of light squadrons, the mad tarantala of triumph when the 
 slaughter was done, the grand swoop of the Eagles down 
 unto the carnage, the wild hurrah of France. 
 
 She loved them with all her heart and soul ; and she flew 
 now through the starlit sultry night, crying, * La guerre ! 
 La guerre ! La guerre I ' and chanting to the enraptured 
 soldiery a Marseillaise of her own improvisation, all slang, 
 and doggerel, and baorack- grammar ; but fire-giving as a 
 
596 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 torch, and rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it, waving 
 the tricolor high above her head : 
 
 Fantasia, 
 
 Deo Gratia! 
 
 En avant I 
 
 On t' attend I 
 
 Au cor et a cri 
 
 Suivez, mes Spahis, 
 On e'^lance a la danse, 
 Pour la gloire de la France, 
 
 Fusillons, 
 
 BataiUons ! 
 
 Et marchons 
 
 Au guidons I 
 
 Va, loustio, 
 
 Et du eric 
 
 Vide ton verre. 
 
 A la guerre 1 
 Cast I'Amie du Drapeau 
 Qui s'appelle son troupeau f 
 Faisons pouff k Ti^mir, 
 Faisons style k venir, 
 De I'avoine la moisson, 
 Portera belle boisson, 
 Le Zephyr au douar 
 F'ra retentir son cor, 
 Chasse-marais cont' fleurettea 
 S'emparant des fillettes, 
 Et sous I'Aigle mes Roumis, 
 Vont gorger les Arbis, 
 A la musique si nette 
 De la haute clarinette I 
 
 Bazzia, 
 
 Grazia, 
 
 Est iei, 
 
 Mes Spahis, 
 X I'amour 1 Aux beaux jours, 
 Rataplan des tambours. 
 Nous appelle, * R'lin tintin, 
 Vite au rire, au butin 1 ' 
 
 Vive la gloire I 
 
 Vive le boire 1 
 Vive le vin ros6 du sang I 
 Vive le feu volage des rangsl 
 Vive tout <?a qui va nous fairc 
 Paradis au fond d'enfer, 
 Par la Guerre, par la Guerre I 
 En avant 1 Allons 1 Buvons « 
 En avant I Allons 1 Mourrons ', 
 
 ^ 
 
 1 
 
ZARAILA ' 397 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 ZABAILA 
 
 The African day was at its noon. 
 
 From the first break of dav/n the battle had raged ; now, at 
 midday, it was at xts height. Far in the interior, almost on 
 the edge of the great desert, in that terrible season when air 
 that is flame by day is ice by night, and when the scorch of a 
 blazing sun may be followed in an hour by the blinding fury 
 of a snowstorm, the slaughter had gone on hour through 
 hour under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of 
 brass. . The Arabs had surprised the French encampment ■.. 
 where it lay in the centre of an arid plain that was called 
 Zaraila. Hovering like a cloud of hawks on the entrance of| 
 the Sahara, massed together for one mighty if futile effort, 
 with all their ancient war-lust, and with a new despair, the 
 tribes who refused the yoke of the alien empire were once 
 again in arms, were once again combined in defence of those 
 limitless kingdoms of drifting sand, of that beloved belt of 
 bare and desolate land so useless to the conqueror, so dear to 
 the nomad. When they had been, as it had been thought, 
 beaten back into the desert wilderness, when, without water 
 and without cattle, it had been calculated that they would, of 
 sheer necessity, bow themselves in submission, or perish of 
 famine and of thirst, they had recovered their ardour, their 
 strength, their resistance, their power to harass without 
 ceasing, if they could never arrest, the enemy. They had 
 cast the torch of war afresh into the land, and here, south- 
 ward, the flame burned bitterly, and with a merciless tongue 
 devoured the lives of men, licking them up as a forest fire the i 
 dry leaves and the touchwood. *"^ 
 
 Circling, sweeping, silently, swiftly, with that rapid spring, 
 that marvellous whirlwind of force, that is of Africa, and of 
 Africa alone, the tribes had rushed down in the darkness of 
 night, lightly as a kite rushes through the gloom of the dawn. 
 For once the vigilance of the invader served him naught ; for 
 once the Frankish camp was surprised off its guard. While 
 the air was still chilly with the breath of the night, while 
 
39S UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 fche first gleam of morning had barely broken through the 
 mists of the east, while the picket-fires burned through the 
 dusky gloom, and the sentinels and videttes paced slowly to 
 and fro, and circled round, hearing nothing worse than the 
 stealthy tread of the jackal, or the muffled flight of a night- 
 bird, afar in the south a great dark cloud had risen, darker 
 than the brooding shadows of the earth and sky. 
 
 The cloud swept onward, like a mass of cirri, in those 
 shadows shrouded. Fleet as though wind-driven, dense as 
 though thunder-charged, it moved over the plains. As it 
 grew nearer and nearer, it grew greyer, a changing mass of 
 white and black that fused, in the obscurity, into a shadow 
 colour ; a dense array of men and horses flitting noiselessly 
 like spirits, and as though guided alone by one rein and moved 
 alone by one breath and one will : not a bit champed, not a 
 linen-fold loosened, not a shiver of steel was heard ; as silently 
 as the winds of the desert sweep up northward over the 
 plains, so they rode now, host upon host of the warriors of 
 the soil. 
 
 The outlying videttes, the advanced sentinels, had scruti- 
 nised so long through the night every wavering shade of 
 cloud and moving form of buffalo in the dim distance, that 
 their sleepless eyes, strained and aching, failed to distinguish 
 this moving mass that was so like the brown plains and star- 
 less sky that it could scarce be told from them. The night, 
 too, was bitter ; northern cold cut hardly chillier than this 
 that parted the blaze of one hot day from the blaze of another. 
 The sea-winds were blowing cruelly keen, and men who at 
 noon gladly stripped to their shirts, shivered now where they 
 lay under canvas. 
 
 Awake while his comrades slept around him, Cecil was 
 stretched half unharnessed. The foraging duty of the past 
 twenty-four hours had been work harassing and heavy, in- 
 glorious and full of fatigue. The country round was bare as 
 a table-rock; the watercourses poor, choked with dust and 
 stones, unfed as yet by the rains or snows of the approaching 
 winter. The horses suffered sorely, the men scarce less. 
 The hay for the former was scant and bad ; the rations for 
 the latter often cut off by flying skirmishers of the foe. The 
 campaign, so far as it had gone, had been fruitless, yet had 
 cost largely in human life. The men died rapidly of dysen- 
 tery, disease, and the chills of the nights, and had severe 
 
ZARAILA 39^ 
 
 losses in countless obscure skirmishes, that served no end 
 except to water the African soil with blood. •^ 
 
 True, France would fill the gaps up as fast as they occurred,! 
 and the Moniteur would only allude to the present operations 
 when it could give a flourishing line descriptive of the Arabs 
 being driven back, decimated, to the borders of the Sahara. 
 But as the flourish of the Moniteur would never reach a 
 thousand little wayside huts, and seaside cabins, and vine- 
 dressers' sunny nests, where the memory of some lad who 
 had gone forth never to return would leave a deadly shadow 
 athwart the humble threshold, so the knowledge that they 
 were only so many automata in the hands of Government, 
 whose loss v/ould merely be noted that it might be efficiently 
 supplied, was not that wine -draught of La Gloire, which 
 poured the strength and the daring of gods into the limbs 
 of the men of Jena and of Austerlitz. Still, there was the 
 war-lust in them, and there was the fire of France ; they 
 fought not less superbly here, where to be food for jackal and 
 kite was their likeliest doom, than their sires had done under ^ 
 the eagles of the First Empire, when the conscript hero ^J 
 to-day was the glittering Marshal of to-morrow. 
 
 Cecil had awakened while the camp still slept. Do what 
 he would, force himself into the fulness of this fierce and 
 hard existence as he might, he could not burn out or banish 
 a thing that had many a time haunted him, but never as it 
 did now — the remembrance of a woman. He almost laughed \ 
 as he lay there on a pile of rotting straw, and wrung the ; 
 truth out of kis own heart, that he — a soldier of these exiled 
 squadrons — was mad enough to love that woman, whose j 
 deep proud eyes had dwelt with such serene pity upon him. j 
 
 Yet his hand clinched on the straw as it had clinched once 
 when the operator's knife had cut down through the bones of 
 his breast to reach a bullet that, left in his chest, would have 
 been death. If in the sight of men he had only stood in the 
 rank that was his by birthright, he could have strived for — it 
 might be that he could have roused— some answering passion 
 in her. But that chance was lost to him for ever. Well, it 
 was but one thing more that was added to all that he had of 
 his own will given up. He was dead ; he must be content, 
 as the dead must be, to leave the warmth of kisses, the glow 
 of delight, the possession of a woman's loveliness, the homage 
 of men's honour, the gladness of successful desires, to those 
 
400 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 who still lived in the light he had quitted. He had never 
 allowed himself the emasculating indulgence of regret ; he 
 flung it off him now. 
 
 Flick-Flack, coiled asleep in his bosom, thrilled, stirred, 
 and growled. He rose, and, with the little dog under his 
 arm, looked out from the canvas. He knew that the most 
 vigilant sentry in the service had not the instinct for a foe 
 afar off that Flick-Fiack possessed. He gazed keenly south- 
 ward, the poodle growling on ; that cloud so dim, so distant, 
 caught his sight. Was it a moving herd, a shifting mist, a 
 shadow-play between the night and dawn ? 
 
 For a moment longer he watched it ; then what it was he 
 knew, or felt by such strong instinct as makes knowledge ; 
 and like the blast of a clarion his alarm rang over the 
 unarmed and slumbering camp. 
 
 An instant, and the hive of men, so still, so motionless, 
 broke into violent movement ; and from the tents the half- 
 clothed sleepers poured, wakened, and fresh in wakening as 
 hounds. Perfect discipline did the rest. W^ith marvellous, 
 with matchless swiftness and precision, they harnessed and 
 got under arms. They were but fifteen hundred or so in all 
 — a single squadron of Chasseurs, two battalions of Zouaves, 
 half a corps of Tirailleurs, and some Turcos ; only a branch 
 of the main body, and without artillery. But they were 
 some of the flower of the army of Algiers, and they roused in 
 a second, with the vivacious ferocity of the bounding tiger, 
 with the glad eager impatience for the slaughter of the 
 unloosed hawk. Yet, rapid in its wondrous celerity as their 
 united action was, it was not so rapid as the downward 
 sweep of that war-cloud that came so near, with the tossing 
 of white draperies and the shine of countless sabres, now 
 growing clearer and clearer out of the darkness, till, with the 
 whir like the noise of an eagle's wings, and a swoop like an 
 eagle's seizure, the Arabs whirled down upon them, met a few 
 yards in advance by the answering charge of the Light Cavalry. 
 
 There was a crash as if rock were hurled upon rock, as the 
 Chasseurs, scarce seated in saddle, rushed forward to save 
 the pickets, to encounter the first blind force of the attack, 
 and to give the infantry, further in, more time for harnesa 
 and defence. Out of the caverns of the night an armed 
 multitude seemed to have suddenly poured. A moment ago 
 they had slept in security ; now thousands on thousands 
 
ZARAILA 401 
 
 whom they could not number, whom they could but dimly 
 even perceive, were thrown on them in immeasurable hosts, 
 which the encircling cloud of dust served but to render 
 vaster, ghastlier, and more majestic. The Arab line stretched 
 out with wings that seemed to extend on and on without 
 end ; the line of the Chasseurs was not one-half its length ; 
 they were but a single squadron flung in their stirrups, 
 scarcely clothed, knowing only that the foe was upon them, 
 caring only that their sword-hands were hard on their 
 weapons. With all the dan of France they launched them 
 selves forward to break the rush of the desert horses ; they 
 met with a terrible sound, like falling trees, like clashing 
 metal. 
 
 The hoofs of the rearing chargers struck each other's 
 breasts, and these bit and tore at each other's manes, while 
 their riders reeled dow^n dead. Frank and Arab were blent in 
 one inextricable mass as the charging squadrons encountered. 
 The outer wings of the tribes were spared the shock, and 
 swept on to meet the bayonets of Zouaves and Turcos as 
 at their swift foot-gallop the Enfans Perdus of France threw 
 themselves forward from the darkness. The cavalry was en- 
 veloped in the overwhelming numbers of the centre ; and the 
 flanks seemed to cover the Zouaves and Tirailleurs as some 
 great settling mist may cover the cattle who move beneath it. 
 
 It was not a battle ; it was a frightful tangling of men anH^ 
 brutes. No contest of modern warfare, such as commences' 
 and conquers by a duel of artillery, and, sometimes, gives the^* j,^/ 
 victory to whosoever has the superiority of ordnance, but a 
 conflict, hand to hand, breast to brea «t, life for life, a Homeric 
 combat of spear and of sword even while the first volleys of | 
 the answering musketry pealed over the plain. "" ■" 
 
 For once the Desert avenged in Uke that terrible inexhausti- 
 bility of supply wherewith the Empire so long had crushed 
 them beneath the overwhelming difference of numbers. It 
 was the Day of Mazagran onre more, as the light of the 
 morning broke, grey, silvered, beautiful, in the far dim dis- 
 tance, beyond the tawny seas of reeds. Smoke and sand soon 
 densely rose above the struggle, white, hot, blinding ; but out 
 from it the lean dark Bedouin faces, the snowy haicks, the 
 red burnous, the gleam of the Tunisian muskets, the flash of 
 the silver-hilted yataghans, were seen fused in a mass with 
 kiie brawny naked necks of the Zouaves, with the shine of the 
 
 D D 
 
402 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 French bayonets, with the tossmg manes and glowing nostrils 
 of the Chasseurs' horses, with the torn, stained silk of the 
 raised Tricolor, through which the storm of balls flew thick 
 and fast as hail, j^et whose folds were never suffered to fall, 
 though again and again the hand that held its staff was cut 
 away or was unloosed in death, yet ever found another to take 
 its charge before the Flag could once have trembled in the 
 enemy's sight. 
 
 The Chasseurs could not charge; they were hemmed in, 
 packed between bodies of horsemen that pressed them together 
 as between iron plates ; now and then they could cut their 
 way through, clear enough to reach their comrades of the 
 demie cavalerie, but as often as they did so, so often the over- 
 whelming numbers of the Arabs surged in on them afresh like 
 a flood, and closed upon them, and drove them back. 
 
 Every soldier in the squadron that lived kept his life by 
 sheer, breathless, ceaseless, hand-to-hand sword-play, hewing 
 right and left, front and rear, without pause, as in the great 
 tangled forests of the west men hew aside branch and brush- 
 wood ere they can force one step forward. 
 
 The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of 
 morning, and the day rose radiant over the world; they stayed 
 not for its beauty or its peace ; the carnage went on hour upon 
 hour ; men began to grow drunk with slaughter as with raki. 
 It was sublimely grand ; it was hideously hateful — this wild 
 beast struggle, this heaving tumult of striving Uves that ever 
 and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke from 
 it as the lightning from the nigl.it. The sun laughed in its 
 warmth over a thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas 
 lying northward, and over the yellow sands of the south ; but 
 the touch of its lieat only made the flame in their blood burn 
 fiercer ; the fulness of its light only served to show them 
 clearer where to strike and how to slay. 
 
 It was bitter, stifling, cruel work ; with their mouths choked 
 with sand, with their throats caked with thirst, with their 
 eyes blind with smoke ; cramped as in a vice, scorched with 
 the blaze of powder, covered with blood and with dust ; while 
 the steel was thrust through nerve and sinew, or the shot 
 ploughed through bone and flesh. The answering fire of the 
 Zouaves and Tirailleurs kept the Arabs further at bay, and 
 mowed them faster down ; but in the Chasseurs' quarter of 
 the field — parted from the rest of their comrades as they had 
 
ZARAILA 403 
 
 been by the rush of that broken charge with which they had 
 sought to save the camp and arrest the foe — the worst pressure 
 of the attack was felt, and the fiercest of the slaughter fell. 
 
 The Chef d'Escadron had been shot dead as they had first 
 swept out to encounter the advance of the desert horsemen ; 
 one by one the officers had been cut down, singled out by the 
 keen eyes of their enemies, and throwing themselves into the 
 deadUest of the carnage with the impetuous self-devotion 
 characteristic of their service. At the last there remained but 
 a mere handful out of all the brilliant squadron that had gal- 
 loped down in the grey of the dawn to meet the whirlwind of 
 Arab fury. At their head was Cecil. 
 
 Two horses had been killed under him, and he had thrown 
 himself afresh across unwounded chargers, whose riders had 
 fallen in the melee, and at whose bridles he had caught as he 
 shook himself free of the dead animals' stirrups. His head 
 was uncovered ; his uniform, hurriedly thrown on, had been 
 torn aside, and his chest was bare to the red folds of his sash ; 
 he was drenched with blood, not his own, that had rained on 
 him as he fought ; and his face and his hands were black 
 with smoke and with powder. He could not see a yard in 
 front of hijn ; he could not tell how the day went anywhere, 
 save in that corner where his own troop was hemmed in. As 
 fast as they beat the Arabs back, and forced themselves some 
 clearer space, so fast the tribes closed in afresh. No orders 
 reached him from the General of Brigade in command ; except 
 for the well-known war-shouts of the Zouaves that ever and 
 again rang above the din, he could not tell whether the 
 French battalions were not cut utterly to pieces under the 
 immense numerical superiority of their foes. All he could 
 see was that every officer of Chasseurs was down, and that 
 unless he took the vacant place, and rallied them together, 
 the few score troopers that were still left would scatter, con- 
 fused and demoralised, as the best soldiers will at times when 
 they can see no chief to follow. 
 
 He spurred the horse he had just mounted against the 
 dense crowd opposing him, against the hard black wall of 
 dust, and smoke, and steel, and savage faces, and lean swarthy 
 arms, which were all that his eyes could see, and that seemed 
 impenetrable as granite, moving and changing though it was 
 He thrust the grey against it, while he waved his sword above 
 his head. 
 
 D D 8 
 
404 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * En avant, mes frdres t Frmwe I France t France / * 
 His voice, well known, well loved, thrilled the hearts of 
 
 bis comrades, and brought them together like a trumpet-call. 
 They had gone with him many a time into the hell of battle, 
 into the jaws of death. They surged about him now, striking, 
 thrusting, forcing, with blows of their sabres or their lances 
 and blows of their beasts' fore-feet, a passage one to another, 
 until they were reunited once more as one troop, while their 
 shrill shouts, Hke an oath of vengeance, echoed after him in 
 the butchery, that has pealed victorious over so many fields 
 from the soldiery of France. They loved him ; he had called 
 them his brethren. They were like lambs for him to lead, 
 like tigers for him to incite. 
 
 They could scarcely see his face in that great red mist of 
 combat, in that horrible stifling pressure on every side that 
 jammed them as if they were in a press of iron, and gave 
 them no power to pause, though their animals' hoofs struck 
 the lingering life out of some half-dead comrade, or trampled 
 over the writhing limbs of the brother-in-arms they loved 
 dearest and best. But his voice reached them, clear and 
 ringing in its appeal for sake of the country they never once 
 forgot or once reviled, though in her name they were starved 
 and beaten like rebellious hounds, though in her cause they 
 were exiled all their manhood through under the sun of this 
 cruel, ravenous, burning Africa. They could see him lift aloft 
 the Eagle he had caught from the last hand that had borne 
 it, the golden gleam of the young morning flashing like flame 
 upon the brazen wings ; and they shouted, as with one throat, 
 ' Mazagran I Mazagran I ' As the battalion of Mazagran had 
 died keeping the ground through the whole of the scorching 
 day, while the fresh hordes poured down on them like cease- 
 less torrents snow-fed and exhaustless, so they were ready to 
 hold the ground here, until of all their number there should 
 be left not one living man. 
 
 He glanced back on them, guarding his head the while 
 from the lances that were rained on him ; and he lifted the 
 Guidon higher and higher, till, out of the ruck and the 
 throng, the brazen bird caught afresh the rays of the rising 
 sun. 
 
 * Suivez-moi ! ' he shouted. 
 
 Then, like arrows launched at once from a hundred bows, 
 they charged, he still slightly in advance of them, the bridle 
 
ZARAILA 405 
 
 flung upon his horse's neck, his head and breast bare, one 
 hand striking aside with his blade the steel shafts as they 
 poured on him, the other holding high above the press the 
 Eagle of the Bonapaites. 
 
 The effort was superb. 
 
 Dense bodies of Arabs parted them in the front from the 
 camp where the battle raged, harassed them in the rear with 
 flying shots and hurled lances, and forced down on them on 
 either side, like the closing jaws of a trap. The impetuosity 
 of their onward movement was, for the moment, u-resistible ; 
 it bore headlong all before it ; the desert horses recoiled, and 
 the desert riders themselves yielded, crushed, staggered, 
 trodden aside, struck aside, by the tremendous impetus with 
 which the Chasseurs were thrown upon them. For the 
 moment, the Bedouins gave way, shaken and confused, as at 
 the head of the French they saw this man, with his hair 
 blowing in the wind, and the sun on the fairness of his face, 
 ride down on them thus unharmed, though a dozen spears 
 were aimed at his naked breast, dealing strokes sure as death 
 right and left as he went, with the light from the hot blue 
 skies on the ensign of France that he bore. 
 
 They knew him ; they had met him in many conflicts ; and 
 wherever the * fair Frank,' as they called him, came, there 
 they knew of old the battle was hard to win ; bitter to the 
 bitterest end, whether that end were defeat, or victory costly 
 as defeat in its achievement. 
 
 And for the moment they recoiled under the shock of that 
 fiery onslaught ; for the moment they parted, and wavered 
 and oscillated beneath the impetus with which he hurled his 
 hundred Chasseurs on them, with that light, swift, inde- 
 scribable rapidity and resistlessness of attack characteristic of 
 the African Cavalry. 
 
 Though a score or more, one on another, had singled him 
 out with special and violent attack, he had gone, as yet, 
 un wounded, save for a lance-thrust in his shoulder, of which, 
 in the heat of the conflict, he was unconscious. The * fighting 
 fury ' was upon him ; and when once this had been ht in 
 him, the Arabs knew of old that the fiercest vulture in the 
 Frankish ranks never struck so surely home as this hand ^hat 
 his comrades called ' mam dejemm e, mais main de Jer.' 
 
 As he spurred his horse ^wn on them nowTtwenty blades 
 glittered against him ; the foremost would have cut straight 
 
4o6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 down through the bone of his bared chest and killed him at a 
 single lunge, but as its steel flashed in the sun, one of his 
 troopers threw himself against it, and parried the stroke from 
 him by sheathing it in his own breast. The blow was mortal, 
 and the one who had saved him reeled down off his saddle 
 under the hoofs of the trampling chargers. * Picpon s'en 
 souvient,' he murmured with a smile ; and as the charge 
 swept onward, Cecil, \^dth a great cry of horror, saw the feet 
 of the maddened horses strike to pulp the writhing body, and 
 saw the black wistful eyes of the Enfant de Paris look upward 
 to him once, with love, and fealty, and unspeakable sweetness 
 gleaming through their darkened sight. 
 
 But to pause was impossible. Though the French horses 
 were forced with marvellous dexterity through a bristling 
 forest of steel, though the remnant of the once- glittering 
 squadron was cast against them in as headlong a daring as if 
 it had half the regiments of the Empire at its back, the charge 
 availed little against the hosts of the desert that had rallied 
 and swooped down afresh almost as soon as they had been, for 
 the instant of the shock, panic-stricken. The hatred of the 
 opposed races was aroused in all its blind ravening passion ; 
 the conquered had the conquering nation for once at their 
 mercy ; for once at tremendous disadvantage ; on neither side 
 was there aught except that one instinct for slaughter, which, 
 once awakened, kills every other in the breast in which it 
 burns. 
 
 The Arabs had cruel years to avenge — years of a loathed 
 tyranny, years of starvation and oppression, years of constant 
 flight southward, with no choice but submission or death. 
 They had deadly memories to wash out — memories of brethren 
 who had been killed like carrion by the invaders' shot and 
 steel ; of nomadic freedom begrudged and crushed by civilisa- 
 tion ; of young children murdered in the darkness of the 
 caverns, with the sulphurous smoke choking the innocent 
 throats that had only breathed the golden air of a few 
 summers; of women, well beloved, torn from them in the 
 hot flames of burning tents and outraged before their eyes 
 with insult whose end was a bayonet-thrust into their breasts 
 — breasts whose sin was fidelity to the vanquished. 
 
 They had vengeance to do that made every stroke seem 
 righteous and holy in their sight ; that nerved each of their 
 bare and sinewy arms as with the strength of a thousand 
 
 i 
 
ZARAILA 407 
 
 limba. Right — so barren, so hopeless, so unavailing — had 
 long been with them. Now with it was added at Ust the 
 power of might; and they exercised the power with the 
 savage ruthlessness of the desert. They closed in on every 
 side ; wheeling their swift coursers hither and thither ; striking 
 with lance and blade ; hemming in, beyond escape, the doomed 
 fragment of the Frankish squadron till there remained of 
 them but one small nucleus, driven close together, rather as 
 infantry will form than as cavalry usually does — a ring of 
 horsemen, of which every one had his face to the foe ; a solid 
 circle curiously wedged one against the other, with the bodies 
 of chargers and of men deep around them, and with the 
 ground soaked with blood till the sand was one red morass. 
 
 Cecil held the Eagle still, and looked round on the few left 
 to him. 
 
 * You are sons of the Old Guard : die like them.* 
 
 They answered with a pealing cry, terrible as the cry of 1 
 the lion m the hush of night, but a shout that had in it assent, ( 
 triumph, fealty, victory, even as they obeyed him and drew \ 
 up to die, while in their front was the young brow of Petit 
 Picpon turned upward to the glare of the skies. 
 
 There was nothing for them but to draw up thus, and await 
 their butchery, defending the Eagle to the last ; looking till 
 the last toward that 'woman's face of their leader,' as they 
 had often termed it, that was to them now as^ the face of 
 Napoleon was to the soldiers who loved him. '~" ~ 
 
 There was a pause, brief as is the pause of the lungs to 
 «take a fuller breath. The Arabs honoured these men, who 
 alone and in the midst of the hostile force held their ground 
 and prepared thus to be slaughtered one by one, till of all the 
 squadron that had ridden out in the darkness of the dawn 
 there should be only a black, huddled, stiffened heap of dead 
 men and of dead beasts. The chief who led them pressed 
 them back, withholding them from the end that was so new 
 to their hands when they should stretch that single ring of 
 horsemen all lifeless in the dust. 
 
 * You are great warriors,' he cried, in the Sabir tongue ; 
 * surrender, we will spare 1 ' 
 
 Cecil looked back once more on the fragment of his troop, 
 and raised the Eagle higher aloft where the wings should 
 glisten in the fuller day. Half naked, scorched, blinded, i 
 with an open gash in his shoulder where the lance had struck, I 
 
4o8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and with his brow wet with the great dews of the noon-heat 
 and the breathless toil, his eyes were clear as they flashed 
 with the light of the sun in them ; his mouth smiled as he 
 answered : 
 
 * Have we shown ourselves cowards, that you think we 
 shall yield ? ' 
 
 A hourrah of wild delight from the Chasseurs he led greeted 
 and ratified the choice : ' On meurt — on 7ie se rend pas ! ' 
 they shouted in the words, which, even if they be but 
 legendary, are too true to the spirit of the soldiers of France 
 not to be as truth in their sight. Then, with their swords 
 above their heads, they waited for the collision of the terrible 
 attack which would fall on them upon every side, and strike 
 all the sentient life out of them before the sun should be one 
 point higher in the heavens. It came : with a yell as of wild 
 beasts in their famine, the Arabs threw themselves forward, 
 the chief himself singling out the * fair Frank ' with the 
 violence of a lion flinging himself on a leopard. One instant 
 longer, one flash of time, and the tribes pressing on them 
 would have massacred them like cattle driven into the pens 
 of slaughter. Ere it could be done, a voice like the ring of a 
 silver trumpet echoed over the field : 
 
 * En avant ! En avant I Tue, tue, tue I ' 
 
 Above the din, the shouts, the tumult, the echoing of the 
 distant musketry, that silvery cadence rung ; down into the 
 midst, with the Tricolor waving above her head, the bridle 
 of her fiery mare between her teeth, the raven of the dead 
 Zouave flying above her head, and her pistol levelled in deadly, 
 aim, rode Cigarette. 
 
 The lightning fire of the crossing swords played round her, 
 the glitter of the lances dazzled her eyes, the reek of smoke 
 and of carnage was round her ; but she dashed down into the 
 heart of the conflict as gaily as though she rode at a review, 
 laughing, shouting, waving the torn colours that she grasped, 
 with her curls blowing back in the breeze, and her bright 
 young face set m the warrior's lust. Behind her, but scarcely 
 a length, galloped three squadrons of Chasseurs and Spahis ; 
 trampling headlong over the corpse-strewn field, and break- 
 ing through the masses of the Arabs as though they were seas 
 of corn. 
 
 She wheeled her mare round bj Cecil's side at the moment 
 when, with six swift passes of his blade he had warded off 
 
ZARAILA 409 
 
 the Chief's blows and sent his own sword down through the 
 chest-bones of the Bedouin's mighty form. 
 
 * Well struck ! The day is turned. Charge 1 ' 
 
 She gave the order as though she were a Marshal of the 
 Empire, the suu-blaze full on her where she sat on the rear- 
 ing, fretting, half-bred grey, with the Tricolor folds above 
 her head, and her teeth tight gripped on the chain-bridle, and 
 her face all glowing and warm and full of the fierce fire of 
 war — a Httle Amazon in scarlet, and blue, and gold ; a young 
 -Jeanne d'Arc, with the crimson fez in lieu of the silvered 
 casque, and the gay broideries of her fantastic dress instead 
 of the breastplate of steel. And with the Flag of her idolatry, 
 the Flng that was as her religion, floating back as she went, 
 she spurred her mare straight against the Arabs, straight over 
 the lifeless forms of the hundreds slain ; and after her poured 
 the fresh squadrons of cavalry, the ruby burnous of the Spahis 
 streaming on the wind as their darling led them on to retrieve 
 the day for France. 
 
 Not a bullet struck, not a sabre grazed her ; but there, in 
 the heat and the press of the worst of the slaughter, Cigarette 
 rode hither and thither, to and fro, her voice ringing like a 
 bird's song over the field, in command, in applause, in encou- 
 ragement, in delight ; bearing her standard aloft and un- 
 touched ; dashing heedless through a storm of blows ; cheer- 
 ing on her - children * to the charge again and again ; and 
 all the while with the sunlight full on her radiant spirited 
 head, and with the grim grey raven flying ^bjim her, shriek- 
 ing shrilly its ^ Tue, ttie^"^tu'e7' ~ The Army believed with 
 superstitious faith in the potent spell of that veteran bird, and 
 the story ran that whenever he flew above a combat France 
 was victor before the sun set. The echo of the raven's cry, 
 and the presence of the child who, they knew, would have a 
 thousand musket balls fired in her fair young breast rather 
 than live to see them defeated, made the fresh squadrons 
 sweep in like a whirlwind, bearing down all before them. 
 
 Cigarette saved the day. 
 
4IO UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 THE LOVE OP THE AMAZON 
 
 Befobb the sun had declined from his zenith the French 
 were masters of the field, and pursued the retreat of the 
 Arabs till for miles along the plain the line of their flight was 
 marked with horses that had dropped dead in the strain, and 
 with the motionless forms of their desert riders, their cold 
 hands clinched in the loose hot sands, and their stern faces 
 turned upward to the cloudless scorch of their native skies, 
 under whose freedom they would never again ride forth to 
 the joyous clash of the cymbals and the fierce embrace of the 
 death-grapple. 
 
 When at length she returned, coming in with her ruthless 
 Spahis, whose terrible passions she feared no more than 
 Virgil's Volscian huntress feared the beasts of forest and 
 plain, the raven still hovered above her exhausted mare, the 
 torn flag was still in her left hand ; and the bright laughter, 
 the flash of ecstatic triumph, was still in her face as she sang 
 the last lines of her own war-chant. The leopard nature was 
 roused in her. She was a soldier ; death had been about her 
 from her birth ; she neither feared to give nor to receive it ; 
 she was proud as ever was young Pompeius flushed with the 
 glories of his first eastern conquests ; she was happy as such 
 elastic, sunlit, dauntless youth as hers alone can be, return- 
 ing in the reddening afterglow at the head of her comrades 
 to the camp that she had saved. 
 
 She could be cruel — women are, when roused, as many a 
 revolution has shown ; she could be herioc — she would have 
 died a hundred deaths for France ; she was vain with a viva- 
 cious childlike vanity ; she was brave with a bravery beside 
 which many a man's high courage palled. Cruelty, heroism, 
 vanity, and bravery were all on fire, and all fed to their utter- 
 most, most eager, most ardent flame, now that she came back 
 at the head of her Spahis ; while all who remained of tbe 
 soldiers who, but for her, would have been massacred long 
 ere then, without one spared among them, threw themselves 
 forward, crowded round her, caressed, and laughed, and wept, 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 411 
 
 and shouted with all the changes of their intense mercurial I 
 temperaments, kissed her boots, her sash, her mare*s drooping ( 
 neck, and, lifting her, with wild vivas that rent the sky, on ! 
 to the shoulders of the four tallest men among them, bore 
 her to the presence of the only officer of high rank who had ; 
 survived the terrors of the day, a Chef de Bataillon of the I 
 Zouaves. 
 
 And he, a grave and noble-looking veteran, uncovered 
 his head and bowed before her as courtiers bow before their 
 queens. 
 
 * Mademoiselle, you saved the honour of France. In the 
 name of France, I thank you.' 
 
 The tears rushed swift and hot into Cigarette's bright eyes ] 
 — tears of joy, tears of pride. She was but a child still in I 
 much, and she could be moved by the name of France as other ; 
 children by the name of their mothers. / 
 
 * Chut 1 I did nothing,' she said rapidly. * I only rode 
 fast/ 
 
 The frenzied hurrahs of the men who heard her drowned | 
 her words. They loved her for what she had done ; they ' 
 loved her better still because she set no count on it. 
 
 * The Empire will think otherwise,' said the Major of 
 the Zouaves. * Tell me, my Little One, how did you do this 
 thing ? ' 
 
 Cigarette, balancing herself with a foot on either shoulder 
 of her supporters, gave the salute and answered : 
 
 * Simply, mon Commandant — very simply. I was alone, 
 riding midway between you and the main army — three 
 leagues, say, from each. I was all alone ; only Vole-qui-veut 
 flying with me for fun. I met a colon. I knew the man. 
 For the matter of that, I did him once a service — saved his 
 geese and his fowls from burning, one winter's day, in their 
 house, while he rung his hands and looked on. Well, he was 
 full of terror, and told me there was fighting yonder — here 
 he meant — so I rode nearer to see. That was just upon 
 sunrise. I dismounted, and ran up a palm there.' And 
 Cigarette pointed to a far-off slope crowned with the remains 
 of a once-mighty palm forest. ' I got up very high. I could 
 see miles round. I saw how things were with you. For the 
 moment I was coming straight to you. Then I thought I 
 should do more service if I let the main army know, and 
 brought you a reinforcement. I rode fast. Dieu ! I rode 
 
413 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 fast. My horse dropped under me twice ; but I reached them i 
 at last, and I went at once to the General. He guessed at a 
 glance how things were, and I told him to give me my Spahis 
 and let me go. So he did. I got on a mare of his own staff, 
 and away we came. Ma foi ! it was a near thing. If we 
 had been a minute later, it had been all up with you.' 
 
 * True, indeed,' muttered the Zouave in his beard. * A . 
 superb action, my Little One. But did you meet no Arab 
 Bcouts to stop you ? ' 
 
 Cigarette laughed, 
 
 ' Did I not ? Met them by dozens. Some had a shot at 
 me ; some had a shot from me. One fellow nearly winged 
 me ; but I got through them all somehow. Sapristi ! I 
 galloped so fast I was very hard to hit flying. Those things 
 only require a little judgment ; but some men, pardi I always 
 are creeping when they should fly, and always are scampering 
 when they should saunter ; and then they wonder when they 
 make fiasco ! Bah ! ' 
 j j And Cigarette laughed again. Men were such bunglers — 
 1 j ouf ! 
 ' ' Mademoiselle, if all soldiers were like you,* answered the 
 Major of Zouaves, curtly, * to command a battalion would be 
 paradise ! ' 
 
 * All soldiers would do anything I have done,' retorted 
 Cigarette, who never took a compliment at the expense of her 
 * children.' ' They do not all get the opportunity, look 
 you ; c*est tout ! Opportunity is a little angel ; some catch 
 him as he goes, some let him pass by for ever. You must be 
 quick with him, for he is like an eel to wriggle away. If 
 you want a good soldier, take that aristocrat of the Chasse- 
 Marais — that beau Victor. Pouf I all his officers were down ; 
 and how splendidly he led the troop ! He was going to die 
 with them rather than surrender. Napoleon ' — and Cigarette 
 uncovered her curly head reverentially as at the name of a 
 deity — ' Napoleon would have given him his brigade ere this. 
 If you had seen him kill the chief I ' 
 
 ' He will have justice done him, never fear. And for you 
 — the Cross shall be on your breast. Cigarette, if I live over 
 to-night to write my despatches.' 
 
 And the Chef de Bataillon saluted her once more, and 
 turned away to view the carnage-strewn plain, and number 
 the few who remained out of those who had been wakened by 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 413 
 
 the clash of the Arab arms in the grey of the earliest 
 dawn. 
 
 Cigarette's eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her 
 flushed cheeks grew scarlet. Since her infancy it had been 
 her dream to have the CroPS, to have the Grande Croix to lie 
 above her little lion's heart : it had been the one longing, the 
 one ambition, the one undying desire of her soul ; and lo I she 
 touched its realisation ! 
 
 The wild, frantic, tumultuous cheers and caresses of her 
 soldiery, who could not triumph in her and triumph with her j 
 enough to satiate them, recalled her to the actual moment. ' 
 She sprang down from her elevation, and turned on them with 
 a rebuke. * Ah ! you are making this fuss about me while 
 hundreds of better soldiers than I lie yonder. Let us look to 
 them first ; we will play the fool afterwards.' 
 
 And, though she had ridden fifty miles that day, if she 
 had ridden one — though she had eaten nothing since sunrise, 
 and had only had one draught of bad water — though she was 
 tired, and stiff, and bruised, and parched with thirst, 
 Cigarette dashed off as lightly as a young goat to look for 
 the wounded and the dying men who strewed the plain far 
 and near. 
 
 She remembered one whom she had not seen after that first s^ 
 
 moment in which she had given the word to the squadrons to .^>^ 
 charge. -, oj^ "^ 
 
 It was a terrible sight — the arid plain, lying in the scarlefH 
 glow of sunset, covered with dead bodies, with mutilated 1 
 hmbs, with horses gasping and writhing, with men raving I 
 hke mad creatures in the torture of their wounds. It was a 
 sight which always went to her heart. She was a true 
 soldier, and, though she could deal death pitilessly, could, 
 when the delirium of war was over, tend and yield infinite 
 compassion to those who were in suffering. But such scenes 
 had been familiar to her from the earliest years when, on an 
 infant's limbs, she had toddled over such battle-fields, and t ^' 
 wound tiny hands in the hair of some dead trooper who had 
 given her sweetmeats the hour before, vainly trying to 
 awaken him. And she went through all the intense misery 
 and desolation of the scene now without shrinking, and with 
 that fearless tender devotion to the wounded which Cigarette 
 showed in common with other soldiers of her nation, being, 
 like them, a young lion in the combati but a creature 
 
414 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 unspeakably gentle and full of sympathy when the fury of 
 the fight was over. 
 
 She had seen great slaughter often enough, but even she 
 had not seen any struggle more close, more murderous, than 
 this had been. The dead lay by hundreds ; French and 
 Arab locked in one another's limbs as they had fallen when 
 the ordinary mode of warfare had failed to satiate their 
 violence, and they had wrestled together like wolves fighting 
 and rending each other over a disputed carcass. The bitter- 
 ness and the hatred of the contest were shown in the fact thaf 
 there were very few merely wounded or disabled ; almost all 
 of the numbers that strewed the plain were dead. It had 
 been a battle-royal, and, but for her arrival with the fresh 
 squadrons, not one among her countrymen would have lived 
 to tell the story of this terrible duello which had been as 
 magnificent in heroism as any Austerlitz or Gemappes, but 
 which would pass unhonoured, almost unnamed, among the 
 futile fruitless heroisms of Algerian warfare. 
 
 * Is he killed ? Is he killed ? ' she thought, as she bent 
 over each knot of motionless bodies where here and there 
 some faint stifled breath or some moan of agony told that life 
 still lingered beneath the huddled stifiening heap. And a 
 tightness came at her heart, an aching fear made her shrink, 
 as she raised each hidden face that she had never known 
 before. * What if he be ? ' she said fiercely to herself. * It 
 is nothing to me. I hate him, the cold aristocrat. I ought 
 to be glad if I see him lie here.' 
 
 But, despite her hatred for him, she could not banish that 
 hot feverish hope, that cold suffocating fear, which, turn by 
 turn, quickened and slackened the bright flow of her warm 
 young blood as she searched among the slain. 
 
 * Ah ! le pauvre Picpon ! ' she said, softly, as she reached 
 at last the place where the young Chasseur lay, and lifted the 
 black curls off his forehead. The hoofs of the charging 
 cavalry had cruelly struck and trampled his frame ; the back 
 had been broken, and the body had been mashed as in a 
 mortar under the thundering gallop of the Horse ; but the 
 face was still uninjured, and had a strange pathetic beauty, 
 a calm and smiling courage on it. It was ashen pale ; but 
 the great black eyes that had glistened in such malicious 
 mirth, and sparkled in such malignant mischief during life, 
 were open, and had a mournful pitiful serenity in their look 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 415 
 
 wts if from their depths the soul still gazed — that soul which 
 had been neglected and cursed, and left to wander among evil 
 ways, yet, which, through all its darkness, all its ignorance 
 had reached, unguided, to love and to nobility. 
 
 Cigarette closed their long black lashes down on the white 
 cheeks w^ith soft and reverent touch ; she had seen that look 
 ere now on the upturned faces of the dead who had strewn 
 the barricades of Paris, with the words of the Marseillaise the 
 last upon their lips. 
 
 To her there could be no fate fairer, no glory more glorious, 
 than this of his — to die for France. And she laid him gently 
 down, and left him, and went on with her quest. 
 
 It was here that she had lost sight of Cecil as they had 
 charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with 
 noise and terror, had torn away at a full speed that had 
 outstripped even the swiftest of her Spahis. A httle farther 
 on a dog's moan caught her ear ; she turned and looked 
 across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, 
 sat the small snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air 
 with its httle paws as it had been taught to do when it needed 
 anything, and howling piteously as it begged. 
 
 ' FHck-Flack ? What is it, Fhck-Flack ? ' she cried to 
 him, while, with a bound, she reached the spot. The dog 
 leaped on her rejoicing. The dead were thick there — ten or 
 twelve deep — French trooper and Bedouin rider flung across 
 each other, horribly entangled with the limbs, the manes, the 
 shattered bodies of their own horses. Among them she saw 
 the face she sought as the dog eagerly ran back, caressing the 
 hair of a soldier who lay underneath the weight of his grey 
 charger, that had been killed by a musket ball. 
 
 Cigarette grew very pale, as she had never grown when 
 the hailstorm of shots had been pouring on her in the midst 
 of a battle ; but, with the rapid skill and strength she had 
 acquired long before, she reached the place, lifted aside first 
 one, then another, of the lifeless Arabs that had fallen above 
 him, and drew out from beneath the suffocating pressure of 
 his horse's weight the head and the frame of the Chasseur 
 whom Flick-Flack had sought out and guarded. 
 
 For a moment she thought him dead ; then, as she drew 
 him out where the cooled breeze of the declining day could 
 reach him, a slow breath, painfully drawn, moved his chest 
 she saw that he was unconscious from the stifling oppression 
 
4i6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 under which he had been buried since the noon ; an houi 
 more without the touch of fresher air, and life would have 
 been extinct. 
 
 Cigarette had with her the flask of brandy that she always 
 brought on such errands as these ; she forced the end between 
 his lips, and poured some down his throat ; her hand shock 
 slightly as she did so, a weakness the gallant little cam- 
 paigner never before then had known. 
 
 It revived him in a degree ; he breathed more freely, 
 though heavily, and with difficulty still ; but gradually the 
 deadly leaden colour of his face was replaced by the hne of 
 life, and his heart began to beat more loudly. Consciousness 
 did not return to him ; he lay motionless and senseless, with 
 his head resting on her lap, and with Flick-Flack, iu eager 
 affection, licking his hands and his hair. 
 
 * He was as good as dead, Flick-Flack, if it had not been 
 for you and me,' said Cigarette, while she wetted his lipg 
 with more brandy. ' Ah bah ! and he would be more grate- 
 ful, Flick-Flack, for a scornful scoff from Miladi ! ' 
 
 Still, though she thought this, she let his head lie on her 
 lap, and, as she looked down on him, there was the glisten as 
 of tears in the brave sunny eyes of the little Friend of the 
 Flag. 
 
 * IZ est si heaUy si heauy si beau I ' she muttered in her 
 teeth, drawing the silk-like lock of his hair through her 
 hands, and looking at the stricken strength, the powerless 
 limbs, the bare chest, cut and bruised, and heaved painfully 
 by each uneasy breath. She was of a vivid, voluptuous, 
 artistic natnre ; she was thoroughly woman-like in her j)as- 
 sions and her instincts, though she so fiercely contemned 
 womanhood. If he had not been beautiful, she would never 
 have looked twice at him, never once have pitied his fate. 
 
 And he was beautiful still, though his hair was heavy with 
 dew and dust, though his face was scorched with powder, 
 though his eyes were closed as with the leaden weight of 
 death, and his beard was covered with the red stain of blood 
 that had flowed from the lance-wound on his shoulder. 
 
 He was not dead ; he was not even in peril of death. Bhe 
 knew enough of medical lore to know that it was but the in- 
 sensibility of exhaustion and suffocation ; and she did not 
 care that he should waken. She drooped her head over him, 
 moving her hand softly among the masses of his curls, and 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 417 
 
 watching the quickening beatings of his heart under the bare 
 strong nerves. Her face grew tender, and warm, and eager, 
 and melting with a marvellous change of passionate hues. 
 She had all the ardoar of southern blood ; without a wish he 
 had wakened in her a love that grew daily and hourly, though 
 she would not acknowledge it. She loved to see him lie there 
 as though he were asleep, to cheat herself into the fancy that 
 she watched his rest to wake it with a kiss on his lips. In 
 that unconsciousness, in that abandonment, he scsmed wholly 
 her own ; passion which she could not have analysed made 
 her bend above him with a half-fierce, half-dreamy delight in 
 that solitary possession of his beauty, of his life. 
 
 The restless movements of little Flick-Flack detached a 
 piece of twine passed round his favourite's throat : the glitter 
 of gold arrested Cigarette's eyes. She caught what the poodle's 
 impatient caress had broken from the string ; it was a small 
 blue enamel medallion bonbon-box, with a hole through it by 
 which it had been slung — a tiny toy once costly, now tar- 
 nished, for it had been carried through many rough scenes 
 and many years of hardship, had been bent by blows struck 
 at the breast against which it rested, and was clotted 1 o-v 
 with blood. Inside it was a woman's ring, of sapphires and 
 opals. 
 
 She looked at both close in the glow of the setting sun ; 
 then passed the string through and fastened the box afresh. 
 It was a mere trifle, but it sufiSced to banish her dream, to 
 arouse her to contemptuous impatient bitterness with that 
 new weakness that had for the hour broken her down to the 
 level of this feverish folly. He was beautiful — yes I She 
 could not bring herself to hate him ; she could not help the 
 brimming tears blinding her eyes when she looked at him 
 stretched senseless thus. But he was wedded to his past ; 
 that toy in his breast, whatever it might be, whatever tale 
 might cling to it, was sweeter to him than her lips would 
 ever be. Bah I there were better men than he ; why had 
 she not let him lie and die as he might under the pile of 
 dead? 
 
 Bah 1 she could have killed herself for her folly ! She, who 
 had scores of lovers, from princes to piou-pious, and never 
 had a heartache for one of them, to go and care for a silent 
 * ci-devant,' who had never even noticed that her eyes had any 
 brightness or her face had any charm ! 
 
4i8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * You deserve to be shot — you 1 ' said Cigarette, fiercely 
 abusing herself as she put his head off her lap, and rose 
 abruptly and shouted to a Tringlo who was at some distance 
 searching for the wounded. * Here is a Chasse-Marais with 
 some breath in him,' she said, curtly, as the man with his 
 mule-cart, and its sad burden of half-dead, moaning, writhing 
 frames drew near at her summons. * Put him in. Soldiers 
 cost too much training to waste them on jackals and kites, if 
 one can help it. Lift him up — quick I ' 
 
 * He is badly hurt ? ' said the Tringlo. 
 She shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 ' Oh, no ! I have had worse scratches myself. The horse 
 fell on him, that was the mischief. Most of them hert ha.ve 
 swallowed the ^^ petite pilule d'oubli" once and for ail. J 
 never saw a prettier thing — every Lascar has killed his own 
 little knot of Arbicos. Look how nice and neat they lie.* 
 
 Cigarette glanced over the field with the satisfied appre- 
 ciation of a dilettante glancing over a Soltikoff or Blacas 
 collection unimpeachable for accuracy and arrangement ; and 
 drank a toss of her brandy, and lighted her little amber pipe, 
 and sang loudly as she did so the gayest ballad of the Langue 
 , Verte. 
 
 She was not going to have him imagine she cared for that 
 Chasseur whom he lifted up on his little waggon with so kindly 
 a care — not she ! Cigarette was as proud in her way as was 
 ever the Princess Venetia Corona. 
 
 Nevertheless, she kept pace with the mules, carrying little 
 Flick-Flack, and never paused on her way, though she passed 
 scores of dead Arabs, whose silver ornaments and silk broi- 
 deries, commonly after such a fantasia, replenished the 
 knapsack and adorned in profusion the uniform of the young 
 filibuster, being gleaned by her, right and left, as her lawful 
 harvest after the fray. 
 
 * Leave him there. I will have a look at him,' she said, 
 at the first empty tent they reached. The camp had been the 
 scene of as fierce a struggle as the part of the plain which 
 the cavalry had held, and it was strewn with the slaughter of 
 Zouaves and Tirailleurs. The Tringlo obeyed her, and went 
 about his errand of mercy. Cigarette, left alone with the 
 wounded man, lying insensible still on a heap of forage, ceased 
 her song and grew very quiet. She had a certain surgical 
 skill, learnt as her untutored genius learnt most things, with 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 419 
 
 marvellous rapidity, by observation and intuition; and she 
 had saved many a life by her knowledge and her patient 
 attendance on the sufferers — patience that she had been famed 
 for when she had been only six years old, and a surgeon of 
 the Algerian regiments had affirmed that he could trust her 
 to be as wakeful, as watchful, and as sure to obey his directions 
 as though she were a Sceur de Charity. Now * the little fagot 
 of opposites,* as Cecil had called her, put this skill into 
 active use. 
 
 The tent had been a scullion's tent ; the poor marmiton had 
 been killed, and lay outside, with his head clean severed by an 
 Arab flissa ; his fire had gone out, but his brass pots and pans, 
 his jar of fresh water, and his various preparations for the 
 General's dinner were still there. The General was dead 
 also; far yonder, where he had fallen in the van of the 
 Zouaves, exposing himself with all the splendid reckless 
 gallantry of France ; and the soup stood unserved, the wild 
 plovers were taken by Flick-Flack, the empty dishes waited 
 for the viands which there were no hands to prepare and no 
 mouths to eat. Cigarette glanced round, and saw all with 
 one flash of her eyes ; then she knelt down beside the heap of 
 forage, and, for the first thing, dressed his wounds with the 
 cold, clear water, and washed away the dust and the blood 
 that covered his breast. 
 
 * He is too good a soldier to die ; one must do it for 
 France,' she said to herself, in a kind of self -apology. And 
 as she did it, and bound the lance gash close, and bathed his 
 breast, his forehead, his hair, his beard, free from the sand, 
 and the powder, and the gore, a thousand changes swept over 
 her mobile face. It was one moment soft, and flushed, and 
 tender as passion ; it was the next jealous, fiery, scornful, 
 pale, and full of impatient self-disdain. 
 
 He was nothing to her — morbleu ! He was an aristocrat, 
 and she was a child of the people. She had been besieged by 
 dukes, and had flouted princes ; she had borne herself in such 
 gay Hberty, such vivacious freedom, such proud and careless 
 sovereignty — bah 1 what was it to her whether this man lived 
 or died ? If she saved him, he would give her a low bow as 
 he thanked her, thinking all the while of Miladi ! 
 
 And yet she went on with her work. 
 
 Cecil had been stunned by a stroke from his horse's hoof as 
 the poor beast fell beneath and rolled over him. His wounds 
 
 KX3 
 
420 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 were slight — marvellously so for the thcusand strokes that 
 had been aimed at him ; but it was difficult to arouse him 
 from unconsciousness, and his face was white as death where 
 he lay on the heap of dry reeds and grasses. She began to 
 feel fear of that lengthened syncope ; a chill, tight, despairing 
 fear that she had never known in her life before. She knelt 
 silent a moment, drawing through her hand the wet locks of 
 his hair with the bright threads of gold gleaming in it. 
 
 Then she started up, and, leaving him, found a match, and 
 lighted the died- out wood afresh ; the fire soon blazed up, and 
 she warmed above it the soup that had grown cold, poured 
 into it some red wme that was near, and forced some, little 
 by little, down his throat. It was with difficulty at first that 
 she could pass any through his tightly locked teeth ; but by 
 degrees she succeeded, and, only half conscious still, he drank 
 it faster, the heat and the strength reviving him as its stimu- 
 lant warmed his veins. His eyes did not unclose, but he 
 stirred, moved his limbs, and, with some muttered words she 
 could not hear, drew a deeper breath and turned. 
 
 'He will sleep now — he is safe,' she thought to herself 
 while she stood watching him with a curious conflict of pity, 
 impatience, anger, and relief at war within her. 
 
 Bah ! Why was she always doing good services to this man, 
 who only cared for the blue serene eyes of a woman who 
 would never give him aught except pain ? Why should she 
 take such care to keep the fire of vitality alight in him, when 
 it had been crushed out in thousands as good as he, who would 
 have no notice save a hasty thrust into the earth, no funeral 
 chant except the screech of the carrion birds ? 
 
 Cigarette had been too successful in her rebellion against 
 all weakness, and was far too fiery a young warrior to find 
 refuge or consolation in the poet's plea. 
 
 How is it under our control to love or not to love ? 
 
 to allow anything to gain ascendancy over her that she 
 resisted, to succumb to any conqueror that was unbidden and 
 unwelcome, was a submission beyond words degrading to the 
 fearless soldier-code of the Friend of the Flag. And yet — 
 there she stayed and watched him. She took some food, for 
 she had been fasting all day ; then she dropped down before 
 the fire she had lighted, and, in one of those soft, curled, 
 
THE LOVE Of THE AMAZON 441 
 
 kitten-like attitudes that were characteristic of her, kept her 
 vfgil over him. 
 
 She was bruised, stiff, tired, longing like a tired child to 
 fall asleep ; her eyes felt hot as flame, her rounded supple 
 limbs were aching, her throat was sore with long thirst and 
 the sand that she seemed to have swallowed till no draught 
 of water or wine would take the scorched, dry pain out of it. 
 But, as she had given up her fete-day in the hospital, so she 
 sat now — as patient in the self-sacrifice as she was impatient 
 when the vivacious agility of her young frame was longing 
 for the frenzied delights of the dance or the battle. 
 
 Yonder she knew, where her Spahis bivouacked on the 
 hard-won field, there were riotous homages, wild applause, 
 intoxicated triumph waiting for the Little One who had saved 
 the day, if she chose to go out for it ; and she loved, to be the 
 centre of such adoration and rejoicing with all the exultant 
 vanity of a child and a hero in one. Here there were warmth 
 of flames, quietness of rest, long hours for slumber, all that 
 her burning eyes and throbbing nerves were longing for, as 
 the sleep she would not yield to stole on her, and the racking 
 pain of fatigue cramped her bones. But she would not go to 
 the pleasure without, and she would not give way to the 
 weariness that tortured her. 
 
 Cigarette could crucify self with a generous courage, all the 
 purer because it never occurred to her that there was anything 
 of virtue or of sacrifice in it. She was acting en hon soldat — 
 that was all. Pouf ! that wanted no thanks. 
 
 Silence settled over the camp ; half the slain could not be 
 buried, and the clear luminous stars rose on the ghastly 
 plateau. All that she heard were the challenge of sentinels, 
 the tramp of patrols. The guard visited her once : ' C'est 
 Cigarette,' she said, briefly, and she was left undisturbed. 
 
 She kept herself awake in the little dark tent, only lit by 
 the glow of the fire. Dead men were just without, and in 
 the moonlight without, as the night came on, she could see 
 the severed throat of the scullion, and the head farther off, 
 like a round grey stone. But that was nothing to Cigarette ; 
 dead men were no more to her than dead trees are to others. 
 
 Every now and then, four or five times in an hour, she 
 gave him whom she tended the soup or the wine that she kept 
 warmed for him over the embers. He took it without know- 
 ledge, sunk half in lethargy, half in sleep ; but it kept the 
 
424 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 life glowing in him which, without it, might have perished of 
 cold and exhaustion as the chills and northerly wind of the 
 evening succeeded to the heat of the day, and pierced through 
 the canvas walls of the tent. It was very bitter ; more keenly 
 felt because of the previous burning of the sun. There was 
 no cloak or covering to fling over him : she took off her blue 
 cloth tunic and threw it across his chest, and, shivering 
 despite herself, curled closer to the little fire. 
 
 She did not know why she did it — he was nothing to her 
 — and yet she kept herself wide awake through the dark 
 autumn night, lest he should sigh or stir and she not hear 
 him. 
 
 * I have saved his life twice,' she thought, looking at him ; 
 /beware of the third time, they say ! ' 
 
 He moved restlessly, and she went to him. His face was 
 flushed now ; his breath came rapidly and shortly ; there was 
 some fever on him. The linen was displaced from his wounds ; 
 she dipped it again in water, and laid the cooled bands on 
 them. * Ah, bah ! If I were not unsexed enough for this, 
 how would it be with you now ? ' she said in her teeth. He 
 tossed wearily to and fro ; detached words caught her ear as 
 he muttered them : 
 
 ' Let it be, let it be — he is welcome I How could I prove 
 it at his cost ? I saved him — I could do that. It was not 
 much ' 
 
 She listened with intent anxiety to hear the other whispers 
 ending the sentence, but they were stifled and broken. 
 
 * Tiens I ' she murmured below her breath. ' It is for some 
 other he has ruined himself.' 
 
 She could not catch the words that followed. They were 
 in an unknown language to her, for she knew nothing of 
 English, and they poured fast and obscure fi'om his lips as he 
 moved in feverish unrest ; the wine that had saved him from 
 exhaustion inflaming his brain in his sleep. Now and then 
 French phrases crossed the English ones ; she leaned down to 
 seize their meaning till her cheek was against his forehead, 
 till her lips touched his hair; and at that half caress her 
 heart beat, her face flushed, her mouth trembled with a too 
 vivid joy, with an impulse, half fear and half longing, that 
 had never so moved her before. 
 
 * If I had my birthright,' he muttered in her own tongue. 
 ' If I had it — would she look so cold then ? She might love 
 
THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON 423 
 
 me — women used once. 0, Godl if she had not looked on me, 
 I had never known all I have lost ! ' 
 
 Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang 
 up from her rest beside him. 
 
 * She — she — always she I ' she muttered fiercely, while hei? 
 face grew duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent ; and she 
 went slowly away, back to the low wood fire. 
 
 This was to be ever her reward ! 
 
 Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery vengeful pas- 
 sions of her hot and jealous instincts. Cigarette had in her 
 the violence as she had the nobility of a grand nature that has 
 gone whoHy untutored and unguided ; and she had the power 
 of southern vengeance in her, though she had also the swift 
 and rapid impulse to forgiveness of a generous and sunlit 
 temper. It was bitter, beyond any other bitterness that could 
 have wounded her, for the spoilt, victorious, imperious, little 
 empress of the Army of Algeria, to feel that, though she had 
 given his life twice back to this man, she was less to him than 
 the tiny white dog that nestled in his breast ; that she who 
 never before had endured a slight, or known what neglect 
 could mean, gave care, and pity, and aid, and even tender- 
 ness, to one whose only thought was for a woman who had 
 accorded him nothing but a few chill syllables of haughty 
 condescension 1 
 
 He lay there unconscious of her presence, tossing wearily to 
 and fro in fevered unrefreshing sleep, murmuring incoherent 
 words of French and English strangely mingled ; and Cigarette 
 crouched on the ground, with the firelight playing all over 
 her picturesque, childlike beauty, and her large eyes strained 
 and savage, yet with a strange mistful pain in them, looking 
 out at the moonlight where the headless body lay in a cold 
 grey sea of shadow. 
 
 Yet she did not leave him. 
 
 She was too generous for that. * What is right is right. 
 He is a soldier of France,' she muttered, while she kept her 
 vigil. She felt no want of sleep ; a hard, hateful wakefulness 
 seemed to have banished all rest from her ; she stayed there 
 all the night through. Whenever she could ease or aid him 
 she rose and did so, with the touch of water on his forehead, 
 or of cooled wine to his lips, by the alteration of the linen on 
 his wounds, or the shifting of the rough forage that made his 
 bed. But she did it without anythmg of that loving, lingering 
 
424 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 attendance she had given before ; she never once drew out the 
 task longer than it needed, or let her hands wander among 
 his hair, or over his lips, as she had done before. 
 
 And he never once was conscious of it ; he never once 
 knew that she was near. He did not waken from the painful, 
 delirious, stupefied slumber that had fallen on him ; he only 
 vaguely felt that he was suffering pain ; he only vaguely 
 dreamed of what he murmured of — his past, and the beauty 
 of the woman who had brought all the memories of that past 
 back on him. 
 
 And this was Cigarette's reward — to hear him mutter 
 wearily of the proud eyes and of the lost smile of another ! 
 
 The dawn came at last; her constant care and the skill 
 with which she had cooled and dressed his wounds had done 
 him infinite service ; the fever had subsided, and towards 
 morning his incoherent words ceased, his breathing grew 
 calmer and more tranquil ; he fell asleep — sleep that was 
 profound, dreamless, and refreshing. 
 
 She looked at him with a tempestuous shadow darkening 
 her face that yet was soft with a tenderness that she could 
 not banish. She hated him ; she ought to have stabbed or 
 shot him rather than have tended him thus ; he neglected 
 her, and only thought of that woman of his old Order. As 
 a daughter of the People, as a child of the Army, as a soldier 
 of France, she ought to have killed him rather than have 
 caressed his hair and soothed his pain ! Pshaw ! She 
 ground one in another her tiny white teeth, that were like a 
 spaniel's. 
 
 Then gently, very gently, lest she would waken him, she 
 took her tunic skirt with which she had covered him from 
 the chills of the night, put more broken wood on the fading 
 fire, and with a last lingering look at him where he slept, 
 passed out from the tent as the sun rose in a flushed and 
 beautiful dawn. He would never know that she had saved 
 him thus : be never should know it, she vowed in her heart. 
 
 Cigarette was very haughty in her own wayward, careless 
 fashion. At a word of love from him, at a kiss from his lips, 
 at a prayer from his voice, she would have given herself to 
 him in all the abandonment of a first passion, and have 
 gloried in being known as his mistress. But she would have 
 perished by a thousand deaths rather than have sought him 
 through his pity or through his gratitude ; rather than have 
 
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 425 
 
 accepted the compassion of a heart that gave its warmth to 
 another ; rather than have ever let him learn that he was any 
 more to her tha,n all their other countless comrades who filled 
 up the hosts of Africa. 
 
 * He will never Imow,' she said to herself, as she passed 
 through the disordered camp, and in a distant quarter coiled 
 herself among the hay of a forage-waggon, and covered up in 
 dry grass, like a bird in a nest, let her tired limbs lie and her 
 aching eyes close' in repose. She was very tired ; and every 
 now and then as she slept a quick sobbing breath shook her 
 as she slumbered, l ike a w orn-out fawn who has been wounded 
 while it played. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 
 
 With the reveilU and the break of morning Cigarette woke, 
 herself again ; she gave a little petulant shake to her fairy 
 form when she thought of what folly she had been guilty. 
 * Ah, bah ! you deserve to be shot,' she said to herself afresh. 
 ' One would think you were a Silver Pheasant — you grow such 
 a little fool I ' 
 
 Love was all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had 
 always reckoned ; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, 
 a draught of champagne, to flavour an idle moment. ' Vin 
 et V^rms * she had always been accustomed to see worshipped 
 together, as became their alliterative ; it was a bit of fun — 
 that was all. A passion that had pain in it had never touched 
 the Little One ; she had disdained it with lighest, airiest 
 contumely. * If your sweetmeat has a bitter aJmond in it, 
 eat the sugar, and throw the almond away, you goose ! that 
 is simple enough, isn't it ? Bah ! I don't pity the people 
 who eat the bitter almond; not I — ce sont Men bStes, ces 
 gens ! ' she had said once, when arguing with an officer on the 
 absurdity of a melancholy love that possessed him, and whose 
 sadness she rallied most unmercifully. Now, for once in her 
 young life, the Child of France found that it was remotely 
 pofisibie to meet with almonds so bitter that the taste will 
 
426 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 remain and taint all things, do what philosophy may to throw 
 its acridity aside. 
 
 With the riveilU she awoke, herself again, though she had 
 not had more than an hour's slumber — awoke, it is true, with 
 a dull ache at her heart that was very new and bitterly 
 unwelcome to her, but with the buoyant vivacity and the 
 proud carelessness of her nature in arms against it, and with 
 that gaiety of childhood inherent to her repelling, and very 
 nearly successfully, the foreign depression that weighed on it. 
 
 Her first thought was to take care that he should never 
 learn what she had done for him. The Princess Corona 
 would not have more utterly disdained to solicit regard 
 through making a claim upon gratitude than the fiery little 
 warrior of France would have done. She went straight to 
 the Tringlo who had known her at her mission of mercy. 
 
 ' Georges, mon brave,* said the Little One, with that 
 accent of authority which was as haughty as any General's, 
 * do you know how that Chasseur is that we brought in last 
 night ? ' 
 
 * Not heard, ma belle,* said the cheery little Tringlo. 
 who was hard pressed ; for there was much to be done, and 
 he was very busy. 
 
 * What is to be done with the wounded ? ' 
 Georges lifted his eyebrows : 
 
 * Ma belle I there are very few. There are hundreds of 
 dead. It was a duel d outrance yesterday. The few there 
 are we shall take with an escort of Spahis to headquarters.' 
 
 ' Good. I will go with you. Have a heed, Georges, never 
 to whisper that I had anything to do with saving that man I 
 called to you about.* ' 
 
 ' And why, my Little One ? * 
 
 * Because I desire you 1 ' said Cigarette, with her most 
 imperious emphasis. * They say he is English, and a ruined 
 Milord, pardieu ! Now, I would not have an Englishman 
 think I thought his six feet of carcase worth saving for a 
 ransom.* 
 
 The Tringlo chuckled ; he was an Anglophobist. In the 
 Chinese expedition his share of ' loot ' had been robbed from 
 him by a trick of which two English soldiers had been the 
 concocters, and a vehement animosity against the whole 
 British race had been the fruit of it in him. 
 
 * NoHf won, non I ' he answered her. heartily. * I under- 
 
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 427 
 
 stand. Thou art very right, Cigarette. If we have ever 
 obliged an Englishman, he thinks his obligation to us opens 
 him a neat little door through which to cheat us. It is very 
 dangerous to oblige the English ; they always hate you for it. 
 That is their way. They may have virtues ; they may,' he 
 added, dubiously, but with an impressive air of strictest 
 impartiality, * but among them is not written gratitude. Ask 
 that man Rac how they treat their soldiers I * and M. Georges 
 hurried away to his mules and his duties, thinking with loving 
 regret of the delicious Chinese plunder of which the dogs of 
 Albion had deprived him. 
 
 ' He is safe ! ' thought Cigarette ; of the patrol who had 
 seen her she was not afraid — he had never noticed with 
 whom she was when he had put his head into the scullion's 
 tent ; and she made her way towards the place where she 
 had left him, to see how it went with this man whom she 
 was so careful should never know that which he had owed 
 to her. 
 
 It went well with him, thanks to her ; care, and strengthen- 
 ing nourishment, and the skill of her tendance had warded 
 off all danger from his wound. The bruise and pressure 
 from the weight of the horse had been more ominous, and 
 he could not raise himself or even breathe without severe 
 pain ; but his fever had left him, and he had just been lifted 
 into a mule -drawn ambulance- waggon as Cigarette reached 
 the spot. 
 
 ' How goes the day, Monsieur Victor ? So you got sharp 
 scratches, I hear. Ah ! that was a splendid thing we had 
 yesterday I When did you go down ? We charged together ! * 
 she cried gaily to him ; then heo* voice dropped suddenly, 
 with an indescribable sweetness and change of tone. * So I — 
 you suffer still ? ' she asked, softly. 
 
 Coming close up to where he lay on the straw, she saw 
 the exhausted languor of his regard, the heavy darkness under 
 his eyelids, the effort with which his lips moved as the faint 
 words came broken through them. 
 
 * Not very much, ma belle, 1 thank you. I shall be fit for 
 harness in a day or two. Do not let them send me into hos- 
 pital. I shall be perfectly — well — soon.' 
 
 Cigarette swayed herself upon the wheel and leaned to- 
 wards him, touching and changing his bandages with clever 
 hands 
 
423 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * They have dressed your wound ill ; whose doing is 
 fchat?' ' 
 
 * It is nothing. I have been half cut to pieces before now ; 
 this is a mere bagatelle. It is only ' 
 
 'That it hurts you to breathe? I know! Have they 
 given you anything to eat this morning ? * 
 
 * No. Everything is in confusion. We ' 
 
 She did not stay for the conclusion of his sentence ; she had 
 started off, quick as a swaUow. She knew what she had left 
 in her dead scullion's tent. Everything was in confusion, as 
 he had said. Of the few hundreds that had been left after 
 the terrific onslaught of the past day, some were employed far 
 out, thrusting their own dead into the soil ; others were re- 
 moving the tents and all the equipage of the camp ; others 
 were busied with the wounded, of whom the greatest sufferers 
 were to be borne to the nearest hospital (that nearest many 
 leagues away over the wild and barren country) ; while those 
 who were likely to be again soon ready for service were to be 
 escorted to the headquarters of the main army. Among the 
 latter Cecil had passionately entreated to be numbered ; his 
 prayer was granted to the man who had kept at the head of 
 his Chasseurs and borne aloft the Tricolor through the whole 
 of the war-tempest on which the dawn had risen, and which 
 had barely lulled and simk by the setting of the sun. Cha- 
 teauroy was away with the other five of his squadrons ; and 
 the Zouave chef-de-bataillon, the only officer of any rank who 
 had come alive through the conflict, had himself \asited Bertie, 
 and given him warm words of eulogy, and even of gratitude, 
 that had soldierly sincerity and cordiality in them. 
 
 'Your conduct was magnificent,' he had said, as he had 
 turned away. ' It shall be ray care that it is duly reported 
 and rewarded.* 
 
 Cigarette was but a few seconds absent ; she soon bounded 
 back like the swift little chamois she was, bringing with her 
 a huge bowlful of red wine with bread broken in it. 
 
 * This is the best I could get,' she said ; * it is better than 
 nothing. It will strengthen you.' 
 
 * What have you had yourself, petite ? * 
 
 * Ah, bah I Leave off thinking for others ; I have break- 
 fasted long ago,' she answered him. (She had only eaten a 
 biscuit well-nigh as hard as a flint.) * Take it— here I will 
 hold it for you.' 
 
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 429 
 
 She perched herself on the wheel like a bh'd on a twig ; she 
 had a bird/s power of alighting and sustaining herself on the 
 most difircull and most airy elevation ; but Cecil turned his 
 eyes on the only soldier in the cart beside himself, one of the 
 worst men in his regiment — a murderous, sullen, black- 
 browed, evil wretch, fitter for the bench of the convict-galley 
 than for the ranks of the cavalry. 
 
 * Give half to Zackrist,' he said. ' I know no hunger, and 
 he has more need of it.' 
 
 * Zackrist I that is the man who stole your lance and ac- 
 coutrements, and got you into trouble by taking them to pawn 
 in your name, a year and more ago.' 
 
 * Well, what of that ? He is not the less hungry.' 
 
 ' What of that ? ¥/hy, you were going to be turned into 
 the First Battalion ^ disgraced for the affair, because you 
 would not tell of him : if Vireflou had not found out the 
 rights of the matter in time ! * 
 
 * What has that to do with it ? ' 
 
 ' This, Monsieur Victor, that you are a fool.' 
 
 ' I dare say I am. But that does not make Zackrist less 
 hungry.' 
 
 He took the bowl from her hands, and emptying a little of 
 it into the wooden bidon that hung to her belt, kept that for 
 himself, and stretching his arm across the straw, gave the 
 bowl to Zackrist, who had watched it with the longing 
 ravenous eyes of a starving wolf, and seized it with rabid 
 avidity. 
 
 A smile passed over Cecil's face, amused despite the pain 
 he suffered. 
 
 * That is one of my ** sensational tricks " as M. de Chateau- 
 roy calls them. Poor Zackrist ! did you see his eyes ? ' 
 
 * AXackars eyes, yes I ' said Cigarette, who, between her 
 admiration for the action and her impatience at the waste of 
 her good bread and wine, hardly knew whether to applaud or 
 to deride him. * What recompense do you think you will get ? 
 He will steal your things again, first chance.' 
 
 * May be. I don't think he will. But he is very hungry 
 all the same ; that is about the only question just now,' he 
 answered her as he drank and ate his portion, with a need of 
 
 ' The battalion of the criminal outcasts of all corps, whether horse or 
 foot ; answering to the Straf hataillonB of the Austrian service. 
 
43© UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 it that could willingly have made him take thrice as much, 
 though for the sake of Zackrist he had denied his want of it. 
 
 The Zackrist himself, who could hear perfectly what was 
 said, uttered no word ; but when he had finished the contents 
 of the bowl, lay looking at his corporal with an odd gleam in 
 the dark, sullen, savage depths of his hollow eyes. He was 
 not going to say a word of thanks ; no I — none had ever heard 
 a grateful or a decent word from him in his life ; he was proud 
 of that. He was the most foul-mouthed brute in the army, 
 and, like Snake in the School for Scandal, thought a good 
 action would have ruined his character for ever. Neverthe- 
 less there came into his cunning and ferocious eyes a glisten 
 of the same light which had been in the little gamin's when 
 first by the bivouac fire he had murmured, * Ficpon s'en 
 souviendra,' 
 
 * When anybody stole from me,' muttered Cigarette, * I 
 shot him.' 
 
 * You would have fed him had he been starving. Do not 
 belie yourself, Cigarette ; you are too generous ever to be 
 vindictive.' 
 
 * Pooh ! Revenge is one's right.* 
 
 * I doubt that. We are none of us good enough to claim 
 it, at any rate.' 
 
 Cigarette shrugged her shoulders in silence ; then, poising 
 herself on the wheel, she sprang from thence on to the back 
 of her little mare which she had brought up, having the reins 
 in one of her hands and the wine-bowl in the other, and was 
 fresh and bright after the night's repose. 
 
 ' I will ride with you with my Spahis,' she said, as a 
 young queen might have promised protection from her escort. 
 He thanked her, and sank back among the straw, exhausted 
 and worn out with pain and with languor ; the weight that 
 seemed to oppress his chest was almost as hard to bear as 
 when the actual pressure of his dead charger's body had been 
 on him. 
 
 Yet, as he had said, it was but a bagatelle beside the all 
 but mortal wounds, the agonising neuralgia, the prostrating 
 fever, the torture of bullet-torn nerves, and the scorching fire 
 of inflamed sword-wounds that had in their turn been borne 
 by him in his twelve years of African service — things which, 
 to men who have never suffered them, sound like the ro- 
 manced horrors of an exaggerated imagination ; yet things 
 
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 431 
 
 which are daily and quietly borne, by such soldiers as the 
 soldiers of the Algerian Army, as the natural accompanimenta 
 of a military life — borne, too, in brave simple unconscious 
 heroism by men who know well that the only reward for it 
 will be their own self-contentment at having been true to the 
 traditions of their regiment. 
 
 Four other troopers were placed on the straw beside him, 
 and the mule-carts with their mournful loads rolled slowly 
 out of camp eastward towards the quarters of the main army ; 
 the Spahis, glowing red against the sun, escorting them, with 
 their darling in their midst, while from their deep chests they 
 shouted war- songs in Sabir with all the wild and riotous 
 delight that the triumph of victory and the glow of bloodshed 
 roused in those who combined in them the fire of France and 
 the fanaticism of Islamism — an irresistible union. 
 
 Though the nights were now cold, and before long even the 
 advent of snow might be looked for, the days were hot and 
 even scorching still. Cigarette and her Spahis took no heed 
 of it ; they were desert born and bred ; and she was wellnigh 
 invulnerable to heat as any Httle salamander. But, although 
 they were screened as well as they could be under an impro- 
 vised awning, the wounded men suffered terribly. Gnats and 
 mosquitoes and all the winged things of the African air tor- 
 mented them, and tossing on the dry hot straw they grew 
 delirious, some falling asleep and murmuring incoherently, 
 others lying with wide open eyes of half-senseless straining 
 misery. Cigarette had known well how it would be with 
 them ; she had accompanied such escorts many a time ; and 
 ever and again when they halted she dismounted and came 
 to them, and mixed wine with some water that she had slung 
 a barrel of to her saddle, and gave it to them, and moved their 
 bandages, and spoke to them with a soft caressing consolation 
 that pacified them as if by some magic. She had led them 
 hke a young lion on to the slaughter in the past day ; she 
 soothed them now with a gentleness that the gentlest daughter 
 of the Church could not have surpassed. 
 
 The way was long ; the road ill formed, leading for the 
 most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to 
 relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear- 
 headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense ; the little caval- 
 cade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black 
 towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, and 
 
432 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 commenced a more hilly and more picturesque portion of the 
 country. Cigarette came to the side of the temporary ambu- 
 lance in which Cecil was placed. He was asleep — sleeping 
 for once peacefully with little trace of pain upon his features, 
 as he had slept the previous night. She saw that his face and 
 chest had not been touched by the stinging insect-swarm ; he 
 was doubly screened by a shirt hung above him dexterously on 
 some bent sticks. 
 
 ' Who has done that ? ' thought Cigarette. As she glanced 
 round she saw : without any linen to cover him, Zackrist 
 had reared himself up and leaned slightly forward over against 
 his comrade. The shirt that protected Cecil was his ; and 
 on his own bare shoulders and mighty chest the tiny armies 
 of the flies and gnats were fastened, doing their will uninter- 
 rupted. 
 
 As he caught her glance, a sullen ruddy glow of shame 
 shone through the black hard skin of his sunburnt \isage — 
 shame to which he had been never touched when discovered 
 in any one of his guilty and barbarous actions. 
 
 ' Dame I ' he growled, savagely ; ' he gave me his wine ; one 
 must do something in return. Not that I feel the insects — 
 not I ; my skin is leather, see you ! they can't get through it ; 
 but his is U7ie /peau de femme — white and soft— bah! like 
 tissue-paper ! ' 
 
 * I see, Zackrist ; you are right. A French soldier can 
 never take a kindness from an English fellow without out- 
 running him m generosity. Look — here is some drink for 
 you ! ' 
 
 She knew too well the strange nature with which she had 
 to deal to say a syllable of praise to him for his self-devotion, 
 or to appear to say that, despite his boast of his leather skin, 
 the stings of the cruel winged tribes were drawing his blood 
 and causing him alike pain and irritation which, under that 
 sun, and added to the torment of his gunshot wound, were a 
 martyrdom as great as the noblest saint ever endured. 
 
 * Tiens 1 tiens ! I did him wrong,' murmured Cigarette. 
 ' That is what they are — the children of France — even when 
 they are at their worst, like that devil, Zackrist. Who dare 
 say they are not the heroes of the world ? ' 
 
 And all through the march she gave Zackrist a double 
 portion of her water dashed with red wine, that was so wel- 
 come and so precious to the parched and aching throats ; and 
 
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST 433 
 
 all through the march Cecil lay asleep, and the man who had 
 thieved from him, the man whose soul was stained with mur- 
 der, and pillage, and rapine, sat erect beside him, letting the 
 insects suck his veins and pierce his flesh. 
 
 It was only when they drew near the camp of the main 
 army that Zackrist beat off the swarm and drew his old shirt 
 over his head. ' You do not want to say anything to him,' he ; 
 muttered to Cigarette. * I am of leather, you know ; I have ; 
 not felt it.' ! 
 
 She nodded ; she understood him. Yet his shoulders and 
 his chest were well-nigh flayed, despite the tough and horny 
 skin of which he made his boast. 
 
 * Dieu ! we are droll 1 ' mused Cigarette. ' If we do a good 
 thing, we hide it as if it were a bit of stolen meat, we are so ^ 
 afraid it should be found out ; but, if they do one in the world 
 there, they bray it at the tops of their voices from the houses' 
 roofs, and run all down the streets screaming about it for fear 
 it should be lost. Dieu I we are droll ! ' 
 
 And she dashed her spurs into her mare and galloped off at 
 the height of her speed into camp — a very city of canvas, 
 buzzing with the hum of Ufe, regulated with the marvellous 
 skill and precision of French warfare, yet with the carelessness 
 and the picturesqueness of the desert-life pervading it. 
 
 * G'est la Cigarette I ' ran from mouth to mouth as the bay 
 mare with her little Amazon rider, followed by the scarlet 
 cloud of the Spahis, all ablaze like poppies in the sun, rose in 
 sight, thrown out against the azure of the skies. 
 
 "What she had done had been told long before by an orderly, 
 riding hard in the early night to take the news of the battle ; 
 the whole host was on watch for its darling— the saviour of 
 the honour of France. Like wave rushing on wave of some 
 tempestuous ocean, the men swept out to meet her in one 
 great surging tide of life, impetuous, passionate, idolatrous, 
 exultant, with all the vivid ardour, all the uncontrolled emo- 
 tion, of natures south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away 
 from their mid-day rest as from their military toil, moved as 
 by one swift breath of fire, and flung themselves out to meet 
 her, the chorus of a thousand voices ringing in deafening vivas 
 to the skies. She was enveloped in that vast sea of eager 
 furious lives, in that dizzy tumult of vociferous cries, and 
 stretching hands, and upturned faces. As her soldiers had 
 done the night before, so these did now— kissing her hands 
 
 FF 
 
434 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 her dress, her feet, sending her name in thunder through ths 
 sunlit air, Ufting her from off her horse, and bearing her, in a 
 score of stalwart arms, triumphant in their midst. 
 
 She was theirs — their own — the Child of the Army, the 
 I Little One whose voice above their dying brethren had the 
 sweetness of an angel's song, and whose feet in their hours 
 of revelry, flew like the swift and dazzling flight of gold- 
 winged orioles. And she had saved the honour of their Eagles ; 
 she had given to them and to France their god of Victory. 
 They loved her — oh, God, how they loved her ! — with what 
 intense, breathless, intoxicating love of a multitude which, 
 though it may stone to-morrow what it adore to-day, has yet 
 for those on whom it has once been given thus a power no 
 other love can know — a passion unutterably sad, deliriously 
 strong. 
 
 That passion moved her strangely. 
 
 As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one 
 man breathed among that tumultuous mass but would have 
 died that moment at her word ; not one mouth moved among 
 that countless host but breathed her name in pride, and love, 
 and honour. 
 
 She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little 
 brigand, a child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; 
 but she was more than these. The divine fire of genius had 
 touched her, and Cigarette would have perished for her country 
 not less surely than J eanne ^lArg.' The holiness of an imper- 
 sonal love, the glow of anlm^SFishable patriotism, the melan- 
 choly of a passionate pity for the concrete and unnumbered 
 sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn, 
 as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together 
 moved her now, and made her young face beautiful as she 
 looked down upon the crowded soldiery. 
 
 * It was nothing,' she answered them — * it was nothing. 
 It was for France.' 
 
 For France ! They shouted back the beloved word with 
 tenfold joy ; and the great sea of life beneath her tossed to 
 and fro in stormy triumph, in frantic paradise of victory, 
 ringing her name with that of France upon the air, in thunder 
 shouts like spears of steel smiting on shields of bronze. 
 
 But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to 
 the desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe 
 for them. 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 435 
 
 * Hush 1 ' she said, softly, with an accent in her voice that 
 hushed the riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the 
 lull in a storm. * Give me no honour while they sleep yonder. 
 With the dead lies the glory ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 BY THE BIVOUAC FIRB 
 
 Le Koi Gaillard qui s'appelle la Guerre, 
 C'est mon souverain tout d6bonnair ; 
 Au bouche qui rit, au main qui tue, 
 Au front d'airain, aux yeux de feu I 
 Comme il est beau ce roi si gai, 
 Qui fait le diable a quatre au gr6, 
 Qui brule, qui boit, qui foudre, qui fume, 
 Qui aime le vin, le sang, l'6cume, 
 Qui jette la torche . 
 
 * HoLA ! NOUS v'la ! ' cried Cigarette, interrupting herself 
 in her chant in honour of the attributes of war, as the Tringlo's 
 mules which she was driving some three weeks after the fray 
 of Zaraila, stopped, by sheer force of old habit, in the middle 
 of a green plateau on the outskirts of a camp pitched in its 
 centre, and overlooked by brown rugged scarps of rock, with 
 stunted bushes on their summits, and with here and there a 
 maritime pine clinging to their naked slopes. At sight of 
 the food-laden little beasts, and the well-known form behind 
 them, the Tirailleurs, Indigenes, and the Zouaves, on whose 
 side of the encampment she had approached, rushed toward 
 her with frantic shouts, and wild delight, and vehement 
 hurrahs in a tempest of vociferous welcome that might have 
 stunned any ears less used, and startled any nerves less 
 steeled, to military Ufe than the Friend of the Flag's. She 
 signed back the shouting disorderly crowd with her mule- 
 whip, as superbly as though she were a Marshal of France 
 ligning back a whole army's mutiny. 
 
 * What children you are ! You push, and scramble, and 
 iear, like a set of monkeys over a nut. Get out of my way 
 or I swear you shall none of you have so much as a morsel 
 
 of black bread — do you hear ? ' 
 
 rv2 
 
4S6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 It was amusing to see how they minded her contemptuous 
 orders ; how these black-bearded fire-eaters, the terror of the 
 country, each one of whom could have crushed her in his 
 grasp as a wolf crushes a lamb, slunk back, silenced and 
 obedient, before the imperious bidding of the little vivandiere. 
 They had heeded her and let her rule over them almost as 
 much when she had been seven years old, and her curls, now 
 BO dark, had been yellow as corn in the sun. 
 
 * Ouj I ' growled only one insubordinate, *if you had been 
 a day and night eating nothing but a bit of moist clay, you 
 might be hungry too, fanfan ! ' 
 
 The humiliated supplication of the reply appeased their 
 autocratic sovereign. She nodded her head in assent. 
 
 * I know ; I know. I have gone days on a handful of 
 barley-ears. M. le Colonel has his marmitonSf and his /ncas- 
 s6es, and his batterie de cuisine where he camps— Lo-he I — but 
 we soldiers have nothing but a hunch of baked chaff. Well, 
 we win battles on it — eh ? Quand la pause est vide^ Vipde 
 mange vite ! ' 
 
 Which was one of the impromptu proverbs that Cigarette 
 was wont to manufacture and bring into her discourse with 
 an air of authority as of one who quotes from profound scho- 
 lastic lore. It was received with a howl of applause and of 
 ratification. The entrails often knaw with bitter pangs of 
 famine in the Army of Algiers, and they knew well how 
 sharp an edge hunger gives to the steel. 
 ' Nevertheless, the sullen angry roar of famished men, that 
 is so closely, so terribly like the roar of wild beasts, did not 
 cease. 
 
 * Where is Biribi ? ' they growled. * Biribi never keeps 
 us waiting. Those are Biribi's beasts.' 
 
 'Right,' said Cigarette, laconically, with a crack of her 
 mule-whip on to the arm of a Zouave who was attempting to 
 make free with her convoy and purloin a loaf off the load. 
 
 * Where is Biribi, then ? ' they roared in concert, a crowd 
 of eager, wolfish, ravenous, impatient men, hungry as camp 
 fasting could make them, and half inclined even to tear their 
 darling in pieces, since she kept them thus from the stores. 
 
 Cigarette uncovered her head with a certain serious grace 
 very rare in her. 
 
 * Biribi has made a good end,' 
 Her assailants grew very quiet. 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 437 
 
 * Shot ? * they asked briefly. Biribi was a Tringlo well 
 beloved in all the battalions. 
 
 Cigarette nodded, with a gesture outward to the solitary 
 country. She was accustomed to these incidents of war ; she 
 thought of them no more than a girl of civilised life thinks 
 of the grouse or the partridges that are killed by her lovers 
 and brothers. 
 
 * I was out yonder, two leagues or more away. I was 
 riding ; I was on my own horse ; Etoile-Filante. Well, I 
 heard shots; of course I made for the place by my ear. 
 Before I got up I saw what was the mischief. There were 
 the mules in a gorge, and Biribi in front of them, fighting, 
 mon Dieu I — fighting like the devil — with three Arbis upon 
 him. They were trying to stop the convoys, and Biribi was 
 beating them back with all his might. I was too far off to 
 do much good ; but I shouted and dashed down to them. 
 The Arbis heard, Biribi heard ; he flew on to them like a 
 tiger, that Uttle Tringlo. It was wonderful 1 Two fell dead 
 under him ; the third took fright and fled. When I got up, 
 Biribi lay above the dead brutes with a dozen wounds in him, 
 if there were one. He looked up, and knew me. " Is it 
 thee, Cigarette ? " he asked ; and he could hardly speak for 
 the blood in his throat. *' Do not wait for me ; I am dead 
 already. Drive the mules into camp as quick as thou canst ; 
 the men will be thinking me late." ' 
 
 * Biribi was always hon enfanty muttered the listening 
 throng ; they forgot their hunger as they heard. 
 
 * Ah, cheiiapans I he thought more of you than you deserve, 
 you jackals 1 I drew him aside into a hole in the rocks out 
 of the heat. He was dead ; he was right. No man could 
 live slashed about hke that. The Arbicos had set on him as 
 he went singing along ; if he would have given up the brutes 
 and the stores, they would not have harmed him ; but that 
 was not Biribi. I did all I could for him. Dame I it was 
 no good. He lay very still for some minutes with his head 
 on my lap ; then he moved restlessly and tossed about. " They 
 will think me so late — so late," he muttered ; " and they are 
 famished by this. There is that letter, too, from his mother 
 for Petit-Pot-de-Terre ; there is all that news from France ; I 
 hare so much for them, and I shall be so late — so late I " AH 
 he thought was that he should be so late into camp. Well, 
 it was all over very soon. I do not think he suffered ; but 
 
43« UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 he was so afraid you should not have the food. I left him in 
 the cave, and drove the mules on as he asked. Etoile-Filante 
 had galloped away ; have you seen him home ? ' 
 
 There broke once more from the hearkening throng a roar 
 that shook the echoes from the rocks ; but it was not now the 
 rage of famished longing, but the rage of the lust for ven- 
 geance, and the grief of passionate hearts blent together. 
 Quick as the lightning flashes, their swords leaped from their 
 scabbards and shook in the sun-lighted air. 
 
 * We will avenge him ! * they shouted as with one throat, 
 the hoarse cry rolling down the valley like a swell of thunder. 
 If the bonds of discipline had loosed them, they would have 
 rushed forth on the search and to the slaughter, forgetful of 
 hunger, of heat, of sun -stroke, of self-pity, of all things save 
 the dead Tringlo, whose only fear in death had been lest they 
 should want and suffer through him. 
 
 Their adjutants, alarmed by the tumult, hurried to the spot, 
 fearing a bread-riot ; for the camp was far from supplies, and 
 had been ill victualled for several days. They asked rapidly 
 what was the matter. 
 
 ' Biribi has been killed,' some soldier answered. 
 
 * Ah 1 and the bread not come ? ' 
 
 * Yes, mon adjutant ; the bread is there, and Cigarette too.* 
 
 * There is no need for me, then,' muttered the adjutant of 
 Zouaves ; ' the Little One will keep order.* 
 
 The Little One had before now quelled a mutiny with her 
 pistol at the ringleader's forehead, and her brave scornful 
 words scourging the insubordinates for their dishonour to their 
 arms, for their treason to the tricolor ; and she was equal to 
 the occasion now. She lifted her right hand : 
 
 * We will avenge him. That is of course. The Flag of 
 France never hangs idly when there is a brave life's loss to 
 be reckoned for ; I shall know again the cur that fled. Trust 
 to me, and now be silent. You bawl out your oath of ven- 
 geance, oh yes 1 But you bawled as loud a minute ago for 
 bread. Biribi loved you better than you deserved. You 
 deserve nothing ; you are hounds ready to tear for offal to eat 
 as to rend the foe of your dead friend. Bah I ' 
 
 The roar of the voices sank somewhat ; Cigarette had 
 
 sprung aloft on a gun-carriage, and as the sun shone on her 
 
 face it was brilliant with the scorn that lashed them like 
 whips. 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 439 
 
 * Sang de Dieu I * fiercely swore a Zouave. ' Hounds, 
 Indeed 1 If it were any one but you 1 When one has had 
 nothing but a snatch of raw bullock's mnit, and a taste of 
 coffee black with mud, for a week through, is one a hound 
 because one hungers ? ' 
 
 * No,' said the orator from her elevation, and her eyes 
 softened wonderfully. In her heart she loved them so well, 
 these wild barbaric warriors that she censured — * no, one is 
 not a hound because one hungers ; but one is not a soldier if 
 one complains. Well ! Biribi loved you ; and I am here to 
 do his will, to do his work. He came laden ; his back was 
 loaded heavier than the mules'. To the front, all of you, as 
 I name you 1 Petit-Pot-de-Terre, there is your old mother's 
 letter. If she knew as much as I do about you, scapegrace, 
 she would never trouble herself whether you were dead or 
 alive ! Fagotin 1 here is a bundle of Paris newspapers for 
 you ; they are quite new — only nine months old ! Pot616 I 
 some woman has sent you a love-scrawl and some tobacco ; I 
 suppose she knew your passions all ended in smoke I Rafle I 
 here is a little money come for you from France ; it has not 
 been stolen, so it will have no spice for you ! Racoleur ! here 
 is a poulet ^ from some simpleton, with a knife as a souvenir ; 
 sharpen it on the Arbicos. Poupard, Loup-terrible, Jean 
 Pagnote, Pince-Maille, Louis Magot, Jules Goupil — here I 
 There are your letters, your papers, your commissions. Biribi 
 forgot nothing. As if you deserved to be worked for or 
 thought of sacripans I ' 
 
 With which reproach. Cigarette relieved herself of the 
 certain pain that was left on her by the death of Biribi ; she 
 always found, that to work yourself into a passion with 
 somebody is the very best way in the world to banish an 
 unwelcome emotion. 
 
 The men summoned by their camp-soubriquets, which were 
 so familiar that they had, many of them, fairly forgotten 
 their original names, rallied around her to receive the various 
 packets with which a Tringlo is commonly charged by friends 
 in the towns, or relatives away in France, for the soldiers of 
 African brigades, and which, as well as his convoy of food 
 and his budget of news, render him so precious and so 
 welcome an arrival at an encampment. The dead Biribi had 
 
 ' Love- billet. 
 
440 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 been one of the lightest, brightest, cheeriest, and Bauciest of 
 the gay, kindly, industrious wanderers of his branch of the 
 service ; always wilUng to lend ; always ready to help ; 
 always smoking, singing, laughing, chattering ; treating hia 
 three mules as an indulgent mother her children ; calling 
 them Plick, Plack, et Plock, and thinking of Plick, Plack, et 
 Plock far beyond himself at all times ; a merry, busy, smihng, 
 tender-hearted soul, who was always happy, trudging along 
 the sunburnt road, and carolling in his joyous voice chanson- 
 nettes and gaudrioles to the African flocks and herds, amid the 
 African solitudes. If there were a man they loved, it was 
 Biribi ; Biribi, whose advent in camp had always been the 
 signal for such laughter, such abundance, such showers of 
 newspapers, such quantities of intelligence from that France 
 for tidings of which the hardest-featured veteran among them 
 would ask with a pang at the heart, with a thrill in the 
 words. And they had sworn, and would keep what they 
 had sworn in bitter intensity, to avenge him to the uttermost 
 point of vengeance. Yet five minutes afterward when the 
 provisions Plick, Plack, et Plock had brought were divided 
 and given out, they were shouting, eating, singing, devour- 
 ing, with as eager a zest, and as hearty an enjoyment, as 
 though Biribi were among them, and did not he dead two 
 leagues away, with a dozen wounds slashed on his stiffening 
 frame. 
 
 'What heartless brutes 1 Are they always like that?* 
 muttered a gentleman painter who, travelling through the 
 interior to get military sketches, had obtained permission to 
 take up quarters in the camp. 
 
 ' If they were not like that they could not live a day,' » 
 voice answered, curtly, behind him. *Do you know whao 
 this service is, that you venture to judge them ? Men who 
 meet death in the face every five minutes they breathe cannot 
 afford the space for sentimentalism whic those who saunter 
 at ease and in safety can do. They laugh when we are dead, 
 perhaps, but they are true as steel to us while we live ; — it is 
 the reverse of the practice of the world I ' 
 
 The tourist started, turned, and looked aghast at the man 
 who had reproved him ; it was a Chasseur d'Afrique, who 
 having spoken, was already some way onward, moving 
 through the press and tumult oi the camp to his own 
 regiment's portion of it. 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 441 
 
 Cigarette, standing by to see that Plick, Plack, and Plock 
 were properly baited on the greenest foUage lo be found, 
 heard, and her eyes flashed with a deep dehght. 
 
 * Dame ! ' she thought, ' I could not have answered better 
 myself ! He is a true soldier, that.' And she forgave Cecil 
 all his sins to her with the quick, impetuous, generous pardon 
 of her warm little Gallic heart. 
 
 Cigarette believed that she could hate very bitterly j 
 indeed, her power of resentment she rated high among her 
 grandest qualities. Had the little leopard been told that she 
 could not resent to the death what offended her, she would 
 have held herself most infamously insulted. Yet hate was, 
 in truth, foreign to her frank, vivacious nature ; its deadlinesa 
 never belonged to her, if its passion might ; and at a trait 
 p«kin to her, at a flash of sympathetic spirit in the object of 
 her displeasure. Cigarette changed from wrath to friendship 
 with the true instinct of her little heart of gold. A heart 
 which, though it had been tossed about on a sea of blood, and 
 had never been graven with so much as one tender word or 
 one moral principle from the teachings of any creature, was 
 still gold, despite all, no matter the bruises and the stains 
 and the furnace- heats that had done their best to harden it 
 into bronze, to debase it into brass. 
 
 The camp was large, and a splendid picture of colour, 
 movement, picturesque combination, and wonderful light and 
 shadow, as the sun-glow died out and the fires were lighted ; 
 for the nights were now intensely cold, cold with the cutting, 
 icy, withering hise^ and clear above as an Antarctic night, 
 though the days were still hot and dry as flame. 
 
 On the left were the Tirailleurs, the Zouaves, the Zephyrs ; 
 on the right were the Cavalry and the Artillery ; in the 
 centre of all was the tent of the Chief. Everywhere, as 
 evening fell, the red warmth of fires rose ; the caldron of 
 soup or of coffee simmered, gipsy-like, above ; the men 
 lounged around, talking, laughing, cooking, story-telHng at 
 their pleasure ; after the semi-starvation of the last week, the 
 abundance of stores that had come in with other Tringloa 
 besides poor Biribi, caused an universal hilarity. The glitter 
 of accoutrements, the contents of open knapsacks, the skins 
 of animals just killed for the 7narmite, the boughs of pines 
 broken for firewood, strewed the ground. Tethered horses, 
 stands of arms, great drums and eagle-guidons, the looming 
 
442 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 darkness of huge cannon, the blackness, like dromedaries 
 couched, of caissons and ambulance-wagons, the whiteness of 
 the canvas tents, the incessant movement as the crowds of 
 soldiery stirred, and chattered, and worked, and sang — all 
 these, on the green level of the plain, framed in by the 
 towering masses of the rugged rocks, made a picture of 
 marvellous effect and beauty. 
 
 Cecil, looking at it, thought so ; though the harsh and 
 bitter misery which he knew that glittering scene enfolded, 
 and which he had suffered so many years himself — misery of 
 hunger, of cold, of shot-wounds, of racking bodily pains — 
 stole from it, in his eyes, that poetry and that picturesque 
 brilliancy which it bore to the sight of the artist and the 
 amateur. He knew the naked terrors of war, the agony, the 
 travail, the icy chills, the sirocco heats, the grinding routine, 
 the pitiless chastisements of its reality ; to those who do, it 
 can no longer be a spectacle dressed in the splendid array of 
 romance. It is a fearful tragedy and farce woven close one 
 in another ; and its sole joy is in that blood-thirst which men 
 so lustfully share with the tiger, and yet shudder from when 
 they have sated it. 
 
 It was this knowledge of war, in its bitter and deadly 
 truth, which had made him give the ansvrer that had charmed 
 Cigarette, to the casual visitor of the encampment. 
 
 He sat now, having recovered from the effects of the day 
 of Zaraila, within a little distance of the fire at which his 
 men were stewing some soup in the great simmering copper 
 bowl. They had eaten nothing for nigh a week, except some 
 mouldy bread, with the chance of a stray cat or a shot bird 
 to flavour it. Hunger was a common thorn in Algerian 
 warfare, since not even the matchless intendance of France 
 could regularly supply the troops across those interminable 
 breadths of arid land, those sun-scorched plains, swept by 
 Arab foragers. 
 
 * Beau Victor ! you took their parts well,' said a voice 
 behind him, as Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and 
 stood in the glow of the fire, with a little pipe in her pretty 
 rosebud mouth and her cap set daintily on one side of her 
 ourls. 
 
 He looked up and smiled. 
 
 * Not so well as your own clever tongue would have done. 
 Words are not my weapons.' 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 443 
 
 * No ! you are as silent as the grave commonly ; but when 
 70U do speak, you speak well,' said the vivandiere-Demos- 
 thenes, condescendingly. * I hate silence myself ! Thoughts 
 are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, 
 round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of 
 talk, they keep little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul 
 can digest.' 
 
 With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into 
 the night air, lookmg the prettiest little genre picture in the 
 ruddy firelight that ever was painted on such a background 
 of wavering shadow and undulating flame. 
 
 * Will your allegory hold good, petite ? ' smiled Cecil, 
 thinking but little of his answer or of his companion, of 
 whose service to him he remained utterly ignorant. * I fancy 
 speech is the chaff most generally, little better. So, they 
 talk of you for the Cross ? No soldier ever, of a surety, more 
 greatly deserved it.' 
 
 Her eyes gleamed with a lustre like the African planets 
 above her ; her face caught all the fire, the light, the illumi- 
 nation of the flames flashing near her. 
 
 ' I did nothing,' she said, curtly. * Any man on the field 
 would have done the same.* 
 
 * That is easy to say ; not so easy to prove. In all great 
 events there may be the same strength, courage, and desire 
 to act greatly in those who follow as in the one that leads ; 
 but it is only in that one that there is also the daring to 
 originate, the goaius to seize aright the moment of action and 
 of success.' 
 
 Cigarette was a little hero ; she was, moreover, a little , 
 desperado ; but she was a child in years and a woman at ' 
 heart, valiant and ruthless young soldier though she might 
 be. She coloured all over her mignonne face at the words of 
 eulogy from this ma:a whom she had told herself she hated ; 
 her eyes filled ; her lips trembled. 
 
 * It was nothing,' she said, softly, under her breath. * I 
 would die twenty deaths for France.' 
 
 He looked at her, and for the hour understood her aright ; 
 he saw that there was the love for her country and the power 
 of sacrifice of a Viriathus or an Arminius in the gay-plumaged 
 and capricious Uttle hawk of the desert. 
 
 *You have a noble nature, Cigarette,' he said, with an ' 
 oamest regard at her. * My poor child, if only ' He 
 
444 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 paused. He was thinking what it was hard to say to her — 
 if only the accidents of her life had been different, what 
 beauty, grace, and genius might have been developed out of 
 the untamed, untutored, inconsequent, but glorious nature of 
 ' the child- warrior. 
 
 As by a fate, unconsciously his pity embittered all the 
 delight his praise had given, and this implied regret for her 
 stung her as the rend of the spur a young Arab colt — stung 
 her inwardly into cruel wrath and pain; outwardly into 
 irony, devilry, and contemptuous retort. 
 
 * Oh-h^ ! Child, indeed ! Was I a child the other day, 
 my good fellow, when I saved your squadrcfn from being cut 
 to pieces like grass with a scythe ? As for nobility ? Pouf ! 
 Not much of that in me. I love France — yes. A soldier 
 always loves his country. She is so brave, too, and so fair, 
 and so riante, and so gay. Not like your Albion — if it is 
 yours — who is a great gobemouche stuffed full of cotton, 
 steaming with fog, clutching gold with one hand and the 
 Bible with the other, that she may swell her money-bags, 
 and seem a saint all the same ; never laughing, never learn- 
 ing, always growling, always shuffling, who is like this 
 spider — look ! — a tiny body and huge hairy legs — pull her 
 legs, the colonies, off, and leave her little English body, all 
 shrivelled and shrunk, alone, and I should like to know what 
 size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell 
 and to strut ? ' 
 
 Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with 
 all the supreme disdain she could impel into that gesture. 
 Cigarette, though she knew not her A, B, C, D, and could 
 not have written her name to save her own life, had a certain 
 bright intelligence of her own that caught up political tidings, 
 and grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone 
 will not bestow. One way and another, she had heard most 
 of the floating opinions of the day, and stored them up in her 
 fertile brain as a bee stores honey into his hive by much as 
 nature-given and unconscious an instinct as the bee's own. 
 
 Cecil listened amused. 
 
 * You little Anglophobist I You have the tongue of a 
 Voltaire.' 
 
 * Voltaire ? * questioned Cigarette. * Voltaire I Let me 
 see. I know that name. He was the man who championed 
 Calas ? who had a fowl in the pot for every poor wretch that 
 

 BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 445 
 
 passed his house ? who was taken to the Pantheon by the 
 people in the Revolution ? ' 
 
 * Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still 
 to call without a heart or a God ! ' 
 
 * Chut ! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged. Better 
 than pattering Paters, that I ' said Cigarette, who thought a 
 midnight mass at Notre Dame or a Salutation at the Made- j ^ 
 leine a pretty coitp de thHtre enough, but who had for all 
 churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce disdain. 
 * Go to the grandams and the children 1 ' she would say, with 
 a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers 
 or Paris attempted to reclaim her ; and a son of the Order of 
 Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly 
 beaten once when, in the ardour of an African missionary, he 
 had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, 
 and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered 
 hke dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic 
 artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries. 
 
 * Hola I ' she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her 
 fancy. 'We talk of Albion — there is one of her sons. I 
 detest your country, but, ma foi I I must confess she breeds 
 uncommonly handsome men.' 
 
 She was a dilettante in handsome men ; she nodded her 
 head now to where, some yards off, at another of the camp- 
 fires, stood, with some officers of the regiment, one of the 
 tourists ; a very tall, very fair man, with a gallant bearing, 
 and a tawny beard that gUttered to gold in the light of the 
 flames. 
 
 Cecil's glance followed Cigarette's. With a great cry he 
 sprang to his feet and stood entranced, gazing at the stranger. 
 She saw the startled amaze, the longing love, the agony of 
 recognition, in his eyes ; she saw the impulse in him to spring 
 forward, and the shuddering effort with which the impulse 
 was controlled. He turned to her almost fiercely : 
 
 ' He must not see me I Keep him away — away, for God's 
 Bake 1 ' 
 
 He could not leave his men ; he was fettered there where 
 his squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from 
 the flame-light into the shadow, and thrust himself among 
 the tethered horses. Cigarette asked nothing ; comprehended 
 at a glance with all the tact of her nation ; and then saun- 
 tered forward to meet the officers of the regiment as they 
 
446 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 came up to the picket-fire with the yellow-haired English 
 stranger. She knew how charming a picture there, with het 
 hands lightly resting on her hips, and her bright face danced 
 on by the ruddy fire-glow, she made : she knew she could 
 hold thus the attention of a whole brigade. The eyes of the ; 
 stranger lighted on her, and his voice laughed in mellow 
 music to his companions and ciceroni. 
 
 * Your intendance is perfect ; your ambulance is perfect ; 
 your camp-cookery is perfect, messieurs ; and here you have 
 even perfect beauty too ! Truly, campaigning must be plea- 
 sant work in Algeria I ' 
 
 Then he turned to her with compliments frank and gay, 
 and full of a d^bonnair grace that made her doubt he could 
 be of Albion. 
 
 Retort was always ready to her ; and she kept the circle of 
 officers in full laughter round tho vidette-fire with a shower 
 of repartee that would have made her fortune on the stage of 
 the Chatelet or Folies Marigny. And every now and then 
 her glance wandered to the shadow where the horses were 
 tethered. 
 
 Bah ! Why was she always doing him service ? She could 
 not have told. ' Parcequ' f suis bien bete,' said Cigarette 
 mentally, with a certain fiery contempt for herself. 
 
 Still she went on — and did it. 
 
 It was a fantastic picture by the bright scarlet light of the 
 camp-fire, with the Little One in her full glory of mirth and 
 mischief, and her circle of officers laughing on her with ad- 
 miring eyes ; nearest her the towering height of the English 
 stranger with the gleam of the flame in the waves of his leo- 
 nine beard. 
 
 From the darkness, where the scores of grey horses were 
 tethered, Cecil's eyes were riveted on it. There were none 
 near to see him ; had there been, they would have seen an 
 agony in his eyes that no physical misery, no torture of the 
 battle-field, had brought there. His face was bloodless, and 
 his gaze strained through the gleam on to the fire-lit group 
 with a passionate intensity of yearning ; — he was well used to 
 pain, well used to self-control, well used to self-restraiut, but 
 for the first time in his exile the bitterness of a struggle almost 
 vanquished him. All the old love of his youth went out to 
 this man, so near beside him, yet so hopelessly severed from 
 him ; looking on the face of his friend, a violence of longing 
 
I 
 
 BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 447 
 
 shook him : * God, if I were dead ! ' he thought, * they 
 might know then ' 
 
 He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand 
 once more touch his ; those familiar eyes once more look on 
 him with the generous tender trust of old. 
 
 His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood 
 there among his horses with the stir and tumult of the bi- 
 vouac about him. There was nothing simpler, nothing lesa 
 strange, than that an English soldier should visit the Franco - 
 Arab camp ; but to him it seemed Hke the resurrection of the 
 dead. 
 
 Whether it was a brief moment or an hour through, that 
 the circle stood about the great black caldron that was swing- 
 ing above the flames, he could not have told : to him it was 
 an eternity. The echo of the mellow ringing tones that he 
 knew so well came to him from the distance, till his heart 
 seemed breaking with but one forbidden longing, to look once 
 more in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar 
 quail, and say only, ' I was guiltless.* 
 
 It is bitter to know those whom we love dead ; but it is 
 more bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, 
 have sunk our memory deep beneath oblivion that is not the 
 oblivion of the grave. 
 
 Awhile, and the group broke up and was scattered, the 
 English traveller throwing gold pieces by the score- among 
 the waiting troopers. ' A biejitot ! ' they called to Cigarette, 
 who nodded farewell to them with a cigar in her mouth, and 
 busied herself pouring some brandy into the old copper cal- 
 dron in which some black coffee and muddy water, three 
 parts sand, was boiling. A few moments later, and they 
 were out of sight among the confusion, the crowds, and the 
 flickering shadows of the camp. When they were quite gone, 
 she came softly to him ; she could not see him well in the 
 gloom, but she touched his hand. 
 
 ' Dieu / how cold you are I He is gone,' 
 
 He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in 
 his the little warm brown palm. She felt a shiver shake hia 
 limbs. 
 
 • Is he your enemy ? ' she asked. 
 'No.' 
 
 * What then ? ' 
 
 ' The man I love best on earth.* 
 
448 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Ah ! ' She had felt a surprise she had not spoken that 
 ho should flee thus from any foe, 'He thinks you dead, 
 then ? ' 
 
 ' Yes.' 
 
 * And must always think so ? ' 
 
 ' Yes.' He held her hand still, and his own wrung it 
 hard — the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. 
 ' Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful ; for God's sake, get 
 me sent out of this camp to-night. I am powerless.' 
 
 There was that in the accent which struck his listener to 
 the heart. He was powerless, fettered hand and foot as 
 though he were a prisoner ; a night's absence, and he would 
 be shot as a deserter. He had grown accustomed to this 
 rendering up of all his life to the rules of others ; but now 
 and then the galled spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at 
 the bonds. 
 
 * I will try,' said Cigarette, simply, without anything of 
 her audacity or of her vanity in the answer. * Go you to the 
 fire ; you are cold.' 
 
 * Are you sure he will not return ? ' 
 
 'Not he. They are gone to eat and drink; I go with 
 them. What is it you fear ? ' 
 
 * My own weakness.' 
 
 She was silent. She could just watch his features by the 
 dim light, and she saw his mouth quiver under the fulness of 
 his beard. He felt that if he looked again on the face of the 
 man he loved he might be broken into self-pity, and unloose 
 his silence, and shatter all the work of so many years. He 
 had been strong where men of harder fibre and less ductile 
 temper might have been feeble ; but he never thought that 
 he had been so ; he only thought that he had acted on im- 
 pulse, and had remained true to his act through the mere 
 instinct of honour — an instinct inborn in his blood and his 
 order — an instinct natural and unconscious with him as the 
 instinct by which he drew his breath. 
 
 •You are a fine soldier,' said Cigarette, musingly ; *such 
 men are not weak.' 
 
 * Why ? We are only strong as tigers are strong — ^just the 
 strength of the talon and fang. I do not know. I was weak 
 as water once ; I may be again, if — if ' 
 
 He scarcely knew that he was speaking aloud ; he had for- 
 gotten her ! His whole heart seemed burnt as with fire by 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 449 
 
 the memory of that one face so familiar, so well loved, yeb 
 from which he must shrink as though some cowardly sin were 
 between them. The wretchedness on him seemed more than 
 he could bear ; to know that this man was so near that the 
 sound of his voice raised could summon him, yet that he must 
 remain as dead to him — remain as one dead after a craven 
 and treacherous guilt. 
 
 He turned suddenly, almost violently, upon Cigarette .: 
 
 * You have surprised my folly from me ; you know my 
 secret so far ; but you are too brave to betray me, you are too 
 generous to tell of this ? I can trust you to be silent ? ' 
 
 Her face flushed scarlet with astonished anger ; her little 
 childlike form grew instinct with haughty and fiery dignity. 
 
 ' Monsieur, that question from one soldier of France to 
 another is insult. We are not dastards ! * 
 
 There was a certain grave reproach that mingled with the 
 indignant scorn of the answer, and showed that her own heart 
 was wounded by the doubt, as well as her military pride by 
 the aspersion. Even amid the conflict of pain at war in him 
 he felt that, and hastened to soothe it. 
 
 * Forgive me, my child ; I should not have ^Tonged yoa 
 with the question. It is needless, I know. Men can tr?ist 
 you to the death, they say.' 
 
 ' To the death— yes.' 
 
 The answer was thoughtful, dreamy, almost sad, for Ciga- 
 rette. His thoughts were too far from her in their tumult of 
 awakened memories to note the tone as he went rapidly on : 
 
 * You have ingenuity, compassion, tact ; you have power 
 here, too, in your way ; for the love of Heaven get me sent 
 out on some duty before dawn ! There is Biribi's murder to 
 be avenged — would they give the errand to me ? ' 
 
 She thought a moment. 
 
 * We will see,' she said, curtly. ' I think I can do it. 
 But go back, or you will be missed. I will come to yoa 
 soon.' 
 
 She left him then, rapidly, drawing her hand quickly out 
 of the clasp of his. 
 
 * Que je suis hete ! Que je suis bete /' said Cigarette to 
 herself ; for she felt her heart aching to its core for the sorrow 
 of this man who was nothing to her. He did not know what 
 jhe had done for him in his suffering and delirium ; he did 
 not know how she had watched him all that night through. 
 
450 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 when she was weary, and bruised, and thirsting for sleep ; fce 
 did not know ; he held her hand as one comrade another's, 
 and never looked to see if her eyes were blue or wef6~ttact, 
 were laughing or tear-laden. And yet she felt pain in his 
 pain ; she was always giving her life to his service. * Qim 
 je suis bite ! Que je suis bete I ' she murmured again. Many 
 beside the little Friend of the Flag beat back as folly _the 
 noblest and purest thing in them. 
 
 Cecil mechanically returned to the fire at which the men 
 of his tribu were cooking their welcome supper, and sat down 
 near them, rejecting, with a gesture, the most savoury portion 
 which, with their customary love and care for him, they were 
 eareful to select and bring to him. There had never been a 
 time when they had found him fail to prefer them to himself, 
 or fail to do them kindly service, if of such he had a chance ; 
 and they returned it with all that rough and silent attach- 
 ment that can be so strong and so stanch in lives that may be 
 black with crime or red with slaughter. 
 
 He sat like a man in a dream, while the loosened tongues 
 of the men ran noisily on a hundred themes as they chaffed 
 ea^ch other, exchanged a fire of bivouac jokes more racy than 
 decorous, and gave themselves to the enjoyment of their rude 
 meal, that had to them that savour which long hunger alone 
 ean give. Their voices came dull on his ear ; the ruddy 
 warmth of the fire was obscured to his sight ; the din, the 
 laughter, the stir all over the great camp, at the hour of 
 dinner were lost on him. He was insensible to everything 
 except the innumerable memories that thronged upon him, 
 and the aching longing that filled his heart with the sight of 
 the friend of his youth. 
 
 ' He said once that he would take my hand before all the 
 world always, come what would,' he thought. * Would he 
 take it now, I wonder ? Yes, he never believed against me.' 
 
 And, as he thought, the same anguish of desire that had 
 before smitten him to stand once more guiltless in the pre- 
 sence of men, and once more bear, untarnished, the name of 
 his race and the honour of his fathers, shook him now as strong 
 winds shake a tree that yet is fast rooted at its base, though 
 it sway awhile beneath the storm. 
 
 * How weak I am ! ' he thought, bitterly. * What does 
 it matter ? Life is so short, one is a coward indeed to fret 
 over it. I cannot undo what I did. I cannot if I would. 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 451 
 
 To betray him now t God ! not for a kingdom, if I had the 
 chance ! Besides, she may live still ; and, even were she 
 dead, to tarnish her name to clear my own would be a 
 scoundrel's baseness — baseness that would fail as it merited, 
 for who could be brought to believe me now ? ' 
 
 The thoughts unformed drifted through his mind, half 
 dulled, half sharpened by the deadly pain, and the rush of 
 old brotherly love that had arisen in him as he had seen the 
 face of his friend beside the watch-fire of the French bivouac. 
 It was hard ; it was cruelly hard ; he had, after a long and 
 severe conflict, brought himself into contentment with his lot, 
 and taught himself oblivion of the past, and interest in the 
 present, by active duties and firm resolve ; he had vanquished 
 all the habits, controlled most of the weakness, and banished 
 nearly all the frailties and indulgences of his temperament in 
 the long ordeal of African warfare. It was cruelly hard that 
 now, when he had obtained serenity, and more than half 
 attained forgetfulness, these two — her face and his — must 
 come before him, one to recall the past, the other to embitter 
 the future ! 
 
 As he sat with his head bent down and his forehead leaning 
 on his arm, while the hard biscuit that served for a plate 
 stood unnoticed beside him, with the food that the soldiers 
 had placed on it, he did not hear Cigarette's step till she 
 touched him on the arm. Then he looked up ; her eyes were 
 looking on him with a tender, earnest pity. 
 
 * Hark ! I have done it,' she said, gently. * But it will be 
 an errand very close to death, that you must go on ' 
 
 He raised himself erect, eagerly. 
 
 * No matter that ! Ah, mademoiselle, how I thank you ! * 
 
 * Chut ! I am no Paris demoiselle ! * said Cigarette, with 
 a dash of her old acrimony. ' Ceremony in a camp — pouf ! 
 You must have been a court chamberlain once, weren't you ? 
 Well, T have done it. Your officers were talking yonder of 
 a delicate business ; they were uncertain who best to employ. 
 I put in my speech — it was dead against military etiquette, 
 but I did it — I said to M. le General : " You want the best 
 rider, the most silent tongue, and the surest steel in the 
 squadrons ? Take Bel-a-faire-peur then." " Who is that ? " 
 asked the general ; he would have sent out of camp anybody 
 but Cigarette for the interruption. " Mon General," said I, 
 ** the Arabs asked that, too, the other day at Zaraila." " What I *' 
 
 o s 2 
 
45* UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 he cried, " the man Victor — who held the ground with his 
 Chasseurs ? I know — a fine soldier. M. le Colonel, shall we 
 Bend him ? " The Black Hawk had scowled thunder on you ; 
 he hates you more still since that affair at Zaraila, specially, 
 because the general has reported your conduct with such 
 
 f)raise that they cannot help but promote you. Well, he had 
 ooked thunder, but now he laughed. " Yes, mon General," 
 he answered him, " take him, if you like. It is fifty to one 
 whoever goes on that business will not come back alive, and 
 you will rid me of the most insolent fine gentleman in my 
 Bquadrons." The general hardly heard him ; he was deep in 
 thought ; but he asked a good deal about you from the Hawk, 
 and Chateauroy spoke for your fitness for the errand they are 
 going to send you on, very truthfully, for a wonder. I don't 
 know why ; but he wants you to be sent, I think ; most likely 
 that you may be cut to pieces. And so they will send for 
 you in a minute. I have done it as you wished, " le diable 
 prends le fruit.'*' 
 
 There was something of her old brusquerie and recklessness 
 in the closing sentence ; but it had not her customary debon- 
 naire lightness. She knew too well that the chances were as 
 a hundred to one that he would never return alive from this 
 service on which he had entreated to be despatched. Cecil 
 grasped both her hands in his with warm gratitude, that was 
 still, like the touch of his hands, the gratitude of comrade to 
 comrade, not of man to woman. 
 
 ' God bless you. Cigarette ! You are a true friend, my 
 child. You have done me immeasurable benefits ' 
 
 * Oh-h6. I am a true friend,' said the Little One, some- 
 thing pettishly. She would have preferred another epithet. 
 ' If a man wants to get shot as a very great favour, I always 
 let him pleasure himself. Give a man his own way, if you 
 wish to be kind to him. You are children, all of you, nothing 
 but children, and if the toy that pleases you best is death, 
 yfliy — you must havc it. Nothing else would content you. 
 I know you. You always want what flies from you, and are 
 tired of what lies to your hand. That is always a man.' 
 
 * And a woman, too, is it not ? ' 
 Cigarette shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 * Oh, I dare say. We love what is new — what is strange. 
 We are humming-tops ; we will only spin when we are fresh 
 wound up with a string to our liking.' 
 
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE 453 
 
 * Make an exception of yourself, my child. You are 
 always ready to do a good action, and never tire of that. 
 From my heart I thank you. I wish to Heaven I could 
 prove it better.' 
 
 She drew her hands away from him. 
 
 * A great thing I have done, certainly 1 Got you permis- 
 sion to go and throw a cartel at old King Death ; that is all ! 
 There ! Loup-^-gri£fes-de-fer is coming to you. That is your 
 summons.' 
 
 The orderly so nicknamed approached, and brought the 
 bidding of the general in command of the Cavalry for Cecil 
 to render himself at once to his presence. These things brook 
 no second's delay in obedience ; he went with a quick adieu 
 to Cigarette, and the little Friend of the Flag was left in his 
 vacant place beside the lire. 
 
 And there was a pang at her heart. 
 
 * Ten to one he goes to his death,* she thought. But 
 Cigarette, volage little mischief though she was, could reach 
 very high in one thing ; she could reach a love that was un- 
 selfish, and one that was heroic. 
 
 A few moments, and Cecil returned. 
 
 * Eake,' he said rapidly, in the French he habitually used, 
 • saddle my horse and your own. I am allowed to choose 
 one of you to accompany me.' 
 
 Eake, in Paradise, and the envied of every man in the squad- 
 rons, turned to his work — with him a task of scarce more than 
 a second ; and Cecil approached his little Friend of the Flag. 
 
 ' My child, I cannot attempt to thank you. But for you, 
 I should have been tempted to send my lance through my 
 own heart.' 
 
 * Keep its lunge for the Arbicos, mon ami^^ said Cigarette 
 brusquely — the more brusquely because that new and bitter 
 pang was on her. * As for me, I want no thanks.' 
 
 ' No ; you are too generous. But not the less do I wish I 
 could render them more worthily than by words. If I live, 
 I will try ; if not, keep this in my memory. It is the only 
 thing I have.' 
 
 He put into her hand the ring she had seen in the little 
 bonbonnUre ; a ring of his mother's that he had saved when 
 he had parted with all else, and that he had put off his hand 
 and into the box of Petit Reine's gift the day he had entered 
 the Algerian army. 
 
454 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Cigarette flushed scarlet with passions he could not under- 
 stand, and she could not have disentangled. 
 
 ' The ring of your mistress I Not for me, if I know it I 
 Do you think I want to be paid ? * 
 
 ' The ring was my mother's,' he answered her simply. 
 * And I offer it only en souvenir.'' 
 
 She lost all her hot colour and all her fiery wrath ; his grave 
 and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled and rebuked her ; 
 but she raised the ring off the ground where she had flung it, 
 and placed it back in his hand. 
 
 * If so, still less should you part with it. Keep it ; it will 
 bring you happiness one day. As for me, I have done nothing, 
 pardieu 1 * 
 
 ' You have done what I value the more for that noble dis- 
 claimer. May I thank you thus, Little One ? ' 
 
 He stooped and kissed her ; a kiss that the lips of a man 
 will always give to the bright youthful lips of a woman, but 
 a kiss, as she knew well, without passion, even without ten- 
 derness in it. 
 
 With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and a 
 ; refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested herself 
 I from him, her face burning, her heart panting, and plunged 
 I away from him into the depth of the shadow ; and he never 
 ' sought to follow her, but threw himself into saddle as his gray 
 was brought up : another instant, and, armed to the teeth, he 
 rode out of the camp into the darkness of the silent, melan- 
 choly, lonely Arab night. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 SEUL AU MONDE 
 
 Thb errand on which he went was one, as he was well 
 aware, from which it were a thousand chances to one that he 
 ever issued alive. 
 
 It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation 
 with despatches for the chief in command there, and to do this 
 he had to pass through a fiercely hostile region, occupied by 
 Arabs with whom no sort of peace had ever been made, the 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 455 
 
 most, savage as well as the most predatory of the wandering 
 tribes. His knowledge of their tongue, and his friendship 
 with some men of their nation, would avail him nothing here, 
 for their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was said 
 that all prisoners who had fallen into their hands had been 
 put to death with merciless barbarities. This might be true 
 or untrue ; wild tales were com.mon among Algerian cam- 
 paigners ; whichever it were, he thought Uttle of it as he 
 rode out on to the lonely plains. Every kind of hazardous 
 adventure and every variety of peril had been familiar with 
 him in this African life ; and now there were thoughts and 
 memories on him which deadened every recollection of merely 
 physical risk. 
 
 * We must ride as hard and as fast as we can, and as 
 silently,' were the only words he exchanged with Kake, as ha 
 loosened his gray to a hand-gallop. 
 
 * All right, sir,' answered the trooper, whose warm blood 
 was dancing, and whose blue eyes were alive like fire with 
 delight. That he had been absent on a far-away foragmg 
 raid on the day of Zaraila had been nothing short of agony to 
 Rake, and the choice made of him for this duty was to him a 
 gift of Paradise. He loved fighting for fighting's sake ; and 
 to be beside Cecil was the greatest happiness life held for 
 him. 
 
 They had two hundred miles to traverse, and had received 
 only the command he had passed on Rake, to ride * hard, 
 fast, and silently.' To the hero of Zaraila the general had 
 felt too much soldierly sympathy to add the superfluous in- 
 junction to do his uttermost to carry safely and successfully 
 to their destination the papers that were placed in his sabre- 
 tache. They knew well that the errand would be done, or 
 the Chasseur's main de Jemme, mais main de fer, would be 
 Btiffened and nerveless in death. 
 
 It was just nightfall ; the after-glow had faded only a few 
 moments before. Giving their horses, which they were to 
 change once ten hours for the distance, and two for bait and 
 for rest, he reckoned that they would reach the camp before 
 the noon of the coming day, as the beasts, fresh and fast in 
 the camp, flew like greyhounds beneath them. 
 
 Another night ride that they had ridden together came to 
 the mir^:l3 of both ; but they spoke not a word as they swept 
 on, their sabres shaken loose in their sheaths, their lances well 
 
456 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 l^rippcd, and the pistols with which they had been supplied 
 sprung in their belts ready for instant action if a call should 
 come for it. Every rood of the way was as full of unseen 
 ^nger as if laid over mines. They might pass in safety; 
 fcey might any moment be cut down by ten score a,gainst two. 
 From every hanging scarp of rugged rock a storm of musket- 
 balls might pour ; from every screen of wild-fig foliage a 
 shower of lances might whistle through the air ; from every 
 darkling grove of fir-trees an Arab band might spring and 
 swoop on them ; but the knowledge scarcely recurred to the 
 one save to make him shake his sword more at loose for quick 
 disengagement, and only made the sunny blue eyes of the 
 other sparkle with a vivid and longing zest. 
 
 The night grew very chill as it wore on ; the north wind 
 rose, rushing against them with a force and icy touch that 
 seemed to freeze their bones to the marrow after the heat of 
 the day and the sun that had scorched them so long. There 
 was no regular road ; they went across the country, their way 
 sometimes leading over level land, over which they swept like 
 lightning, great plains succeeding one another with wearisome 
 monotony ; sometimes, on the contrary, lying through ravines, 
 and defiles, and gloomy woods, and broken hilly spaces, where 
 rent bare rocks were thrown on one another in gigantic con- 
 fusion, and the fantastic shapes of the wild fig and the dwarf 
 palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the darkness. For 
 there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by the 
 storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky ; and 
 the only sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the 
 shriek of the night bird, and now and then the sound of 
 shallow water -courses, where the parched beds of hidden 
 brooks had been filled by the autumnal rain. 
 
 The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, 
 and the horses laid well and warmly to their work. They 
 halted to rest and bait their beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered 
 from the blasts of the bise, and green with short sweet grass, 
 sprung up afresh after the summer drought. 
 
 * Do you ever think of him, sir ? ' said Rake, softly, with 
 a lingering love in his voice, as he stroked the grays and 
 tethered them. 
 
 * Of whom ? • 
 
 * Of the King, sir. If he's alive, he's getting a ?are old 
 horse now.' 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 457 
 
 * Think of him I I wish I did not, Rake.* 
 
 * Wouldn't you like to see him agen, sir ? * 
 ' What folly to ask ! You know ' 
 
 * Yes, sir, I know,* said Rake, slowly. ' And I know — 
 leastways I picked it out of a old paper — that your elder 
 brother died, sir, like the old lord, and Mr. Berk.'s got the 
 title.' 
 
 Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say 
 this thing which he had learned, and which he could not tell 
 whether or no Cecil knew likewise. His eyes looked with 
 straining eagerness through the gloom into his master's ; he 
 was uncertain how his words would be taken. To his bitter 
 disappointment, Cecil's face showed no change, no wonder. 
 
 ' I have heard that,' he said, calmly — as calmly as though 
 the news had no bearing on his fortunes, but was some 
 stranger's history. 
 
 * W^ell, sir, but he am't the lord ? ' pleaded Rake, passion- 
 ately. ' He won't never be while you're living, sir 1 ' 
 
 * Oh yes, he is ! I am dead, you know.' 
 
 'But he luon't, sir!* reiterated Rake. 'You're Lord 
 Royallieu if ever there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever 
 there will be one.' 
 
 ' You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can 
 claim none.' 
 
 The man looked very wistfully at him ; all these years 
 through he had never learned why his master was thug 
 * dead ' in Africa, and he had too loyal a love and faith ever 
 to ask, or ever to doubt but that Cecil was the wronged and 
 not the wrong-doer. 
 
 'You ain't a outlaw, sir,' he mrttered, *You could take 
 the title if you would.' 
 
 * Oh, no I I left England under a criminal charge ; I 
 should have to disprove that before I could inherit.* 
 
 Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. 
 ' You could disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you 
 chose.' 
 
 ' No ; or I should not have come here. Let us leave the 
 subject. It was settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royal- 
 lieu. I would not disturb him, if I had the power, and I have 
 not it. Look, the horses are taking well to their feed.' 
 
 Rake asked him no more : he had never had a harsh word 
 from Cecil in their lives ; but he knew him too well for all 
 
4S8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Ihat to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put 
 aside. But his heart ached sorely for his master ; he would 
 so gladly have seen 'the king among his own again,' and 
 would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever 
 a Cavalier strove for the White Rose ; and he sat in silence, 
 perplexed and ill-satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with 
 the great, dim, desolate African landscape stretching before 
 him, with here and there a gleam of light upon it when the 
 wind swept the clouds apart. His volatile speech was chilled, 
 and his buoyant spirits were checked. That Cecil was justly 
 outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason to 
 believe for one instant ; yet he felt that he might as soon seek 
 to wrench up the great stones above him from their base aa 
 seek to change the resolution of this man, whom he had once 
 known pliant as a reed and careless as a child. 
 
 They were before long in saddle again and off, the country 
 growing wilder at each stride the horses took. 
 
 * It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,' said 
 Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle. * They have come 
 northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, 
 and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later. If they 
 cut me down, don't wait, but slash my sabretache loose and 
 ride off with it.' 
 
 * All right, sir,* said Rake, obediently ; but he thought to 
 himself, ' Leave you alone with them demons ? Damn me if 
 I will.' 
 
 And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the 
 darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black 
 with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds. 
 
 Meantime Cigarette was feasting with the officers of hia 
 regiment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions 
 could furnish in honour of the two or three illustrious tourista 
 who were on a visit to the head-quarters of the Algeria* 
 Army ; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the 
 toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable 
 as the champagnes. Not that she was altogether herself 
 to-night ; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of 
 stinging ironies ; but that delicious gaiety, like a kitten's 
 play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first tfme in 
 her life, was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In 
 truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the 
 bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 459 
 
 into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing 
 at all of what was around her, and very little of what she 
 said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out 
 yonder, of the bleak arid country, of the great, dim, measure- 
 less plains ; of one who was passing through thsm all, and 
 one who might never return. 
 
 It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her 
 present ; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, 
 haunting unconquerable fear for another had approached her : 
 fear ! — she had never known it for herself, why should she feel 
 it now for him ? — a man whose lips had touched her own as 
 lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves 
 of a rose or the curls of a dog ! 
 
 She felt her face burn with the flush of a keen, unbearable, 
 passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to 
 be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and 
 forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day ; and now he — 
 he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate 
 and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known 
 — he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he 
 had roused it I To the proud young warrior of France a greater 
 degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have 
 come to her. 
 
 Yet she was true as steel to him ; true with the strong and 
 loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To 
 have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was 
 neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine 
 baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would 
 have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, 
 and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it 
 could never be stealing and traitorous, and ne ver like tha 
 revenge of a woman. 
 
 Not a word escaped her that could have given a clue to the 
 secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her ; she only 
 studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of 
 this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as 
 criminals flee from their accusers. 
 
 ' What is your name ? ' she asked him, curtly, in one of 
 the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated 
 hi the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertain- 
 ing him. 
 
 ' Well — some call me Seraph.' 
 
46o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Ah ! you have petits noms then in Albion ! I should 
 have thought she was too sombre and too stiff for them. 
 Besides ? * 
 
 * Lyonnesse.* 
 
 * "What a droll name ! What are you ? * 
 
 * A soldier.' 
 
 * Good ! What grade ? * 
 
 * A Colonel of Guards.' 
 
 Cigarette gave a Httle whistle to herself ; she remembered 
 that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, 
 * He has the seat of the English Guards.' 
 
 * My pretty catechist, M. le Due does not tell you his 
 title/ cried one of the officers. 
 
 Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head. 
 
 ' Ouf I Titles are nothing to me. I am a child of the 
 People. So you are a Duke, are yon, M. le Seraph ? Well, 
 that is not much, to my thinking. Bah 1 there is Fialin made 
 a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing pri- 
 vates' uniforms, and littering down their own horses. Bah ! 
 Have you that sort of thing in Albion ? ' 
 
 ' Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep 
 crossings ? Oh yes ! ' laughed her interlocutor. ' But you 
 speak of aristocrats in your ranks — that reminds me. Have 
 you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor ? ' 
 
 He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers who an- 
 swered him in the affirmative ; while Cigarette listened with 
 all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper 
 name, heightened and tight-strung. 
 
 * A fine fellow,' continued the Chef d'Escadron to whom 
 he had appealed. * He behaved magnificently the other day 
 at Zaraila ; he must be distinguished for it. He is just sent 
 on a perilous errand, but though so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, 
 and woe to the Arabs who slay him I Are you acquainted 
 with him ? ' 
 
 * Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of 
 him. I have been told he seems above his present position. 
 Is it so ? ' 
 
 ' Likely enough, monsieur, he seems a gentleman. But 
 then we have many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can 
 make no difference for that. Cigarette can tell you more 
 of him ; she used to complain that lie bowed like a Court 
 chamberlain.' 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 461 
 
 ' Oh-h6 — I did I ' cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony 
 because pained and irritated by being appealed to on the 
 Bubject. ' And, of course, when so many of his officers have 
 the manners of Pyrenean bears, it is a little awkward for him 
 to bring us the manners of a Palace ! ' 
 
 Which effectually chastised the Chef d'Escadron, who was 
 one of those who had a ton de garnison of the roughest, and 
 piqued himself on his powers of fence much more than on his 
 habits of delicacy. 
 
 * Has this Victor any history ? ' asked the English 
 Duke. 
 
 'He has written one with his sword; a fine one,' said 
 Cigarette, curtly. ' We are not given here to care much 
 about any other,' 
 
 ' Quite right ; I asked because a friend of mine who had 
 Been his carvings wished to serve him if it were possible; 
 and ' 
 
 • Ho 1 That is Miladi, I suppose ? ' Cigarette's eyes 
 flashed fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. * What did 
 she tell you about him, la belle dedaigneuse ? ' 
 
 ' I am ignorant of whom you speak,' he answered, with 
 something of surprise and annoyance. 
 
 ' Are you ? ' said Cigarette, in derision. ' I doubt that. 
 Of whom should I speak but of her ? Bah I She insulted 
 him, she offered him gold, she sent my men the spoils of her 
 table, as if they were paupers, and he thinks it all divine 
 because it is done by Madame la Princesse Corona d'Amagiie ! 
 Faugh I when he was delirious, the other night, he could 
 babble of nothing but of her — of her — of her ! ' 
 
 The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every 
 other thought ; she was a child in much, she was untutored 
 in all ; she had no thought that by her scornful vituperation 
 of ' Miladi ' she could either harm Cecil or betray herself. 
 But she was amazed to see the English guest change colour 
 with a haughty anger that he strove to subdue as he half 
 rose and answered her with an accent in his voice that 
 reminded her — she knew not why — of Bel-^-faire-peur and of 
 Marquise. 
 
 ' Madame la Princesse Corona d'Amagiie is my sister ; 
 why do you venture to couple the name of this Chasseur with 
 hers ? * 
 
 Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, 
 
462 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 dared to anything by the mere fact of being publicly 
 
 arraigned. 
 
 * Pardieu 1 Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with 
 the Eagles of France ? — a pretty idea, truly ! So she is your 
 sister, is she? Miladi? Well, then, tell her from me ta 
 think twice before she outrages a soldier with " patronage " ; 
 and tell her, too, that had I been he I would have ground 
 my ivory toys into powder before I would have let them 
 become the playthings of a grande dame who tendered m© 
 gold for them ! ' 
 
 The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that 
 was mingled with a vivid sense of intense annoyance and 
 irritated pride, that the name he cherished closest should b« 
 thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandi^rt 
 and in connection with a trooper of Chasseurs. 
 
 *I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle,' 
 he said, with an impatient stroke to his beard. * There it 
 no occasion for it. Madame Corona d'Amagiie, my sister,' 
 he continued, 1 3 the officers present, * became accidentally 
 acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of 
 yours ; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and 
 good breeding. She chanced to name him to me, and feeling 
 some pity ' 
 
 ' M. le Due ! ' cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud 
 and startling as a bugle-note, while she stood hke a little 
 lioness, flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the 
 warmth of wrath at once jealous and generous, * keep your 
 compassion until it is asked of you. No soldier of France 
 needs it ; that I promise you. I know this man that you 
 talk of ''pitying." Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks 
 ago ; he had drawn up his men to die with them rather than 
 surrender and yield up the guidon ; I dragged him half dead, 
 when the field was won, from under his horse, and his first 
 conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to a 
 wretch who had thieved from him. Our life here is hell 
 upon earth to such as he, yet none ever heard a lament 
 wrung out of him ; he is gone to the chances of death 
 to-night as most men go to their mistresses' kisses : he is a 
 soldier Napoleon would have honoured. Such an one is noc 
 to have the patronage of a Miladi Corona, nor the pity of a 
 stranger of England. Let the first respect him ; let the last 
 imitate him.' 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 4^3 
 
 And Cigarette, having pronounced her defence and her 
 eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a 
 tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, 
 breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced 
 her way out despite them, and left h^r hosts alone in their 
 lighted tent. 
 
 ^ C'est Cigarette ! ' said the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug 
 of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a 
 whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities. 
 
 • A strange little Amazon ! ' said their guest. ' Is she in 
 love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with 
 his name ? ' 
 
 The Major shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 * I don't know that, monsieur,' answered one. * She 
 will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face 
 most soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper 
 windmill, just as the breeze blows ; but, as the windmill 
 never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the 
 Tricolor.' 
 
 Their guest said little more on the subject ; in his own 
 ihoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of 
 this Chasseur's fortunes, he should have brought in the name 
 he loved so well — the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in 
 Europe — into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp 
 dinner. 
 
 Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing ; he had listened 
 in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon hia 
 swarthy features ; only now he opened his lips for a few 
 brief words : 
 
 ' Mon cher Due, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm 
 of her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and 
 an outlaw when he came to us. He fights well — it is often a 
 blackguard's virtue ! ' 
 
 His guest nodded, and changed the subject ; his impatience [ 
 and aversion at the introduction of his sister's name into the | 
 discussion, made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it i 
 die out forgotton. 
 
 Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper ! U 
 Cigarette had been of his own sex, he could have dashed -the 
 white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in 
 one breath. 
 
 And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his 
 
464 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 narrow camp palliasse, tired with a long day in saddle under 
 the hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm 
 under his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this 
 unknown French trooper. 
 
 But Cigarette remained wakeful. 
 
 She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, 
 Etoile Filante, with her head on the beast's glossy flank and 
 her hand among his mane. She often slept thus in camp, 
 and the horse would lie still and cramped for hours rather 
 than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most watchful 
 heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed 
 cheek, the frank fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that 
 one stroke of his hoof could have stamped out into a bruised 
 and shapeless mass. 
 
 To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake 
 — wide awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness 
 beyond, with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, 
 and her mouth quivering with pain and with wrath. The 
 vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had 
 come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had 
 roused her to fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken — 
 of that aristocrat whose name had been on Cecil's lips when 
 he had been delirious. She had kept his secret loyally, she 
 had defended him vehemently ; there was something that 
 touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which 
 he had recognised this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of 
 him as some unknown French soldier. She could not tell 
 what the history was, but she could divine nearly enough to 
 feel its pathos and its pain. She had known, in her short 
 life, more of men and of their passions and of their fortunes 
 than many lives of half a century in length can ever do ; she 
 «ould guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, 
 fche past which had exiled the man who had kept by him hia 
 lost mother's ring as the sole relic of years to which he was 
 dead as utterly as though he were lying in his coffin. No 
 matter what the precise reason was — women, or debt, or 
 accident, or ruin — these two, who had been familiar comrades, 
 were now as strangers to each other ; the one slumbered in 
 ignorance near her, the other had gone out to the close peril 
 of death, lest the eyes of his friend should recognise his fac( 
 and read his secret. It troubled her, it weighed on her, it 
 smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even now — 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 465 
 
 this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows 
 of the night chase one another along the dreary plains — a 
 shot might have struck down this life that had been stripped 
 of name and fame and country ; even now all might be over ! 
 
 And Cigarette felt a cold sickly shudder seize her that 
 never before at death or danger, had chilled the warm swift 
 current of her bright French blood. In bitter scorn at 
 herself, she muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth. 
 
 Mdre de Dieu I he had touched her lips as carelessly as her 
 own kiss would have touched the rose-hued waxen petals 
 of a cluster of oleander-blossoms ; and she cared for him 
 still! 
 
 While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the 
 French camp around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette 
 watched afar off the dim distant forms of the videttes as they 
 circled slowly round at their outpost duty, eight leagues off, 
 through a vast desert of shadow and silence the two horsemen 
 swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed between them ; 
 they rode close together in unbroken stillness ; they were 
 scarcely visible to each other, for there was no moon, and 
 storm-clouds obscured the skies. Now and then their horses* 
 hoofs struck fire from a flint- stone, and the flash sparkled 
 through the darkness ; often not even the sound of their gallop 
 was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil. 
 
 Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril ; no 
 frowning ledge of rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might 
 serve as the barricade behind which some foe lurked ; no knot 
 of cypress-shrubs, black even on that black sheet of shadow, 
 but might be pierced with the steel tubes of levelled waiting 
 muskets. 
 
 Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in 
 what was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and 
 the invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt 
 which the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to 
 them, had by no means ended. They were still in arms, 
 infesting the country everywhere southward, defying regular 
 pursuit, impervious to regular attacks, carrying on the haras- 
 sing guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts, and 
 causing thus to their Frankish foe more irritation and more 
 loss than decisive engagements would have produced. They 
 feared nothing, had nothing to lose, and could subsist almost 
 upon nothing. They might be driven into the desert, they 
 
 9 ]^ 
 
466 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they 
 would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now 
 far and wide over the country ; every cave might shelter, 
 every ravine might inclose them ; they appeared here, they 
 appeared there ; they swooped down on a convoy, they carried 
 sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a flight of 
 hawks upon a foraging-party, they picked off any vidette as 
 he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight ; and every yard 
 of the sixty miles which the two gray chargers of the Chas- 
 seurs d'Afrique must cover ere their service was done, was as 
 rife with death as though its course lay over the volcanic line 
 of an earthquake or a hollow mined and sprung. 
 
 They had reached the centre of the plain when the sound 
 they had long looked for rang on their ears, piercing the 
 heavy breathless stillness of the night. It was the Allah-il- 
 Allah of their foes, the war-cry of the Moslem. Out of the 
 gloom — whether from long pursuit or some near hiding-place 
 they could not tell — there broke suddenly upon them the fury 
 of an Arab onslaught. In the darkness all they could see 
 were the flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their 
 own, the white steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth 
 flung off the snorting nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved 
 flissas — whether two, or twenty, or twice a hundred were 
 upon them they could not know — they never did know. All 
 of which they were conscious was that in an instant, from 
 the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked 
 space, they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the 
 close, crushing, horrible entanglement of conflict, without the 
 power to perceive or to number their foes, and only able to 
 follow the sheer simple instincts of attack and of defence. All 
 they were sensible of was one of those confused moments, 
 deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and din — 
 an eternity in semblance, a second in duration — that can 
 never be traced, never be recalled, yet in whose feverish ex- 
 citement men do that which, in their calmer hours, would 
 look to them a fable of some Amadis of Gaul. 
 
 How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they 
 struck, how they were encompassed, how they thrust back 
 those who were hurled on them in the black night, with the 
 north sea-wind like ice upon their faces, and the loose African 
 soil drifting up in clouds of sand around them, they could 
 never have told. Nor how they strained free from the armed 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 467 
 
 ring that circled them, and beat aside the shafts of lances and 
 the blades of swords, and forced their chargers breast to breast 
 against the fence of steel, and through the tempest of rage, 
 and blows, and shouts, and wind, and driven sand, cut their 
 way through the foe whose very face they scarce could see, 
 and phmged away into the shadows across the desolation of 
 the plain, pursued, whether by one or by a thousand they 
 could not guess ; for the gallop was noiseless on the powdered 
 soil, and the Arab yell of baffled passion and slaughterous lust 
 was half drowned in the rising of the wind-storm. Had it 
 been day, they would have seen their passage across the level 
 table-land traced by a crimson stream upon the sand, in which 
 the blood of Frank and Arab blended equally. 
 
 As it was, they dashed headlong down through the dark- 
 ness that grew yet denser and blacker as the storm rose. For 
 miles the ground was level before them, and they had only to 
 let the half -maddened horses, that had as by a miracle escaped 
 all injury, rush on at their own will through the whirl of 
 the wind that drove the dust upward in spiral columns and 
 brought icy breaths of the north over the sear, sunburnt, 
 southern wastes. 
 
 For a long space they had no sense but that of rapid cease- 
 less motion through the thick gloom and against the pressure 
 of the violent blasts. The speed of their gallop and the 
 strength of the currents of air were like some narcotic that 
 drowned and that dizzied perception. In the intense dark- 
 ness neither could see, neither hear, the other ! the instinct of 
 the beast kept them together, but no word could be heard 
 above the roar of the storm, and no light broke the sombre 
 veil of shadow through which they passed as fast as leopards 
 course through the night. The first faint streak of dawn 
 grew gray in the east when Cecil felt his charger stagger and 
 sway beneath him, and halt, worn out and quivering in every 
 sinew with fatigue. He threw himself off the animal in time 
 to save himself from falhng with it as it reeled and sank to 
 the ground. 
 
 'Massena cannot stir another yard,' he said. *Do you 
 think they follow us still ? ' 
 
 There was no reply. 
 
 He strained his sight to pierce the darkness, bat he could 
 distinguish nothing ; the gloom was still too deep. He spoke 
 more loudly ; still there was no reply. Then he raised hia 
 
 HH i 
 
468 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 voice in a shout ; it rang through the silence, and, when it 
 ceased, the silence reigned again. 
 
 A deadly chill came on him. How had he missed his 
 comrade? They must be far apart, he knew, since no re- 
 sponse was given to his summons ; or — the alternative rose 
 before him with a terrible foreboding. 
 
 That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a gnastly 
 loneliness that seemed filled with desolation. His horse was 
 stretched before him on the sand, powerless to rise and drag 
 itself a rood onward, and fast expiring. From the plains 
 around him not a sound came, either of friend or foe. The 
 consciousness that he was alone, that he had lost for ever the 
 only friend left to him, struck on him with that conviction 
 which so often foreruns the assurance of calamity. Without 
 a moment's pause, he plunged back in the direction he had 
 come, leaving the charger on the ground to pant its life out 
 as it must, and sought to feel his way along, so as to seek as 
 best he could the companion he had deserted. He still could 
 not see a rood before him, but he went on slowly, with some 
 vague hope that he should ere long reach the man whom he 
 knew death or the fatality of accident alone would keep from 
 his side. He could not feel or hear anything that gave him 
 the slightest sign or clue to aid his search ; he only wandered 
 farther from his horse, and risked falling afresh into the hands 
 of his pursuers ; he shouted again with all his strength, but 
 his own voice alone echoed over the plains, while his heart 
 stood still with the same frozen dread that a man feels when, 
 wrecked on some barren shore, his cry for rescue rings back 
 on his own ear over the waste of waters. 
 
 The flicker of the dawn was growing lighter in the sky, 
 and he could see dimly now, as in some winter day's dark 
 twilight, though all around him hung the leaden mist, with 
 the wild winds driving furiously. It was with difficulty 
 almost that he kept his feet against their force ; but he was 
 blown onward by their current, though beaten from side to 
 side, and he still made his way forward. He had repassed 
 the ground already traversed by some hundred yards or more, 
 which seemed the length of many miles in the hurricane that 
 was driving over the earth and sky, when some outline still 
 dusk'er than the dusky shadow caught his sight ; it was the 
 bodj of a horse, standing on guard over the fallen body of a 
 man. 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 469 
 
 Another moment and he was beside them. 
 
 ' My God ! Are you hurt ? ' 
 
 He could see nothing but an indistinct and shapeless mass 
 without form or colour, to mark it out from the brooding gloom 
 and from the leaden earth. But the voice he knew so well 
 answered him with the old love and fealty in it ; eager with 
 fear for him. 
 
 * When did you miss me, sir ? I didn't mean you to know ; 
 I held on as long as I could ; and when I couldn't no longer, 
 I thought you was safe not to see I'd knocked over, so dark as 
 it was.' 
 
 * Great Heavens ! You are hurt, then ? ' 
 
 * Just finished, sir. Lord ! it don't matter. Only you ride 
 on, Mr. Cecil ; ride on, I say. Don't mind me.* 
 
 ' What is it ? When were you struck ? Heaven ! I 
 never dreamt- ' 
 
 Cecil hung over him, striving in vain through the shadows 
 to read the truth from the face on which he felt by instinct 
 the seal of death was set. 
 
 ' I never meant you should know, sir. I meant just to 
 drop behind and die on the quiet. You see, sir, it was just 
 this way ; they hit me as we forced through them. There's 
 the lance-head in my loins now. I pressed it in hard, and 
 kept the blood from flowing, and thought I should hold out so 
 till the sun rose. But I couldn't do it so long ; I got sick and 
 faint after awhile, and I knew well enough it was death. So 
 I dropped down while I'd sense left to check the horse and get 
 out of saddle in silence. I hoped you wouldn't miss me, in the 
 darkness and the noise the wind was making ; and you didii't 
 hear me then, sir ; I was glad.' 
 
 His voice was checked in a quick grasping breath ; his only 
 thought had been to lie down and die in solitude so that his 
 master might be saved. 
 
 A great sob shook Cecil as he heard ; no false hope came to 
 him ; he felt that this man was lost to him for ever, that this 
 was the sole recompense which the cruelty of Africa would 
 give^ ta-a^fidelity passing the fidelity of woman ; these throes 
 of dissolution the only payment with which fate would ever 
 requite a loyalty that had held no travail weary, no exile pain, 
 and no danger worthy counting, so long as they were encoun- 
 tered and endured in his own service. 
 
 ' Don't take on about it, sir,' whispered Rake, striving to 
 
47© UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 raise his head that he might strain his eyes better through the 
 gloom to see his master's face. ' It was sure to come some 
 time ; and I ain't in no pain — to speak of. Do leave me, Mr. 
 Cecil — leave me, for God's sake, and save yourself I * 
 
 * Did you leave me ? ' 
 
 The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered 
 it ; but through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it. 
 
 * That was different, sir,' he said, simply. ' Let me lie 
 here and go you on. It'll soon be over, and there's naught to 
 be done.' 
 
 * God ! is no help possible ? ' 
 
 * Don't take on, sir ; it's no odds. I allays was a scamp, 
 and scamps die game, you know. My life's been a rare spree, 
 count it all and all ; and it's a great good thing, you see, sir, 
 to go off quick like this. I J night have been laid in hospital. 
 If you'd only take the beast and ride on, sir * 
 
 * Hush I hush I Would 3 ou make me coward, or brute, or 
 both ? ' 
 
 The words broke in an agony from him. The time had 
 been when he had been himself stretched in what he had 
 thought was death, in just such silence, in just such solitude, 
 upon the bare baked earth, far from men's aid, and near only 
 to the hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey. Then he had 
 been very calm, and waited with indifference for the end ; now 
 his eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing 
 faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impa- 
 tience, the terror, of despair. Death had smitten down many 
 beside him ; buoyant youth and dauntless manhood he had 
 seen a thousand times swept under the great waves of war 
 and lost for ever ; but it had an anguish for him here that he 
 would never have known had he felt his own life-blood well 
 out over the sand. The whole existence of this man had 
 been sacrificed for him, and its only reward was a thrust of a 
 lance in a midnight fray — a grave in an alien soil. 
 
 His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the 
 sounds of the living world. The exhaustion that follows on 
 great loss of blood was upon the soldier who for the last half 
 hour had lain there in the darkness and the stillness, quietly 
 waiting death, and not once seeking even to raise his voice 
 for succour lest the cry should reach and should imperil his 
 master. 
 
 The morning had broken now, but the storm had not lulled. 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 471 
 
 The northeru winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold 
 violence, and the rains burst and poured, with the fury of 
 water-spouts on the crust of the parched, cracked earth. 
 Around them there was nothing heard or seen except the 
 leaden angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane, and 
 the white light of the coming day breaking lividly through 
 the clouds. The world held no place of more utter desolation, 
 more unspeakable loneliness ; and in his misery, Cecil, flung 
 down upon the sands beside him, could do nothing except — 
 helpless to aid, and powerless to save — watch the last breath 
 grow feebler and feebler, until it faded out from the only life 
 that had been faithful to him. 
 
 By the fitful gleams of day he could see the blood slowly 
 ebbing out from the great gap where the lance-head was still 
 bedded with its wooden shaft snapped in two ; he could see 
 the drooped head that he had raised upon his knee, with the 
 yellow northern curls that no desert suns had darkened ; and 
 Rake's eyes, smiling so brightly and so bravely still, looked 
 up from under their weary Uds to his. 
 
 * I'd never let you take my hand before, sir ; just take it 
 once now — will you ? — while I can see you still.' 
 
 Their hands met as he asked it, and held each other close 
 and long ; all the loyal service of the one life, and all the 
 speechless gratitude of the other, told better than by all words 
 in that one farewell. 
 
 A light that was not from the stormy dusky morning shone 
 over the soldier's face. 
 
 * Time was, sir,' he said, with a smile, ' when I used to 
 think as how, some day or another, when I should have done 
 something great and grand, and you was back among your 
 own again, and they here had given me the Cross, I'd have 
 asked you to have done that before all the Army, and just to 
 have said to 'em, if so you'd liked, " He was a scamp, and he 
 wasn't thought good for naught ; but he kep' true to me, and 
 you see it made him go straight, and I aren't ashamed to call 
 him my friend." I used to think that, sir, though 'twas silly, 
 perhaps. But it's best as it is — a deal best, no doubt. If you 
 was only back safe in camp ' 
 
 * God I cease ! I am not worthy one thought of love 
 like yours.' 
 
 * Yes, you are, sir — leastways you was to me. When you 
 took pity on me, it was just a toss up if I didn't go right to 
 
472 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the gallows. Don't grieve that way, Mr. Cecil. If I coulcl 
 just have seen you home again in your place, I Bhould have 
 been glad — that's all. You'll go back one day, sir; when 
 you do, tell the King I ain't never forgot him.' 
 
 His voice grew faint as the last sentence stole from his 
 lips ; he lay quite still, his head leant back against his master ; 
 and the day came, with the north winds driving over the 
 plains, and the gray mists tossed by them to and fro like 
 smoke. 
 
 There was a long silence, a pause in which the wind-storm 
 ceased, and the clouds of the loosed sands sank. Alone, with 
 the wastes stretching around them, were the living and the 
 dying man, with the horse standing motionless beside them, 
 and, above, the gloom of the sullen sky. No aid was pos- 
 sible : they could but wait, in the stupefaction of despair, for 
 the end of all to come. 
 
 In that awful stillness, in that sudden lull in the madness 
 of the hurricane, death had a horror which it never wore in 
 the riot of the battle-field, in the intoxication of the slaughter. 
 There was no pity in earth or heaven ; the hard hot ground 
 sucked down its fill of blood; the icy air enwrapped them 
 like a shroud. 
 
 The faithfulness of love, the strength of gratitude, were of 
 no avail ; the one perished in agony, the other was powerless 
 to save. 
 
 In that mome,ntary hush, as the winds sank low, the heavy 
 eyes, half sightless now, sought with their old wistful dog- 
 like loyalty the face to which so soon they would be blind for 
 ever. 
 
 • Would you tell me once, sir — now ? I never asked — I 
 never would have done — but may be I might know in this 
 last minute ; you never sinned that sin you bear the charge 
 on?' 
 
 • God is my witness, no.* 
 
 The light, that was like sunlight, shone once more in the 
 aching, wandering eyes. 
 
 * I knew, I knew ! It was ' 
 
 Cecil bowed his head over him, lower and lower. 
 
 * Hush 1 He was but a child ; and I ' 
 
 With a sudden and swift motion, as though new life were 
 thrilling in him, Rake raised himself erect, his arms stretched 
 outward to the east, where the young day was breaking. 
 
SEUL AU MONDE 473 
 
 * I knew, I knew ! I never doubted. You will go back to 
 your own some day, and men shall learn the truth — thank 
 God, thank God ! ' 
 
 Then, with that light still on his face, his head fell back- 
 wards ; and with one quick, brief sigh his life fled out for ever. 
 ******* 
 
 The time passed on ; the storm had risen afresh ; the vio- 
 lence of the gusts blew yellow sheets of sand whirling over 
 the plains. Alone, with the dead across his knees, Cecil sat 
 motionless as though turned to stone. His eyes were dry and 
 fixed ; but ever and again a great tearless sob shook him from 
 head to foot. The only life that linked him with the past, 
 the only love that had suffered all things for his sake, were 
 gone, crushed out as though they never had been, like some 
 insect trodden in the soil. 
 
 He had lost all consciousness, all memory, save of that life- 
 less thing which lay across his knees, like a felled tree, like a 
 broken log, with the glimmer of the tempestuous day so chill 
 and white upon the upturned face. 
 
 He was alone on earth ; and the solitudes around him were 
 not more desolate than his own fate. 
 
 He was like a man numbed and stupefied by intense cold ; 
 his veins seemed stagnant, and his sight could only see those 
 features that became so terribly serene, so fearfully unmoved 
 with the dread calm of death. Yet the old mechanical in- 
 stincts of a soldier guided him still ; he vaguely knew that 
 his errand had to be done, must be done, let his heart ache as 
 it would, let him long as he might to lie down by the side of 
 his only friend, and leave the torture of life to grow still in 
 him also for evermore. 
 
 Instinctively, he moved to carry out the duty trusted to 
 him. He looked east and west, north and south ; there was 
 nothing in sight that could bring him aid ; there were only 
 the dust-clouds hurled in billows hither and thither by the 
 bitter winds still blowing from the sea. All that could be 
 done had to be done by himself alone. His own safety hung 
 on the swiftness of his flight : for aught he knew, at every 
 moment, out of the mist and the driven sheets of sand there 
 might rush the desert-horses of his foes. But this memory 
 was not with him : all he thought of was that burden 
 citretched across his limbs, which, laid down one hour here 
 unwatched, would be the prey of the jackal and the vulture. 
 
474 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He raised it reverently in his arms, and with long, laborious 
 effort drew its weight up across the saddle of the charger 
 which stood patiently waiting by, turning its docile eyes with 
 a plaintive wondering sadness on the body of the rider it had 
 loved. Then he mounted himself ; and with the head of his 
 lost comrade borne up upon his arm, and rested gently on his 
 breast, he rode westward over the great plain to where his 
 mission lay. 
 
 The horse paced slowly beneath the double load of dead 
 and living ; he would not urge the creature faster on ; every 
 movement that shook the drooping limbs, or jarred the repose 
 of that last sleep, seemed desecration. He passed the place 
 where his own horse was stretched : the vultures were already 
 there. He shuddered ; and then pressed faster on, as though 
 the beasts and birds of prey would rob him of his burden ere 
 he could give it sanctuary. And so he rode, mile after mile, 
 over the barren land, with no companion save the dead. 
 
 The winds blew fiercely in his teeth ; the sand was in his 
 eyes and hair ; the way was long, and weary, and sown thick 
 with danger ; but he knew of nothing, felt and saw nothing, 
 save that one familiar face so strangely changed and trans- 
 figured by that glory with which death had touched it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 * JB VOUS, ACHATE VOTRB VIE ' 
 
 Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. 
 The hurricane never abated, and the blinding dust rose around 
 him in great waves. The horse fell lame ; he had to dismount, 
 and move slowly and painfully over the loose heavy soil on 
 foot, raising the drooping head of the lifeless rider. It was 
 bitter, weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labour, of an 
 intolerable pain. 
 
 Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment 
 all consciousness ; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield 
 and leave the vultures hovering aloft their prey. He was still 
 somewhat weakened by the wounds of Zaraila ; he had been 
 bruised and exhausted by the skirmish of the past night ; he 
 
'JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE' 475 
 
 W93 weary and heart-broken ; but he did not yield to his 
 longing to sink down on the sands, and let his life ebb out ; 
 he held patiently onward through the infinite misery of the 
 passage. At last he drew near the caravanserai where he had 
 been directed to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway 
 in the distance that he had to traverse, and almost alone when 
 the face of the country changed, and was more full of colour, 
 and more broken into rocky and irregular surface. 
 
 As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward 
 its shelter, as its irregular corner towers became dimly percep- 
 tible to him through the dizzy mists that had obscured his 
 sight. By sheer instinct he found his route straight toward 
 the open arch of its entrance-way, and into the square court- 
 yard thronged with mules, and camels, and horses ; for the 
 caravanserai stood on the only road that led through that dis- 
 trict to the south, and was the only house of call for drovers, 
 or shelter for traveller and artists of Europe who might pass 
 that way. The groups in the court paused in their converse 
 and in their occupations, and looked in awe at the gray 
 charger with its strange burden, and the French Chasseur 
 who came so blindly forward like a man feeling his passage 
 through the dark. There was something in the sight that 
 had a vague terror for them before they clearly saw what this 
 thing was which was thus brought into their presence. Cecil 
 moved slowly on into their midst, his hand on the horse's 
 rein ; then a great darkness covered his sight ; he swayed to 
 and fro, and fell senseless on the gray stone of the paved 
 court, while the muleteers and the camel-drivers, the Kabyls 
 and the French, who were mingled there, crowded around 
 him in fear and in wonder. When consciousness returned to 
 him, he was lying on a stone bench in the shadow of the wall, 
 with the coolness of the fountain water bubbling near, and a 
 throng of lean, bronzed, eager faces about him in the mid-day 
 sunlight, which had broken through the wind-storm. 
 
 Instantly he remembered all. 
 
 * Where is he ? ' he asked. 
 
 They knew that he meant the dead man, and answered him 
 in a hushed murmur of many voices. They had placed the 
 body gently down within, in a darkened chamber. 
 
 A shiver passed over him ; he stretched his hand out for 
 water that they held to him. 
 
 ' Saddle me a fresh horse ; I have my work to do,* 
 
476 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or 
 self-pity might a soldier pause by t'le wayside while his errand 
 was still undone, his duty unfulfilled. 
 
 He drank the water thirstily ; then reeling slightly still 
 from the weakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting 
 their offers of aid. * Take me to him,' he said simply. They 
 understood him ; there were French soldiers among them and 
 they took him, without question or comment, across the court 
 to the little square stone cell within one of the towers, where 
 they had laid the corpse, with nothing to break the quiet and 
 the solitude except the low, soft cooing of some doves that 
 had their homes in its dark corners, and flew in and out at 
 pleasure through the oval aperture that served as window. 
 
 Hg motioned them all back with his hand, and went into 
 the gloom of the chamber alone. Not one among them fol- 
 lowed. 
 
 When he came forth again the reckless and liotoMS fantas- 
 sins of France turned silently and reverentially away, so that 
 they should not look upon his face. For it was well known 
 throughout the army that no common tie had bound together 
 the exiles of England, and the fealty of comrade to comrade 
 was sacred in their sight. 
 
 The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. 
 He crossed the court, moving still like a man without sense 
 of what he did ; he had the instinct to carry out the mission 
 trusted to him, instantly and accurately, but he had no 
 distinct perception or memory of aught else save of those 
 long-familiar features of which, ere he could return, the cruel 
 Bun of Africa would not have spared one trace. 
 
 He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch — a 
 shadow black and intense against the golden light which, 
 with the ceasing of the storm, flooded the land in the full 
 morning. There were movement, noise, change, haste in the 
 entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachment of the line 
 and a string of north-ward bound camels, the retinue of some 
 travellers of rank was preparing for departure, and the 
 resources of the humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their 
 powers. The name that some of the hurrying grooms shouted 
 loudly in their impatience broke through his stupor and 
 reached him. It was that of the woman whom, however 
 madly, he loved with all tlie strength of a passion born out of 
 utter hopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him : 
 
•JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE' 477 
 
 * You are of the Princess 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 — rife with death.' 
 
 * Miladi travels with M. le Due, her brother. Miladi does 
 not know what fear is.' 
 
 'But ' 
 
 The remonstrance died on his lips ; he stood gazing out 
 from the gloom of the arch at a face close to him, on which 
 the sun shone full, a face unseen for twelve long years, and 
 which, a moment before laughing and careless in the light, 
 changed, and grew set, and rigid, and pale with the pallor of 
 an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and 
 altered with a wholly different emotion — emotion that was 
 above all, of an intense and yearning tenderness. For a 
 moment both stood motionless and speechless ; then, with a 
 marvellous self-command and self-restraint, Cecil brought 
 his hand to his brow in mihtary salute, passed with the 
 impassiveness 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 that his brother would see no more in him than a 
 French trooper who bore resemblance by a strange hazard 
 to one long believed to be dead and gone. The instinct of 
 generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved him now as, 
 long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin 
 of his mother's darling as his own. 
 
 Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, 
 never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues 
 that still lay between him and his goal. His one impulse 
 had been to spare the other from the knowledge that he 
 lived ; his one longing was to have the hardness and the 
 bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's 
 grave. 
 
 "^ ^F T* ^ 7p ^^ ^f 
 
 Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were 
 in the tent of the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to 
 direct, and he himself returned to the caravanserai to fulfil 
 with his own hand to the dead those last offices which he 
 would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived ; all 
 
478 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists 
 was gone ; they answered him in the affirmative ; there only 
 remained the detachment of the French infantry, which were 
 billeted there for awhile. 
 
 It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the 
 great stars shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, 
 that they made the single grave, under a leaning shelf of 
 rock, with the sombre fans of a pine spread above it, and 
 nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats. The sullen 
 echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem ; 
 and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time 
 would come and play, and browse, and stretch their little 
 tired limbs upon its sod, its sole watchers in the desolation of 
 the plains. 
 
 When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once 
 again to rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. 
 Thrown down upon the grave, he never moved as hour after 
 hour went by. To others that lonely and unnoticed tomb 
 would be as nothing ; only one among the thousand marks 
 left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and 
 savage lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound 
 him to his lost youth, his lost country, his lost peace ; all that 
 had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a 
 dream of the night. This man had followed him, cleaved to 
 him, endured misery and rejected honour for his sake ; and all 
 the recompense such a life received was to be stilled for ever 
 by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistin- 
 guished, unavenged ! It seemed to him like murder — murder 
 with which his own hand was stained. 
 
 The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had 
 succeeded to the storm of the past day there was not a sound 
 except the bleating of the young goats straying from the 
 herd. He lay prostrate under the black boughs of the pine ; 
 the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him ; a grief, acute as 
 remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his fate, 
 had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the 
 land of his exile. 
 
 He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as 
 through the silence he heard a name whispered — the name 
 of his childhood, of his past. 
 
 He sprang to his feet, and as he turned in the moonlight 
 he saw once more his brother's face, paie as the face of the 
 
'JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE' 479 
 
 dead, and strained with an agonising dread. Concealment 
 was no longer possible : the younger man knew that the 
 elder lived ; knew it by a strange and irresistible certainty 
 that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in 
 its chill, leaden, merciless conviction. 
 
 For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable 
 memories choked thought or word in both. They knew each 
 other — all was said in that. 
 
 Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer 
 with a rapid movement, and his hand fell heavily on the 
 other's shoulder. 
 
 * Have you lived stainlessly since ? * 
 
 The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His 
 brother shuddered beneath this touch, and covered his face 
 with his hands. 
 
 ' God is my witness, yes ! But you — you — they said that 
 you were dead I ' 
 
 ^ ^ 4» 4K 4» « « 
 
 Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the 
 words which smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel 
 could have done ; there was the accent of regret. 
 
 ' I am dead,' he said simply, * dead to the world and 
 you.' 
 
 He who bore the title of Roy allien covered his face. 
 
 * How have you lived ? ' he whispered hoarsely. 
 
 * Honourably. Let that suffice. And you ? ' 
 
 The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal — the old, 
 timorous, terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the 
 boy's face, strangely returning on the gracious and mature 
 beauty of the man. 
 
 ' In honour too, I swear I That was my first disgrace, and 
 my last. You bore the weight of my shame ? Good God, 
 what can I say ? Such nobility, such sacrifice ' 
 
 He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy 
 the one who had lost all for his sake, had there but been once 
 in his voice no fear, but only love. As it was, that which 
 he still thought of was himself alone. While crushed with 
 the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, he still was 
 fiUed with only one thought that burned through the dark- 
 ness of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own 
 jeopardy. Even in the very first hours of his knowledge that 
 the man whom he had believed dead was living, living and 
 
4?o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 bearing the burden of the guilt he should have borne, what 
 he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril. 
 
 Cecil stood in silence lookmg at him. He saw the boyish 
 loveliness he remembered so well altered into the stronger 
 and fuller beauty of the man. He saw that life had gone 
 softly, smoothly, joyously, with this weak and feminine 
 nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to evil, its 
 career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world. 
 He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He 
 saw that happiness had done for this character what adversity 
 had done for his own. He saw that by it had been saved a 
 temperament that calamity would have wrecked. He stood 
 and looked at him, but he spoke not one word ; whatever he 
 felt, he restrained from all expression. 
 
 The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, 
 even in those pale gray moonbeams, he shunned the light 
 that was about him. 
 
 ' We believed you were dead,* he murmured wildly. 
 ' They said so ; there seemed every proof. But when I saw 
 you yesterday, I knew you — I knew you, though you passed 
 me as a stranger. I stayed on here ; they told me you would 
 return. God ! what agony this day and night have been.' 
 
 Cecil was silent still ; he knew that this agony had been 
 the dread lest he should be Uving. 
 
 There were many emotions at war in him — scorn, and pity, 
 and wounded love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude 
 denied, or quote a sacrifice that was almost without parallel 
 in generosity, all held him speechless. To overwhelm the 
 sinner before him with reproaches, to count and claim the 
 immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile 
 the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not 
 his own to rest upon him — to do aught of this was not in 
 him. Long ago he had accepted the weight of an alien 
 crime, and borne it as his own ; to undo now all that he had 
 done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the one whom he 
 had saved at such a cost, to turn, after twelve years, and 
 forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had 
 shielded for so long — this was not possible to him. Though 
 it would be but his own birthright that he would demand, 
 his own justification that he would establish, it would have 
 seemed to him like a treacherous and craven thing. No 
 matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made 
 
*JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE' 481 
 
 was unworthy of it, he held that every law of honour and 
 justice forbade him now to abandon his brother, and yield 
 him up to the retribution of his early fault. It might have 
 been a folly in the first instance, it might even have been a 
 madness, that choice of standing in his brother's place to 
 receive the shame of his brother's action ; but it had been 
 done so long before — done on the spur of generous affection, 
 and actuated by the strange hazard that made the keeping of 
 a woman's secret demand the same reticence which also saved 
 the young lad's name ; to draw back from it now would have 
 been a cowardice impossible to his nature. 
 
 AU seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one 
 another. He could not speak with tenderness to this craven 
 who had been false to the fair repute of their name : and 
 he would not speak with harshness. He felt too sick at 
 heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught of his 
 brother's life ; it had been saved from temptation, and there- 
 fore saved from evil ; that knowledge sufficed to him. 
 
 The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In 
 the many years that had passed by, although his character 
 had not changed, his position had altered greatly ; and in the 
 last few months he had enjoyed all the power that wealth 
 and independence and the accession to his title could bestow. 
 He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him 
 by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some 
 chafing, ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the saviour 
 of his whole existence ; some bitter pangs of conscience that 
 [. he would be baser yet, base beyond all baseness, to remain in 
 his elder's place, and accept this sacrifice still, while knowing 
 now the truth. 
 
 ' Bertie — Bertie ! ' he stammered, in hurried appeal — and 
 the name of his youth touched the hearer of it strangely, 
 making him for the moment forget all save that he looked 
 once more upon one of his own race — * on my soul, I never 
 doubted that the story of your death was true. No one did. 
 All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I 
 would have said that you were innocent ; I would — I would 
 have told them how I forged your friend's name and your 
 own when I was so desperate that I scarce knew what I did. 
 But they said that you were killed, and I thought then — 
 then — it was not worth while ; it would have broken my 
 father's heart. God help me I I was a coward ! ' 
 
 1 1 
 
482 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He spoke the truth ; he was a coward ; he had ever been 
 one. Herein lay the whole story of his fall, his weakness, 
 his sin and his ingratitude. Cecil knew that never will 
 gratitude exist where craven selfishness holds reign ; yet 
 there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that moved 
 him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the 
 heroic endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending 
 miseries that he had learned to take as his daily portion, this 
 feebleness and fear roused his wondering conipassion almost 
 as a woman's weakness would have done. Still he never 
 answered ; the hatred of the stain that had been brought upon 
 their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in 
 his sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from 
 this man, who was the only creature of their race who ever 
 had turned poltroon, the thousand remembrances of childhood 
 that uprose before him, the irresistible yearning for some 
 word from the other's lips that should tell of some lingering 
 trace in him of the old love strong enough to kill, for the 
 moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril — all these 
 kept him silent. 
 
 His brother misinterpreted that silence. 
 
 * I am in your power — utterly in your power,' he moaned 
 in his fear. ' I stand in your place ; I bear your title ; you 
 know that our father and our brother are dead ? All that I 
 have inherited is yours — do you know that, since you have 
 •\ever claimed it ? ' 
 
 * I know it.' 
 
 ' And you have never come forward to take your rights ? ' 
 
 'What I did not do to clear my own honour, I was not 
 likely to do merely to hold a title.' 
 
 The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which 
 his words fell ; it was too high to be comprehended by the 
 lower nature. The man who lived in prosperity and peace, 
 and in the smile of the world, and the purple of power, looked 
 bewildered at the man who led the simple, necessitous, peri- 
 lous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco soldier. 
 
 ' But — great Heaven ! — this life of yours ? It must be 
 wretchedness ? ' 
 
 * Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it.' 
 
 The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had 
 suffered himself to show. It stung down to his listener's 
 soul. 
 
'JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE' 483 
 
 * No — no I ' he murmured. ' You are happier than I. 
 You have no remorse to bear 1 And yet — to tell the world 
 that I am guilty ! ' 
 
 ' You need never tell it ; I shall not.' 
 
 He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well 
 knew, and had well weighed, all he surrendered in that pro- 
 mise — the promise to condemn himself to a barren and hope- 
 less fate for ever. 
 
 ' You will not ? ' 
 
 The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched 
 tongue. The one passion of fear upon him was for himself ; 
 even m that moment of supplication his disordered thoughts 
 hovered wildly over the chances of whether, if his elder 
 brother even now asserted his innocence and claimed his 
 birthright, the world and its judges would ever believe him. 
 
 Cecil for awhile again was silent, standing there by the 
 newly made grave of the soldier who had been faithful as 
 those of his own race and of his own order never had been. 
 His heart was full. The ingratitude and the self-absorption 
 of this life for which his own had been destroyed smote him 
 with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours ^ before he 
 had looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his 
 youth — a deadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and 
 name, and heritage, and the world's love, was to live on 
 leaving that one comrade of his early days to believe him 
 dead after a deed of shame. 
 
 His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, 
 sinking his head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had 
 not changed him greatly ; it had merely made him more in- 
 tensely desirous of the pleasures and the powers of life, more 
 intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the contempt of the 
 world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had stooped to 
 any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was 
 capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His 
 was one of those natures which, having no love of evil for 
 evil's sake, still embrace any form of evil which may save 
 them from the penalty of their own weakness. Now, thus 
 meeting one whom for twelve years he had believed must rise 
 from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung 
 his every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness — 
 the desire at all costs to be saved. 
 
 Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange melancholy pity ; 
 
 II 2 
 
484 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 he had loved his brother as a youth — loved him well enough 
 to take and bear a heavy burden of disgrace in his stead. The 
 old love was not dead ; but stronger than itself was his hatred 
 of the shame that had touched their race by the wretched 
 crime that had driven him into exile, and his wondering scorn 
 for the feeble and self- engrossed character that had lived con- 
 tentedly under false colours, and with a hidden blot screened 
 by a fictitious semblance of honour. He could not linger with 
 him ; he did not know how to support the intolerable pain 
 that oppressed him in the presence of the only living creature 
 of his race ; he could not answer for himself what passionate 
 and withering words might not escape him ; every instant of 
 their interview was a horrible temptation to him — the tempta- 
 tion to demand from this coward his own justification before 
 the world — the temptation to seize out of these unworthy 
 hands his birthright and his due. 
 
 But the temptation, sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened 
 by the strength of right, and wellnigh overwhelming with 
 all its fair delicious promise for the future, did not conquer 
 him. What resisted it was his own simple instinct of justice ; 
 an instinct too straight and true either to yield to self-pity or 
 to passionate desire — ^justice which made him feel that, since 
 he had chosen to save this weakling once for their lost mother's 
 sake, he was bound for ever not to repent nor to retract. He 
 gazed awhile longer, silently, at the younger man, who sat 
 still rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of 
 the freshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on 
 his brother's shoulder; the other started and trembled; he 
 remembered that touch in days of old. 
 
 ' Do not fear me,' he said, gently and very gravely. * I 
 have kept your secret twelve years ; I will keep it still. Be 
 happy — be as happy as you can. All I bid of you in return 
 is so to live that in your future your past shall be redeemed ! ' 
 
 The words of the saint to the thief, ' Jc vous acMte voire 
 vie,' were not more merciful, not more noble, than the words 
 with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of his own life, the 
 redemption of his brother's. The other looked at him with a 
 look that was half of terror — terror at the magnitude of this 
 ransom that was given to save him from the bondage of evil. 
 
 ' My God I You cannot mean it I And you ? ' 
 
 * I shall liv*> the life fittest for me ; I am content in it. It 
 is enough.' 
 
»VENETIA' 485 
 
 The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utter- 
 ance. Before his memory rose one fair, proud face. * Con- 
 tent ! ' Ah, Heaven I — it was the only lie that had ever 
 passed his lips. 
 
 His hand lay still upon his brother's shoulder, leaning 
 more heavily there, in the silence that brooded over the 
 hushed plains. 
 
 * Let us part now, and for ever. Leave Algeria at once. 
 This is all I ask.' 
 
 Then, without another word that could add reproach or 
 seek for gratitude, he turned and went away over the great 
 dim level of the African waste, while the man whom he had 
 saved sat as in stupor, gazing at the brown shadows, and the 
 sleeping herds, and the falling stars that ran across the sky, 
 and doubting whether the voice he had heard and the face 
 upon which he had looked were not the visions of a waking 
 dream. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 * VENETIA * 
 
 How that night was spent Cecil could never recall in full. 
 Vague memories remained with him of wandering over the 
 shadowy country, of seeking by bodily fatigue to kill the 
 thoughts rising in him, of drinking at a little water-channel 
 in the rocks as thirstily as some driven deer, of flinging 
 himself down at length, worn out, to sleep under the hanging 
 brow of a mighty wall of rock ; of waking when the dawn was 
 reddening the east with the brown plains around him, and 
 far away under a knot of palms was a goatherd with his flock 
 like an idyl from the old pastoral life of Syria. He stood 
 looking at the light which heralded the sun, with some inde- 
 finite sense of heavy loss, of fresh calamity, upon him. It 
 was only slowly that he remembered all. Years seemed to 
 have been pressed into the three nights and days since he had 
 sat by the bivouac fire, listening to the fiery words of the little 
 Friend of the Flag. 
 The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered in 
 
486 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 yielding up afresh his heritage rolled in on his memory like 
 the wave of some heavy sea that sweeps down all before it. 
 
 When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached 
 him in the green alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed to 
 him that his brother had relied on the personal likeness 
 between them and the similarity of their handv, riting to pass 
 off as his the bill in which his own name Pvnd that of his 
 friend was forged, no thought had crossed him to take upon 
 himself the lad's sin. It had only been when, brought under 
 the charge, he must, to clear himself, have at once accused 
 the boy, and have betrayed the woman whose reputation was 
 in his keeping, that rather by generous impulse than by 
 studied intention he had taken up the burden that he had 
 now carried for so long. Whether or no the moneylenders 
 had been themselves in reality deceived he could never tell ; 
 but ct had been certain that, having avowed themselves confi- 
 dent of his guilt, they could never shift the charge on to his 
 brother in the face of his own acceptance of it. So he had 
 saved the youth without premeditation or reckoning of the 
 cost. And now that the full cost was known to him, he had 
 not shrunk back from its payment. Yet that payment was 
 one that gave him a greater anguish than if he had laid down 
 his life in physical martyrdom. 
 
 To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless peace, 
 to go back to the old fresh fair English woodlands, to go back 
 to the power of command and the delight of free gifts, to go 
 back to men's honour, and reverence, and high esteem — these 
 would have been sweet enough — sweet as food after long 
 famine. But far more than these would it have been to go 
 back and take the hand of his friend once more in the old 
 unclouded trust of their youth ; to go back, and stand free 
 and blameless among his peers, and know that all that man 
 could do to win the heart and the soul of a woman he could 
 at his will do to win hers whose mere glance of careless pity 
 had sufficed to light his life to passion. And he had renounced 
 all this. This was the cost; and he had paid it — paid it 
 because the simple, natural, inflexible law of justice had 
 demanded it. 
 
 One whom he had once chosen to save he could not now 
 have deserted, except by what would have been, in his sight, 
 dishonour. Therefore, when the day broke, and the naemories 
 of the night came with his awakening, he knew that his future 
 
•VENETIAN 487 
 
 was without hope — without it as utterly as was ever that of 
 any captive ^hut in darkness, and silence, and loneliness, in a 
 prison, whose only issue was the oubliettes. There is infinite 
 misery in the world, but this one misery is rare ; or men 
 would perish from the face of the earth as though the sun 
 withdrew its light. 
 
 Alone in that dreary scene, beautiful from its vastness and 
 its solemnity, but imutterably melancholy, unutterably oppres- 
 sive, he also wondered whether he lived or dreamed. 
 
 From among the reeds the plovers were rising ; over the 
 barren rocks the dazzling lizards glided ; afar off strayed the 
 goats : that was the only sign of animal existence. He had 
 wandered a long way from the caravanserai, and he began to 
 retrace his steps, for his horse was there, and although he 
 had received licence to take leisure in returning, he had no 
 home but the camp, no friends but those wild-eyed, leopard- 
 Uke, ferocious sons of the razzia and the slaughter, who would 
 throng around him like a pack of dogs, each eager for the 
 first glance, the first word ; these companions of his adversity 
 and of his perils, whom he had learned to love, with all their 
 vices and all their crimes, for sake of the rough, courageous 
 love that they could give in answer. 
 
 He moved slowly back over the desolate tracks of land 
 stretched between him and the Algerian halting-place. He 
 had no fear that he would find his brother there. He knew 
 too well the nature with which he had to deal to hope that 
 old affection would so have outweighed present fear that his 
 debtor would have stayed to meet him yet once more. On 
 the impulse of the ungovernable pain which the other's pre- 
 sence had been, he had bidden him leave Africa at once ; now 
 he almost wished that he had bid him stay. There was a 
 weary unsatisfied longing for some touch of love or of grati- 
 tude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He 
 would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that 
 he hved had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear 
 of the man whom he remembered as a little golden -headed 
 child, with the hand of their dying mother lying in benedic- 
 tion on the fair silken curls. 
 
 He had asked no question. He had gone back to no re- 
 criminations. He guessed all it needed him to know ; and 
 he recoiled from the recital of the existence whose happiness 
 was purchased by his own misery, and whose dignity was 
 
488 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 built on sand. His sacrifice had not been in vain. Placed 
 
 out of the reach of temptation, the plastic, feminine, unstable 
 
 character had been without a stain in the sight of men ; but 
 
 it was httle better at the core; and he wondered, in his 
 
 suffering, as he went onward through the beauty of the young 
 
 day, whether it had been worth the bitter price he had paid 
 
 \ to raise this bending reed from out the waters which would 
 
 \ have broken and swamped it at the outset. It grew fair, and 
 
 \ free, and flower-crowned now, in the midst of a tranquil and 
 
 i sunlit lake; but was it of more value than a drifted weed 
 
 ; bearing the snake-egg hidden at its root ? 
 
 He had come so far out of the ordinary route across the 
 plains that it was two hours or more before he saw the dark 
 grey square of the caravanserai walls, and to its left that 
 single leaning pine growing out of a cleft within the rock 
 that overhung the spot where the keenest anguish of all his 
 life had known had been encountered and endured — the spot 
 which yet, for sake of the one laid to rest there, beneath the 
 sombre branches, would be for ever dearer to him than any 
 other place in the soil of Africa. 
 
 While yet the caravanserai was distant, the piteous cries 
 of a mother-goat caught his ear ; she was bleating beside a 
 watercourse, into which her kid of that spring had fallen, 
 and whose rapid swell, filled by the recent storm, was too 
 strong for the young creature. Absorbed as he was in his 
 own thoughts, the cry reached him and drew him to the spot ; 
 it was not in him willingly to let any living thing suffer, 
 and he was always gentle to all animals. He stooped, and, 
 with some little difficulty, rescued the little goat for its de- 
 lighted dam. 
 
 As he bent over the water, he saw something gUtter be- 
 neath it ; he caught it in his hand and brought it up ; it was 
 the broken half of a chain of gold, with a jewel in each link. 
 He changed colour as he saw it ; he remembered it as one that 
 Venetia Corona had worn on the morning that he had been 
 admitted to her. It was of peculiar workmanship, and he 
 recognised it at once. He stood with the toy in his hand, 
 looking long at the shining links, with their flashes of pre- 
 cious stones. They seemed to have voices that spoke to him 
 of her about whose beautiful white throat they had been 
 woven — voices that whispered incessantly in his ear, * Take 
 up your birthright, and you will be free to sue to her at least, 
 
« VENETIA • 489 
 
 li not to win her. No golden and jewelled plaything ever 
 tempted a starving man to theft as this tempted him now to 
 break the pledge he had just given. 
 
 His birthright I He longed for it for this woman's sake — 
 for the sake, at least, of the right to stand before her as an 
 equal, and to risk his chance with others who sought her 
 smile — as he had never done for any other thing which, with 
 that heritage, would have become his. Yet he knew that, 
 even were he to be false to his word, and go forward and 
 claim his right, he would never be able to prove his innocence ; 
 he would never hope to make the world believe him unless 
 the real criminal made that confession which he held himself 
 forbidden, by his own past action, ever to extort. 
 
 He gazed long at the broken costly toy, while his heart 
 ached with a cruel pang ; then he placed it in safety in the 
 little blue enamel box, beside the ring which Cigarette had 
 flung back to him, and went onward to the caravanserai. She 
 was no longer there, in all probability ; but the lost bagatelle 
 would give him, some time or other, a plea on which to enter 
 her presence. It was a pleasure to him to know that ; though 
 he knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet 
 sovereignty of her glance was so much added pain, so much 
 added folly, to the dreamlike and baseless passion with which 
 she had inspired him. 
 
 The trifling incident of the goat's rescue and the chain's 
 trouvaille, slight as they were, still were of service to him. 
 They called him back from the past to the present ; they 
 broke the stupor of suffering that had fastened on him ; they 
 recalled him to the actual world about him in which he had 
 to fulfil his duties as a trooper of France. 
 
 It was almost noon when, under the sun-scorched branches 
 of the pine that stretched its sombre fans up against the 
 guttering azure of the morning skies, he approached the gates 
 of the Algerine house of call — a study for the colour of 
 G6r6me, with the pearly grey of its stone tints, and the 
 pigeons wheeling above its corner towers, while under the 
 arch of its entrance a string of mules, maize-laden, were 
 guided ; and on its bench sat a French fantassin, singing 
 gaily songs of Paris while he cut open a yellow gourd. 
 
 Cecil went within, and bathed, and dressed, and drank 
 some of the thin cool wine that found its way hither in the 
 wake of the French army. Then he sat down for awhile a^ 
 
490 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 one of the square cabin-like holes which served for a casemeni 
 in the tower he occupied, and, looking out into the court, 
 tried to shape his thoughts and plan his course. As a soldier 
 he had no freedom, no will of his own, save for this extra 
 twelve or twenty-four hours which they had allowed him for 
 leisure in his return journey. He was obliged to go back to 
 his camp, and there, he knew, he might again encounter one 
 whose tender memories would be as quick to recognise him as 
 the craven dread of his brother had been. He had always 
 feared this ordeal, although the arduous service in which his 
 chief years in Africa had been spent, and the remote expedi- 
 tions on which he had always been employed, had partially 
 removed him from the ever-present danger of such recognition 
 until now. And now he felt that if once the brave kind eyes 
 of his old friend should meet his own, concealment would 
 be no longer possible, yet, for sake of that promise he had 
 sworn in the past night, it must be maintained at every 
 hazard, every cost. Vacantly he sat and watched the play 
 of the sunshine in the prismatic water of the courtyard 
 fountain, and the splashing, and the pluming, and the mur- 
 muring of the doves and pigeons on its edge. He felt meshed 
 in a net from which there was no escape — none — unless, on 
 his homeward passage, a thrust of Arab steel should give him 
 liberty. 
 
 The trampling of horses on the pavement below roused his 
 attention. A thrill of hope went through him that his brother 
 might have lingering conscience, latent love enough, to have 
 made him refuse to obey the bidding to leave Africa. He 
 rose and leaned out. Amid the little throng of riding-horses, 
 grooms, and attendants who made an open way through the 
 polyglot crowd of an Algerian caravanserai at noon, he saw 
 the one dazzling face of which he had so lately dreamed by 
 the water-freshet in the plains. It was but a moment's 
 glance, for she had already dismounted from her mare, and 
 was passing within with two other ladies of her party ; but 
 in that one glance he knew her. His discovery of the chain 
 gave him a plea to seek her ; — should he avail himself of it ? 
 He hesitated awhile ; it would be safest, wisest, best, to 
 deliver up the trinket to her courier, and pass on his way 
 without another look at that beauty which could never be his, 
 which could never lighten for him even with the smile that a 
 woman may give her equal or her friend. She could never 
 
•VENETIA' 491 
 
 be aught to him save one more memory of pain, save one 
 remembrance the more to embitter the career which not even 
 hope would ever illumine. He knew that it was only madness 
 to go into her presence, and feed, with the cadence of her 
 voice, the gold light of her hair, the grace and graciousness of 
 her every movement, the love which she would deem such 
 intolerable insult, that, did he ever speak it, she would order 
 her people to drive him from her like a chidden hound. He 
 knew that ; but he longed to indulge the madness despite it ; 
 and he did so. He went down into the court below, and 
 found her suite. 
 
 ' Tell your mistress that I, Louis Victor, have some jewels 
 which belong to her, and ask her permission to restore them 
 to her hands,' he said to one of her equerries. 
 
 * Give them to me, if you have picked them up,' said the 
 man, putting out his hand for them. 
 
 Cecil closed his own upon them. 
 
 * Go and do as I bid you.' 
 
 The equerry paused, doubtful whether or no to resist the 
 tone and the words. A Frenchman's respect for the military 
 uniform prevailed ; he went within. 
 
 In the best chamber of the caravanserai, Venetia Corona 
 was sitting, listless in the heat, when her attendant entered. 
 The grandes dames who were her companions in their tour 
 through the seat of war were gone to their siesta. She was 
 alone, with a scarlet burnous thrown about her, and upon her 
 all the languor and idleness common to the noontide, which 
 was still very warm, though, in the autumn, the nights were 
 so icily cold on the exposed level of the plains. She was lost 
 in thought, moreover. She had heard, the day before, a story 
 that had touched her — of a soldier who had been slain crossing 
 the plains, and had been brought, through the hurricane and 
 the sand-storm, at every risk, by his comrade, who had 
 chosen to endure all peril and wretchedness rather than leave 
 the dead body to the vultures and the kites. It was a name- 
 less story to her — the story of two obscure troopers, who, for 
 aught she knew, might have been two of the riotous and 
 savage brigands that were common in the Army of Africa. 
 But the loyalty and the love shown in it had moved her ; and 
 to the woman whose life had been cloudless and cradled in 
 ease from her birth, there was that in the suffering and the 
 sacrifice which the anecdote suggested, that had at once the 
 
492 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 fascination of the unknown, and the pathos of a life so fas 
 removed from her, so little dreamed of by her, that all its 
 coarser cruelty was hidden, while only its unutterable sadness 
 and courage remained before her sight. 
 
 Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, 
 watched and read and understood it, she would have been too 
 intensely revolted to have perceived the actual latent nobility 
 possible in such an existence ; as it was, she heard but of it 
 in such words as alone could meet the ear of a great lady, she 
 gazed at it only in pity from a far distant height, and its 
 terrible tragedy had solemnity and beauty for her. 
 
 When her servant approached her now with Cecil's message, 
 she hesitated some few moments in surprise. She had not 
 known that he was in her vicinity ; the story she had heard 
 had been simply of two unnamed Chasseurs d'Afrique, and he 
 himself might have fallen on the field weeks before, for aught 
 that she had heard of him. Some stray rumours of his defence 
 of the encampment of Zaraila, and of the fine prowess shown 
 in his last charge, alone had drifted to her. He was but a 
 trooper ; and he fought in Africa. The world had no 
 concern with him, save the miniature world of his own 
 regiment. 
 
 She hesitated some moments ; then gave the required per- 
 mission. * He has once been a gentleman ; it would be cruel 
 to wound him,' thought the imperial beauty, who would have 
 refused a prince or neglected a duke with chill indifference, 
 but who was too generous to risk the semblance of humihation 
 to the man who could never approach her save upon such 
 sufferance as was in itself mortification to one whose pride 
 survived his fallen fortunes. 
 
 Moreover, the interest he had succeeded in awakening in 
 her, the mingling of pity and of respect that his words and 
 his bearing had aroused, was not extinct ; had, indeed, only 
 been strengthened by the vague stories that had of late floated 
 to her of the day of Zaraila ; of the day of smoke and steel 
 and carnage, of war in its grandest yet its most frightful 
 shape, of the darkness of death which the courage of human 
 souls had power to illumine as the rays of the sun the tem- 
 pest cloud. Something more like quickened and pleasured 
 expectation than any one among her many lovers had ever 
 had power to rouse, moved her as she heard of the presence of 
 the man who, in that day, had saved the honour of his Flag. 
 
*VENETIA' 493 
 
 She oame of an heroio race ; she had heroic blood in her ; and 
 heroism, physical and moral, won her regard as no other 
 quality could ever do. A man capable of daring greatly, and 
 of suffering silently, was the only man who could ever hope 
 to hold her thoughts. 
 
 The room was darkened from the piercing light without, 
 and in its gloom, as he was ushered in, the scarlet of her 
 cashmere and the gleam of her fair hair was all that, for the 
 moment, he could see. He bowed very low that he might 
 get his calmness back before he looked at her ; and her voice 
 in its lingering music came on his ear. 
 
 * You have found my chain, I think ? I lost it in riding 
 yesterday. I am greatly indebted to you for taking care 
 of it.' 
 
 She felt that she could only thank, as she would have 
 thanked an equal who should have done her this sort of 
 slight service, the man who had brought to her the gold 
 pieces with which his Colonel had insulted him. 
 
 'It is I, madame, who am the debtor of so happy an 
 accident.' 
 
 His words were very low, and his voice shook a little over 
 them ; he was thinking not of the jewelled toy that he came 
 here to restore, but of the inheritance that had passed away 
 from him for ever, and which, possessed, would have given 
 him the title to seek what his own efforts could do to wake 
 a look of tenderness in those proud eyes which men ever 
 called so cold, but which he felt might still soften, and 
 change, and grow dark with the thoughts and the passions 
 of love, if the soul that gazed through them were but once 
 stirred from its repose. 
 
 * Your chain is here, madame, though broken, I regret to 
 see,' he continued, as he took the little box from his coat and 
 handed it to her. She took it and thanked him, without, 
 for the moment, opening the enamelled case as she motioned 
 him to a seat at a little distance from her own. 
 
 * You have been in terrible scenes since I saw you 
 last,* she continued. * The story of Zaraila reached us. 
 Surely they cannot refuse you the reward of your service 
 now ? ' 
 
 ' It will make little difference, madame, whether they do 
 or not.' 
 
 * Little difference ! How is that 7 ' 
 
 i 
 
494 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * To my own fate, I meant. Whether I be a captain or a 
 3orporal cannot alter ' 
 
 He paused ; he dreaded lest the words should escape him 
 which should reveal to her that which she would regard as 
 such intolerable offence, such insolent indignity, when felt 
 for her by a soldier in the grade he held. 
 
 * No ? Yet such recognition is usually the ambition of 
 every mihtary life.' 
 
 A very weary smile passed over his face. 
 
 ' I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a 
 pair of epaulettes that will content it.' 
 
 She understood him ; she comprehended the bitter mockery 
 that the tawdiy, meretricious rewards of regimental decora- 
 tion seemed to the man who had waited to die at Zaraila as 
 patiently and as grandly as the Old Guard at Waterloo. 
 
 ' I understand 1 The rewards are pitifully disproportionate 
 to the services in any army. Yet how magnificently you and 
 your men, as I have been told, held your ground all through 
 that fearful day 1 * 
 
 ' We did our duty — nothing more.' 
 
 * Well I is not that the rarest thing among men f ' 
 ' Not among soldiers, madame.' 
 
 * Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is 
 actuated by the finest and most impersonal sentiment that 
 can actuate human beings ! ' 
 
 ' I will not say that. Poor wretches I they are degraded 
 enough, too often. But I believe that more or less in every 
 good soldier, even when he is utterly unconscious of it, is an 
 impersonal love for the honour of his Flag, an uncalculating 
 instinct to do his best for the reputation of his corps. We 
 are called human machines ; we are so, since we move by no 
 will of our own ; but the lowest among us will at times be 
 propelled by one single impulse — a desire to die greatly. It 
 is all that is left to most of us to do.' 
 
 She looked at him with that old look which he had seen 
 once or twice before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and 
 wonder, all in one. He spoke to her as he had never spoken 
 to any living being. The grave, quiet, listless impassiveness 
 that still was habitual with him — relic of the old habits of 
 his former life — was very rarely broken, for his real nature 
 or his real thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far 
 removed from him by position and by circumstance, and dis- 
 
•VENETIA' 495 
 
 fcant with him as a great lady could not but be with a soldier 
 of whose antecedents and whose character she knew nothing, 
 gave him sympathy, a sympathy ihat was sweet and rather 
 felt than uttered ; and it was like balm to a wound, like 
 sweet melodies on a weary oar, to the man who had carried 
 his secret so silently and so long, without one to know his 
 burden or to soothe his pain. 
 
 * Yes,* she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of 
 her face there passed a shadow. ' There must be infinite 
 nobility among these men, who live without hope — live only 
 to die. That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his 
 dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own death 
 rather than leave the body to the carrion birds — you have 
 heard of him ? What tenderness, what greatness there must 
 have been in that poor fellow's heart 1 * 
 
 ' Oh, no ! That was nothing.' 
 
 ' Nothing I They have told me he came every inch of the 
 way in danger of the Arabs' shot and steel. He had suffered 
 so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down 
 insensible on his entrance here.' 
 
 ' You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far 
 greater than any act like that could ever repay.* 
 
 * You I Was it you ? * 
 
 * Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold 
 more of such nobility as you have praised than I.' 
 
 ' Ah ! Tell me of him,' she said simply ; but he saw 
 that the lustrous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness 
 in them that was more precious and more pitiful than a 
 million utterances of regret could ever have been. 
 
 Those belied her much who said that she was heartless ; 
 though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the 
 grief of other lives. He obeyed her bidding now, and told 
 her, in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos 
 spoken there, where without through the oval unglazed case- 
 ment in the distance there was seen the tall dark leaning 
 pine that overhung the grave of yesternight — the story over 
 which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain 
 in it, and which he could have related to no other save 
 herself. It had an intense melancholy and a strange beauty 
 in its bre\nty and its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, 
 darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with the gray gloom 
 of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden sunlight 
 
496 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the 
 proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital. Her 
 face grew paler as she heard ; and a mist was over the 
 radiance of her azure eyes ; that death in the loneliness of 
 the plains moved her deeply with the grand simplicity of its 
 unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke little of himself, 
 she felt, with all the divination of a woman's sympathies, 
 how he who told her this thing had suffered by it — suffered 
 far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in the 
 grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats 
 were at rest on the sod. When he ceased, there was a long 
 silence ; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory 
 of the death that he had painted to hsr ; and she was moved 
 with that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half 
 regret with which the contemplation of calamities that have 
 never touched, and that can never touch them, will move 
 women far more callous, far more world-chilled than herself. 
 
 In the silence, her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel 
 bonbonni^re, whose silver had lost all its bright enamelling, 
 and was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead. 
 The lid came off at her touch as she musingly moved it 
 round and round ; the chain and the ring fell into her lap ; the 
 lid remained in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded 
 in its centre with one name in turquoise letters — Venetia. 
 
 She started as the word caught her eye and broke her 
 reverie ; the colour came warmer into her cheek ; she looked 
 closer and closer at the box, then, with a rapid movement, 
 turned her head and gazed at her companion. 
 
 ' How did you obtain this ? * 
 
 * The chain, madame ? It had fallen in the water,' 
 ' The chain ! No I the box I ' 
 
 He looked at her in surprise. 
 
 * It was given me very long ago.' 
 ' And by whom ? ' 
 
 ' By a young child, madame.' 
 
 Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened ; 
 / the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had said only 
 / wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was 
 I quickened with a thousand shadows of thought. 
 \ * The box is mine ! I gave it ! And you ? ' 
 ', He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before hor, breath- 
 '; less and mute. 
 
•VENETIA» 497 
 
 * And you ? ' she repeated. 
 
 He was silent still, gazing at her. He knew her now — ^. 
 how had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, 
 as never to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem 
 of golden hair could belong alone but to the woman of one 
 race? 
 
 * And you ? * she cried once more, while she stretched her 
 band out to him. ' And you — you are Philip's friend ? You 
 are Bertie Cecil ? ' 
 
 Silently he bowed his head ; not even for his brother's 
 sake, or for sake of his pledged word could he have lied to her. 
 
 But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not 
 take. The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched 
 between them. 
 
 * Petite Eeine ! * he murmured. * Ah, God I how could 
 I be so bUnd ? * 
 
 She grew very pale as she sank back again upon the couch 
 from which she had risen. It seemed to her as though a 
 thousand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this 
 man under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had 
 kissed her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift. 
 And now — they had met thus I 
 
 He said nothing. • He stood paralysed, gazing at her. 
 There had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which 
 he drank for his brother's sake, yet this bitterness surpassed 
 all other : it seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the 
 belief that he was guilty. She in whom all fair and gracious 
 things were met, she who was linked by her race to his past 
 and his youth : she whose clear eyes in her childhood had 
 looked upon him in that first hour of the agony that he had 
 Buffered then, and still suffered on, in the cause of a coward 
 and an ingrate. 
 
 She was pale still ; and her eyes were fixed on him with a 
 gaze that recalled to him the look with which * Petite Reine * 
 had promised that sum.mer day to keep his secret, and tell 
 none of that misery of which she had been witness. 
 
 ' They thought that you were dead,' she said at length, 
 while her voice sank very low. * Why have you Hved like 
 this ? • 
 
 He made no answer. 
 
 *It was cruel to Philip,' she went on, while her voice 
 still shook. • Child though I was, I remember his passion 
 
 i 
 
498 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 of grief when the news came that you had lost your life. He 
 has never forgotten you. So often now he will still speak 
 of you ! He is in your camp. We are travelling together. 
 He will be here this evening. What delight it will give him 
 to know his dearest friend is living ! But why — why — have 
 kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside ? ' 
 
 Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not 
 tell; the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. 
 Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that 
 exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than 
 in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in 
 ordinary moments. 
 
 * Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly ! I knew that you were far 
 higher than your grade in Africa ; I felt that in all things, 
 save in some accident of position, we were equals. But why 
 have you condemned yourself to this misery ? Your life isf 
 brave, is noble, but it must be a constant torture to such as 
 you 1 I remember well what you were — so well, that I 
 wonder we have never recognised each other before now. 
 The existence you lead in Algeria must be very terrible to 
 you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of 
 indolence ! ' 
 
 He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his 
 head on his hands for some moments. He knew that he 
 must leave this woman whom he loved, and who knew him 
 now as one whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and 
 welcomed by all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, 
 mean, and fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had 
 quitted her country. Great dews of intense pain gathered on 
 his forehead ; his whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted 
 against this brand of a guilt not his own that was stamped on 
 him ; he could have cried out to her the truth in all the 
 eloquence of a breaking heart. 
 
 But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own 
 choice for ever ; and the old habits of his early life were 
 strong upon him still. He lifted his head and spoke gently, 
 and very quietly, though she caught the tremor that shook 
 through the words : 
 
 * Do not let us speak of myself. You see what my life is ; 
 there is no more to be said. Tell me rather of your own 
 story — you are no longer the Lady Venetia ? You have been 
 wedded and widowed, they say ? ' 
 
•VENETIA' 499 
 
 * The wife of an hour— yes I But it is of yourself that I 
 wouI3^ hear. Why have left the world, and, above all, why 
 have left usy to think you dead ? I was not so young when 
 we last saw you, but that I remember well how all my people 
 loved you.* 
 
 Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath 
 which his flight had been made ? He began to think so. It 
 was possible. She had been so young a child when he had 
 left for Africa ; then the story was probably withheld from 
 reaching her, and now, what memory had the world to give 
 a man whose requiem it had said twelve long years before ? 
 In all Ukelihood she had never heard his name, save from her 
 brother's lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old 
 comrade. 
 
 * Leave my hfe alone, for God's sake ! ' he said, passion- 
 ately. ' Tell me of your own — tell me, above all, of his. 
 He loved me, you say? — Heaven! he did. Better than 
 any creature that ever breathed ; save the man whose grave 
 lies yonder.* 
 
 ' He does so still,* she answered, eagerly ; ' Philip's is not 
 a heart that forgets. It is a heart of gold, and the name of 
 his earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever. He 
 thinks you dead ; to-night will be the happiest hour he has 
 ever known when he shall meet you here.' 
 
 He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow 
 floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs 
 lest it should strike a chill to her as she passed over it : the 
 torture grew insupportable to him. And yet, it had so much 
 of sweetness that he was powerless to end it — sweetness in 
 the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by 
 birth ; in the change that it had made in her voice and her 
 glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and 
 the last had the smile of friendship ; in the closeness of the 
 remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together, 
 in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a 
 name, the ex -barrier of caste which had been between them 
 had fallen now and for ever. 
 
 She watched him with grave musing eyes. She was 
 moved, startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and 
 filled with a wondering of regret ; yet a strong emotion of 
 relief, of pleasure, rose above these. She had never forgotten 
 the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought 
 
 ek2 
 
500 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 the gifts of her golden store ; she was glad that he lived, 
 though he lived thus ; glad with a quicker, warmer, more 
 vivid emotion than any that had ever occupied her for any 
 man living or dead except her brother. The interest she had 
 vaguely felt in a stranger's fortunes, and which she had 
 driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her harbouring, 
 was justified for one whom her people had known and valued 
 while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had 
 never heard from her brother's lips aught except constant 
 regret and imperishable attachment. For it was true, as 
 Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his memory 
 had passed to all in England had never been seen by her eyes, 
 from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in 
 womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely 
 forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught 
 with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary. 
 
 * What is it you fear from Philip ? ' she asked him, at 
 last, when she had waited vainly for him to break the silence. 
 * You can remember him but ill if you think that there will 
 be anything in his heart save joy when he shall know that 
 you are living. You little dream how dear your memory ia 
 to him ' 
 
 He paused before her abruptly. 
 
 * Hush, hush I or you will kill me I Why ! — three nights 
 ago I fled the camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw 
 his face in the light of the bivouac-fire and dreaded that he 
 Bhould so see mine ! ' 
 
 She gazed at him in troubled amaze ; there was that in the 
 passionate agitation of this man who had been serene through 
 BO much danger, and unmoved beneath so much disaster, that 
 Btartled and bewildered her. 
 
 ' You fled from Philip ? Ah 1 how you must wrong him I 
 What will it matter to him whether you be prmce or trooper, 
 wear a peer's robes or a soldier's uniform ? His friendship 
 never yet was given to externals. But — stay 1 — ^^that reminds 
 me of your inheritance. Do you know that Lord Royallieu 
 is dead ? that your younger brother bears the title, thinking 
 you perished at Marseilles ? He was here with me yesterday ; 
 he has come to Algeria for the autumn. Whatever your 
 motive may have been to remain thus hidden from us all, you 
 must claim your own rights now. You must go back to all 
 that is so justly yours. Whatever your reason be to have 
 
^^1\, 
 
 •VENETIA' 501 
 
 borne with all the suffering and the indignity that have been 
 your portion here, they will be ended now.* 
 
 Her beauty had never struck him so intensely as at thig 
 moment, when, in urging him to the demand of his rights, 
 she so unconsciously tempted him to betray his brother and 
 to forsake his word. The indifference and the careless cold- 
 ness that had to so many seemed impenetrable and unalter- 
 able in her were broken and had changed to the warmth of 
 sympathy, of interest, of excitation. There was a world of 
 feeling in her face, of eloquence in her eyes, as she stooped 
 slightly forward with the rich glow of the cashmeres about 
 her, and the sun-gleam falling across her brow. Pure, and 
 proud, and noble in every thought, and pressing on him only ^ i^. 
 what was the due of his birth and his heritage, she yet un- ; V:. 
 wittingly tempted him with as deadly a power as though she 
 were the vilest of her sex, seducing hiro^ downward to some 
 infamous dishonour. ' ^. 
 
 To do what she said would be but his actual right, and] .^^ 
 would open to him a future so fair that his heart grew sicl^' "' r- 
 with longing for it ; and yet to yield, and to claim justic^ 
 for himself, was forbidden him as utterly as though it were 
 some murderous guilt. He had promised never to sacrifice 
 his brother ; the p-romise held him like the fetters of a> 
 galley. 
 
 * Why do you not answer me ? ' she pursued, while she 
 leaned nearer with wonder, and doubt, and a certain awaken- 
 ing dread shadowing the blue lustre of her eyes that were 
 bent so thoughtfully, so searchingly, upon him. * Is it pos- 
 sible that you have heard of your inheritance, of your title 
 and estates, and that you voluntarily remain a soldier here ? 
 Lord Royallieu must yield them in the instant you prove 
 your identity, and in that there could be no difficulty. I 
 remember you well now, and Philip, I am certain, will only 
 need to see you once to ' 
 
 ' Hush, for pity's sake 1 Have you never heard — have 
 none ever told you * 
 
 ' What ? ' 
 
 Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear ; she knew 
 that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests 
 that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she 
 knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could 
 unman him thus. 
 
 h 
 
502 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ( 
 
 What is it I should have heard ? * she asked him, as he 
 kept his silence. 
 He turned from her so that she could not see his face. 
 
 * That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the 
 taint of crime on me I ' 
 
 * Of crime ? ' 
 
 An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word ; 
 but she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless 
 resolve of a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no 
 shadowy terror appal. 
 
 * Of crime ? What crime ? * 
 
 Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, 
 hopeless, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever 
 would or could have given. 
 
 * I was accused of having forged your brother's name.' 
 
 A faint cry escaped her ; her lips grew white, and her eyes 
 darkened and dilated. 
 
 * Accused ! But wrongfully ? ' 
 
 His breath came and went in quick sharp spasms. 
 
 * I could not prove that.' 
 
 * Not prove it ? Why ? ' 
 ' I could not.' 
 
 * But he — Philip — never believed you guilty ? * 
 ' I cannot tell. He may ; he must.' 
 
 * But you are not ! * 
 
 It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang 
 out in the silver clearness of her voice. There was not a 
 single intonation of doubt in it ; there was rather a haughty 
 authority that forbade even himself to say that one of his race 
 and that one of his order could have been capable of such 
 ignoble and craven sin. 
 
 His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him ; h°i 
 turned his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the 
 heart. 
 
 ' Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will ; I cannot 
 answer you.' 
 
 His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of 
 their utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the 
 inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent 
 in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external 
 semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the noblei 
 belief offered to her choice. She had lived much in the world- 
 
•VENETIAN 503 
 
 but it had not corroded her ; she had acquired keen discern- 
 ment from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and 
 the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked at 
 him now, and stretched her hands out towards him with a 
 royal and gracious gesture of infinite eloquence. 
 
 * You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have arrayed 
 against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely 
 on you. Is it not so ? ' 
 
 He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. 
 In that moment half the bitterness of his doom passed from 
 him ; he had at least her faith. But his face was bloodless 
 as that of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were 
 audible on the stillness. This faith must live on without one 
 thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it 
 should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the 
 foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would 
 there be ? 
 
 He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes ; her own 
 closed involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the 
 despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until 
 her dying day. 
 
 * I was guiltless ; but none could credit it then ; none would 
 do so now ; nor can I seek to make them. Ask me no more ; 
 give me your belief, if you can — God knows what precious 
 mercy it is to me ; but leave me to fulfil my fate, and tell no 
 living creature what I have told you now.' 
 
 The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she 
 heard. Even in the amaze and the vagueness of this first 
 knowledge of the cause of his exile she felt instinctively, as 
 the Little One also had done, that some great sacrifice, some 
 great fortitude and generosity, lay within this sealed secret of 
 his sufferance of wrong. She knew, too, that it would be 
 useless to seek to learn that which he had chosen to conceal ; 
 that for no slender cause could he have come out to lead this 
 life of whose sufferings she could gauge the measure ; that 
 nothing save some absolute and imperative reason could have 
 driven him to accept such hving death as was his doom in 
 Africa. 
 
 * Tell no one ! ' she echoed. * What I not Philip even ? 
 not your oldest friend ? Ah 1 be sure, whatever the evidence 
 might be against you, his heart never condemned you for one 
 instant.' 
 
$64 UNDEll TWO FLAGS 
 
 * I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore yotl 
 to do for me, is to keep silence for ever on my name. To-day, 
 accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to 
 keep sacred. When you recognised me I could not deny 
 myself, I could not lie to you ; but, for God's sake, tell none 
 of what has passed between us ! ' 
 
 ' But why ? ' she pursued — * why ? You lie under this 
 charge still — you cannot disprove it, you say ; but why not 
 come out before the world, and state to all what you swear 
 now to me, and claim your right to bear your father's honours ? 
 If you were falsely accused, there must have been some guilty 
 in your stead ; and if ' 
 
 * Cease, for pity's sake 1 Forget I ever told you I was 
 guiltless I Blot my memory out ; think of me as dead, as I 
 have been, till your eyes called me back to life. Think that I 
 am branded with the theft of your brother's name ; think that 
 I am vile, and shameless, and fallen as the lowest wretch 
 that pollutes this army ; think of me as what you will, but 
 not as innocent ! ' 
 
 The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down 
 with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears 
 away all barriers that have long dammed their course. They 
 were wild, passionate, incoherent ; unlike any that had ever 
 passed his lips, or been poured out in her presence. He felt 
 mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to 
 tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon 
 her face again, and the honour which bound silence on him 
 for sake of the man whom he had sworn under no temptation 
 to dispossess and to betray. 
 
 She heard him silently, with her grand meditative eyes, in 
 which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most 
 women would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the 
 violence of his self-accusation ; she did not. Her intuition 
 was too fine, her sympathies too true. She felt that he 
 feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but 
 that she should justly think him guiltless. She knew that 
 this, whatever its root might be, was the fear of the stainless, 
 not of the criminal life. 
 
 * I hear you,' she answered him, gently ; * but I do not 
 believe you, even against yourself. The man whom Philip 
 loved and honoured never sank to the base fraud of a thief.' 
 
 Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming 
 
I 
 
 •VENETIA' S05 
 
 to read his very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, 
 all the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage 
 within him refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien 
 crime, and rose in revolt to fling ofl: the bondage that forced 
 him to stand as a criminal before the noble gaze of this 
 woman. His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without 
 wavering ; his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless 
 dignity. 
 
 *No. I was innocent. But in honour I must bear the 
 yoke that I took on me long ago : in honour I can never give 
 you or any living soul the ;proof that this crime was not 
 mine. I thought that I should go to my grave without any 
 ever hearing of the years that I have passed in Africa, 
 without any ever learning the name I used to bear. As it is, 
 all I can ask is now — to be forgotten.* 
 
 His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over 
 them. It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman 
 whom he loved with all the strength of a sudden passion 
 born in utter hopelessness ; the woman whose smile, whose 
 beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won as 
 his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birth- 
 right. So bitter, that rather than have spoken those words 
 of resignation he would have been led out by a platoon of 
 his own soldiery and shot in the autumn sunlight beside 
 Eake's grave. 
 
 'You ask what will not be mine to give,* she answered 
 him, while a great weariness stole through her own words, 
 for she was bewildered, and pained, and oppressed with a 
 new strange sense of helplessness before this man's nameless 
 suffering. ' Remember — I knew you so well in my earhest 
 years, and you are so dear to the one dearest to me. It will 
 not be possible to forget such a meeting as this. Silence, 
 of course, you can command from me, if you insist on it, 
 but * 
 
 'I command nothing from you; but I implore it. It is 
 the sole mercy you can show. Never, for God's sake I speak 
 ©f me to your brother or to mine.' 
 
 * Do you so mistrust Philip's affection ? * 
 
 * No. It is because I trust it too entirely.* 
 
 * Too entirely to do what ? ' 
 
 * To deal it fruitless pain. As you love him — as you pity 
 me — pray that he and I never meet I * 
 
r 
 
 506 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * But wliy ? if all this could be cleared ' 
 
 * It never can be.' 
 
 The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of 
 Bome immovable calamity which she had felt before came on 
 her. She had been always used to be obeyed, followed, and 
 caressed; to see obstacles crumble, difficulties disappear, 
 before her wish ; she had not been tried by any sorrow, save 
 when, a mere child still, she felt the pain of her father's 
 death ; she had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with 
 easiest victory. The sense that here there was a tragedy 
 whose meaning she could not reach, that there was here a 
 fate that she could not change or soften, brought a strange 
 unfamiliar feeling of weakness before a hopeless and cruel 
 doom that was no more to be altered by her will than the 
 huge bare rocks of Africa out yonder in the glare of noon 
 were to be lifted by her hand. For she knew that this man, 
 who made so light of perils that would have chilled many to 
 the soul in terror, and who bore so quiet and serene a habit 
 beneath the sharpest stings and hardest blows of his adver- 
 sities, would not speak thus without full warrant, would not 
 consign himself to this renunciation of every hope, unless he 
 were compelled to it by a destiny from which there was no 
 escape. 
 
 She was silent some moments, her eyes resting on him 
 with that grave and luminous regard which no man had ever 
 charged to one more tender or less calmly contemplative. 
 He had risen again, and paced to and fro the narrow chamber, 
 his head bent down, his chest rising and falling with the 
 laboured, quickened breath. Ho had thought that the hour in 
 which his brother's ingratitude had pierced his heart had been 
 the greatest suffering he had ever known, or ever could know; 
 but a greater had waited on him here, in the fate to which 
 the jewelled toy that he had lifted from the water had acci- 
 dentally led him, not dreaming to what he came. 
 
 'Lord Royallieu,' she said, softly, at length, while she 
 rose and moved towards him, the scarlet of the trailing cash- 
 meres gathering dark ruby hghts in them as they caught sun 
 and shadow ; and at the old name, uttered in her voice, he 
 started, and turned, and looked at her as though he saw 
 some ghost of his past life rise from its grave. ' Why look 
 at me so ? * she pursued ere he could speak. * Act how you 
 will, you cannot change the fact that you are the bearer of 
 
*VENETIA' 507 
 
 your father's title. So long as you live, your brother 
 feerkeley can never take it legally. You may be a Chasseur 
 of the African Army, but none the less are you a Peer of ,• 
 England.' -«-^ 
 
 * What matter that ? * he muttered. * Why tell me that ? 
 I have said I am dead. Leave me buried here, and let him 
 enjoy what he may — what he can.' 
 
 * But this is folly — madness * 
 
 ' No ; it is neither. I have told you I should stand as a 
 felon in the eyes of the English law ; I should have no civil 
 rights; the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me 
 remain forgotten here. It will not be long, most likely, 
 before I am thrust into the African sand, to rot like that 
 brave soul out yonder. Berkeley will be the lawful holder 
 of the title then ; leave him in peace and possession now.' 
 
 He spoke the words out to the end — calmly, and with 
 unfaltering resolve. But she saw the great dews gather on 
 his temples, where silver threads were just glistening among 
 the bright richness of his hair, and she heard the short, low, 
 convulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he 
 spoke. She stood close beside him, and gazed once more full 
 in his eyes, while the sweet imperious cadence of her voice 
 answered him : 
 
 * There is more than I know of here. Either you are the 
 greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived. 
 You choose to guard your own secret ; I will not seek to 
 persuade it from you. But tell me one thing — why do you 
 thus abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, 
 and consign yourself for ever to this cruel agony ? ' 
 
 His lips shook under his beard as he answered her : 
 
 * Because I can do no less in honour. For God's sake do 
 not you tempt me ! ' 
 
 A quick deep sigh escaped her as she heard, her face grew 
 very pale as it had done before, and she moved slightly from 
 him. 
 
 * Forgive me,' she said, after a long pause. ' I will never 
 ask you that again.* 
 
 She could honour honour too well, and too well divine all 
 that he suffered for its sake, even to become his temptress 
 in bidding him forsake it ; yet, with a certain weariness, a 
 certain dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realised that 
 what he had chosen was the choice not of his present or of 
 
5o8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 his future. It could have no concern for her — save that 
 long years ago he had been the best-beloved friend of her 
 best-beloved relative — whether or no he remained lost to all 
 the world under the unknown name of a French Chasseur. 
 And yet it smote her with a certain dull unanalysed pain ; 
 it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopeless- 
 ness to realise that he would remain all his years through, 
 until an Arab's shot should set him free, under this bondage 
 of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service. She stood 
 silent long, leaning against the oval of the casement, with 
 the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that swept round 
 her. He stood apart in silence also. What could he say to 
 her ? His whole heart longed with an unutterable longing 
 to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between him 
 and his duty ; but his promise hung on him like a leaden 
 weight. He must remain speechless; — and leave her, for 
 doubt to assail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts 
 of him, if so they would. 
 
 Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in 
 
 . which honour had forbade him to compromise a woman's 
 
 • reputation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a 
 
 \ brother's sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act 
 
 I as that which he paid now. 
 
 Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren 
 dust-strewn plains, in the distance there approached three 
 riders, accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their 
 crimson burnous floating in the autumnal wind. She started, 
 and turned to him : 
 
 *It is Philip 1 He is coming for me from your camp 
 to-day.* 
 
 His eyes strained through the sun glare : 
 
 ' Ah, God ! I cannot meet him — I have not strength. You 
 do not know ' 
 
 * I know how well he loved you.' 
 
 *Not better than I him I But I cannot — I dare not — 
 unless I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth, 
 we must be apart for ever. For Heaven's sake promise me 
 never to speak my name ! ' 
 
 * I promise until you release me.* 
 
 * And you can believe me innocent still, in face of all ? ' 
 She stretched her hands to him once more : * I belieYe, 
 
 For I know what you once were.* 
 
*VENETIA' 509 
 
 Great burning tears fell from his eyes upon her hands as he 
 bent over them : 
 
 *God bless you I You were an angel of pity to me in 
 your childhood ; in your womanhood you give me the only 
 mercy I have known since the last day you looked upon my 
 face ! We shall be far sundered for ever ; may I come to 
 you once more ? ' 
 
 She paused in hesitation and in thought awhile, while for 
 the first time in all her years a tremulous tenderness passed 
 over her face ; she felt an unutterable pity for this man, and 
 for his doom. Then she drew her hands gently away from 
 him : 
 
 * Yes, I will see you again.' 
 
 So much concession to such a prayer Venetia Corona had 
 never before given. He could not command his voice to 
 answer, but he bowed low before her as before an empress : 
 another moment, and she was alone. 
 
 She stood looking out at the wide level country beyond, 
 with the glare of the white strong Hght and the red burnous 
 of the Franco-Arabs glowing against the blue but cloudless 
 sky ; she thought that she must be dreaming some fa.ntastio 
 story born of these desert solitudes. 
 
 Yet her eyes were dim with tears, and her heart ached 
 with another's woe. Doubt of him never came to her ; but 
 there was a vague, terrible pathos in the mystery of his fate 
 that oppressed her with a weight of future evil, unknown, 
 and unmeasured. 
 
 * Is he a madman ? ' she mused. * If not, he is a martyr ; 
 — one of the greatest that ever suffered unknown to other 
 
 men.* 
 
 ******* 
 
 In the coolness of the late evening in the court of the 
 caravanserai her brother and his friends lounged with her and 
 the two ladies of their touring and sketching party, while 
 they drank their sherbet, and talked of the Gerome colours of 
 the place, and watched the flame of the afterglow bum out, 
 and threw millet to the doves and pigeons straying at their 
 feet. 
 
 * My dear Venetia 1 * cried the Seraph, carelessly, tossing 
 handfuls of grain to the eager birds, * I inquired for your 
 Sculptor-Chasseur — that fellow Victor — but I failed to see 
 bim, for he had been sent on an expedition shortly after I 
 
510 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 reached the camp. They tell me he is a fine soldier ; but by 
 what the Marquis said, I fear he is but a handsome black- 
 guard, and Africa, after all, may be his fittest place.' 
 
 She gave a bend of her head to show she heard him, 
 stroking the soft throat of a little dove that had settled on the 
 bench beside her. 
 
 * There is a charming little creature there, a little fire- 
 eater — Cigarette they call her — who is in love with him, I 
 fancy. Such a picturesque child 1 — swears like a trooper, 
 too,' continued he who was now Duke of Lyonnesse. * By- 
 the-way, is Berkeley gone ? ' 
 
 * Left yesterday.' 
 
 ' What for ?— where to ? * 
 
 * I was not interested to inquire,' 
 
 * Ah I you never liked him I Odd enough to leave without 
 reason or apology ? ' 
 
 * He had his reasons, doubtless.* 
 
 * And made his apology to you ? * 
 ' Oh yes.' 
 
 Her brother looked at her earnestly ; there was a care upon 
 her face new to him. 
 
 * Are you well, my darling ? ' he asked her. ' Has the 
 sun been too hot, or la bise too cold for you ? ' 
 
 She rose, and gathered her cashmeres about her, and smiled 
 somewhat wearily her adieu to him. 
 ' Both perhaps. I am tired. Good-night.* 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 THE GIFT OF THE CBOSB 
 
 One of the most brilliant of Algerian autumnal days shone 
 over the great camp in the south. The war was almost at an 
 end for a time ; the Arabs were defeated and driven desert' 
 wards ; hostilities irksome, harassing, and annoying, like all 
 guerilla warfare, would long continue, but peace was virtually 
 established, a.nd Zaraila had been the chief glory that had 
 been added by the campaign to the flag of Imperial France. 
 The kites and the vultures had left the bare bones by 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 511 
 
 thousands to bleach upon the sands, and the hillocks of brown 
 earth rose in clouds where those, more cared for in death, 
 had been hastily thrust beneath the brown crust of the earth. 
 The dead had received their portion of reward — in the jackal's 
 teeth, in the crow's beak, in the worm's caress. And the 
 living received theirs in this glorious rose-flecked glittering 
 autumn morning, when the breath of winter made the air 
 crisp and cool, laut the ardent noon still lighted with its 
 furnace glow the hillside and the plain. 
 
 The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the 
 immense level of the plateau to witness the presentation of 
 the Cross of the Legion of Honour. 
 
 It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on 
 the deep sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched 
 east and west, north and south, formed up in three sides of 
 one vast massive square. The battalions of Zouaves and of 
 Zephyrs ; the brigade of Chasseurs d'Afrique ; the squadrons 
 of Spahis ; the regiments of Tirailleurs and Turcos ; the 
 batteries of Flying Artillery, were all massed there, re- 
 assembled from the various camps and stations of the 
 southern provinces to do honour to the day — to do honour in 
 especial to one by whom the glory of the Tricolor had been 
 saved unstained. 
 
 The red white and blue of the standards, the brass of the 
 eagle guidons, the grey tossed manes of the chargers, the fierce 
 swarthy faces of the soldiery, the scarlet of the Spahis' cloaks, 
 and the snowy folds of the Demi-Cavalerie turbans, the shine 
 of the sloped lances, and the glisten of the carbine barrels, 
 fused together in one sea of blended colour, flashed into a 
 million of prismatic hues against the sombre bistre shadow of 
 the sunburnt plains and the clear blue of the skies. 
 
 It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign ; it had 
 availed nothing except to drive the Arabs away from some 
 hundred leagues of useless and profitless soil ; hundreds of 
 French soldiers had fallen by disease, and drought, and 
 dysentery, as well as by shot and sabre, and were unrecorded 
 save on the books of the bureaus, unlamented save, perhaps, 
 in some little nestling hamlet among the great green woods of 
 Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the 
 vines of Provence, where some woman toihng till sunset 
 among the fields, or praying before some wayside saint's stone 
 niche, would give a thought to the far-off and devouring 
 
512 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 desert that had drawn down beneath its sands the head thai 
 used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child's, or caressed 
 as a lover's. 
 
 But the drums rolled out their long deep thunder over the 
 wastes; and the shot-torn standards fluttered gaily in the 
 breeze blowing from the west; and the clear full music of 
 the French bands echoed away to the dim distant terrible 
 south, where the desert-scorch and the desert-thirst had 
 murdered their bravest and best — and the Army was en fete. 
 En fSte, for it did honour to its darling. Cigarette received 
 the Cross. 
 
 Mounted on her own little bright bay, Etoile-Filante, with 
 tricolor ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy 
 fringes of his mane, the Little One rode among her Spahia. 
 A scarlet kepi was set on her thick silken curls, a tricolor 
 Bash was knotted round her waist, her wine-barrel was slung 
 on her left hip, her pistols thrust in her ceinturon, and a light 
 carbine held in her hand with the butt-end resting on her 
 foot. With the sun on her child-like brunette face, her eyes 
 flashing like brown diamonds in the light, and her marvellous 
 horsemanship, showing its skill in a hundred d^sinvoltures 
 and daring tricks, the little Friend of the Flag had come 
 hither among her half-savage warriors, whose red robes 
 surrounded her like a sea of blood. 
 
 And on a sea of blood she, the Child of War, had floated, 
 never sinking in that awful flood, but buoyant ever above its 
 darkest waves, catching ever some ray of sunlight upon her 
 fair young head, and being oftentimes like a star of hope to 
 those over whom its dreaded waters closed. Therefore they 
 loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful warriors, to 
 whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred, by whom in 
 their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was 
 spared, whose law was hcence, and whose mercy was murder. 
 They loved her, these brutes whose greed was like the tiger's, 
 whose hate was like the devouring flame; and any who 
 should have harmed a single lock of her curling hair would 
 have had the spears of the African Mussulmans buried by the 
 score in his body. They loved her, with the one fond trium- 
 phant love these vultures of the army ever knew ; and to-day 
 they gloried in her with fierce passionate delight. To-day she 
 was to her wild wolves of Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleura 
 was to her brethren of France. And to-day was the crown 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 513 
 
 of her young life. It is given to most, if the desire of their 
 Boul ever become theirs, to possess it only when long and 
 weary and fainting toil has brought them to its goal ; when 
 beholding the golden fruit so far off, through so dreary a 
 pilgrimage, dulls its bloom as they approach ; when having 
 so long centered all their thoughts and hopes in the denied 
 possession of that one fair thing, they find but little beauty 
 in it when that possession is graxited to satiate their love. 
 But thrice happy, and few as happy, are they to whom the 
 dream of their youth is fulfilled in their youth, to whom 
 their ambition comes in full sweet fruitage, whUe yet the 
 colours of glory have not faded to the young, eager, longing 
 eyes that watch its advent. And of these was Cigarette. 
 
 In the fair, slight girlish body of the child-soldier there 
 lived a courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure aa 
 Vergniau-d's, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, 
 untutored, uninspired by poet's words or patriot's bidding, 
 spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind- 
 sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle 
 and the razzia, the spirit of genius, the^ desire to live and to 
 die greatly. It was unreasoned on, it was felt, not thought^ 
 it was often drowned in the gaiety of young laughter and the 
 ribaldry of military jest, it was often obscured by noxious ; 
 influence and stifled beneath the fumes of lawless pleasure ; ' 
 but there, ever, in the soul and the heart of Cigarette, dwelt 
 the germ of a pure ambition — the ambition to do some noble 
 thing for France, and leave her name upon her soldiers' lips, 
 a watchword and a rallying-cry for evermore. To be for ever 
 a beloved tradition in the army of her country, to have her 
 name remembered in the roll-caU as Mort sur le champ 
 d'honneur ; to be once shrined in the love and honour of 
 France, Cigarette full of the boundless joys of life that knew 
 no weakness and no pain, strong as the young goat, happy aa 
 the young lamb, careless as the young flower tossing on the 
 summer breeze — Cigarette would have died contentedly. And 
 now living, some measure of this desire had been fulfilled to 
 her, some breath of this imperishable glory had passed over 
 her. France had heard the story of Zaraila ; from the Throne 
 a message had been passed to her ; what was far beyond ali 
 else to her, her own Army of Africa had crowned her, and 
 thanked her, and adored her as with one voice, and whero- 
 Boever she passed, the v/ild cheers rang through the roar of 
 
SU UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 musketry, as through the silence of sunny air, and throughoui; 
 the regiments every sword would have sprung from its 
 scabbard in her defence if she had but Hfted her hand and 
 Baid one word — * Zaraila 1 ' 
 
 The Army looked on her with delight now. In all that 
 
 mute, still, immovable mass that stretched out so far, in such 
 
 gorgeous array, there was not one man whose eyes did not 
 
 turn on her, whose pride did not centre in her — their Little 
 
 One, who was so wholly theirs, and who had been under the 
 
 shadow of their Flag ever since the curls, so dark now, had 
 
 been yellow as wheat in her infancy. The Flag had been 
 
 her shelter, her guardian, her plaything, her idol ; the flutter 
 
 of the striped folds had been the first thing at which her 
 
 .childish eyes had laughed ; the preservation of its colours from 
 
 [the sacrilege of an enemy's touch, had been her religion, a re- 
 
 (jigion whose true following was, in Eer sight, salvation of the 
 
 I worst and the most worthless life ; and that Flag she had 
 
 saved, and borne aloft in victory at Zaraila. There was not 
 
 one in all those hosts whose eyes did not turn on her with 
 
 gratitude, and reverence, and delight in her as their own. 
 
 Not one: except where her own keen, rapid glance, far- 
 leeing as the hawk's, lighted on the squadrons of the Chas- 
 seurs d'Afrique, and found among their ranks one face, grave, 
 weary, meditative, with a gaze that seemed looking far away 
 from the glittering scene to a grave that lay unseen leagues 
 beyond, behind the rocky ridge. 
 
 ' He is thinking of the dead man, not of me,' thought 
 Cigarette ; and the first taint of bitterness entered into her 
 cup of joy and triumph, as such bitterness enters into most 
 cups that are drunk by human lips. A whole army was 
 thinking of her, and of her alone ; and there was a void in 
 her heart, a thorn in her crown, because one among that 
 mighty mass — one only — gave her presence little heed, but 
 thought rather of a lonely tomb among the desolation of the 
 plains. 
 
 But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to 
 quiver in impotent impatience through her. The trumpets 
 sounded, the salvos of artillery pealed out, the lances and 
 the swords were carried up in salute ; on to the ground rode 
 the Marshal of France, who represented the imperial will 
 and presence, surrounded by his staff, by generals of division 
 and brigade, by officers of rank, and by some few civilian 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 51$ 
 
 riders. An aide galloped up to her where she stood with the 
 corps of her Spahis, and gave her his orders. The Little One 
 nodded carelessly, and touched Etoile-Filante with the prick 
 of the spur. Like lightning the animal bounded forth from 
 the ranks, rearing and plunging, and swerving from side to 
 side, while his rider, with exquisite grace and address, kept 
 her seat like the little semi-Arab that she was, and with a 
 thousand curves and bounds cantered down the line of the 
 gathered troops, with the west wind blowing from the far- 
 distant sea, and fanning her bright cheeks till they wore the 
 soft scarlet flush of the glowing japonica flower. And all 
 down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange longing murmur went 
 — the buzz, of the voices which, but that discipline suppressed 
 them, would have broken out in worshipping acclamations. 
 
 As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door 
 of the As de Fique, she arrested her horse before the great 
 Marshal, who was the impersonation of authority, and put 
 her hand up in the salute, with her saucy wayward laugh. 
 He was the impersonation of that vast, silent, awful, irre- 
 sponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire, \, ^^^ 
 stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the \\,^'^ 
 soldiers of France down into nameless graves, with the desert I 
 sand choking their mouths ; but he was no more to Cigarette ' 
 than any drummer-boy that might be present. She had alfT 
 the contempt for the laws of rank of your thorough inborn 
 democrat, all the gay insouciant indifference to station of theK^^ 
 really free and untrammelled nature ; and in her sight, a 
 dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot- 
 v/ounds without a word or a moan, was greater than all 
 Messieurs les Mar^chaux glittering in their stars and orders. 
 As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, v/ith rank — 
 pooh I You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause 
 in their floating passage because they came between royalty 
 and the sun. All the sovereigns of Europe would have awed 
 Cigarette not one whit more than a gathering of muleteers. 
 ' Allied sovereigns — bah I ' she would have said, * what did i 
 that mean in '15 ? A chorus of magpies chattering over one / 
 stricken eagle I ' 
 
 So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the 
 few great personages whom Algeria could bring around them, 
 as indifferently as she had many a time reined up before a 
 knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a baorack-gate. He was 
 
 ll2 
 
5i6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 nothing to her ; it was her army that crowned her. ' The 
 Generalissimo is the poppy head, the men are the wheat; 
 lay every ear of the wheat low, and of what use is the tower- 
 ing poppy that blazed so grand in the sun ? ' Cigarette 
 would say with metaphorical unction, forgetful, like most 
 allegorists, that her fable was one-sided and unjust in figure 
 and deduction. 
 
 Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart 
 beat fast under its gold-laced jacket as she reined up Etoile and 
 saluted. In that hot clear sun all the eyes of that immense 
 host were fastened on her, and the hour of her longing desire 
 was come at last. France had recr«-nised that she had done 
 greatly, and France, through the voice of this, its chief, spoke 
 to her — France, her beloved, and her guiding-star, for whose 
 sake the young brave soul within her would have dared and 
 have endured all things. There vv^as a group before her, 
 large and brilHant, but at them Cigarette never looked ; what 
 she saw were the sunburnt faces of her ' children,' of men 
 who, in the majority, were old enough to be her grandsires, 
 who had been with her through so many darksome hours, and 
 whose black and rugged features lightened and grew tender 
 whenever they looked upon their Little One, For the moment 
 she felt giddy with sweet fiery joy ; they were here to behold 
 her thanked in the name of France. 
 
 The Marshal, in advance of all his staff, doffed his plumed 
 hat and bowed to his saddle-bow as he faced her. He knew 
 her well by sight, this pretty child of his Army of Africa, 
 who had, before then, suppressed mutiny like a veteran, and 
 led the charge like a Murat — this kitten with a lion's heart, 
 this humming-bird with an eagle's swoop. 
 
 * Mademoiselle,* he commenced, while his voice, well 
 Bkilled to such work, echoed to the farthest end of the long 
 lines of troops, * I have the honour to discharge to-day the 
 happiest duty of my life. In conveying to you the expression 
 of the Emperor's approval of your noble conduct in the pre- 
 Bent campaign, I express the sentiments of the whole Army. 
 Your action on the day of Zaraila was as brilliant in concep- 
 tion as it was great in execution ; and the courage you dis- 
 played was only equalled by your patriotism. May the'soldier 
 of many wars remember you and emulate you. In the name 
 of France, I thank you. In the name of the Emperor, I bring 
 to you the Cross of the Legion of Honour.' 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 517 
 
 As the brief and soldierly words rolled down the ranks of 
 the listening regiments, he stooped forward from his saddle 
 and fastened the red ribbon on her breast ; while from the 
 whole gathered mass, watching, hearing, waiting breathlessly 
 to give their tribute of applause to their darling also, a great 
 shout rose as with one voice, strong, full, echoing over and 
 over again across the plains in thunder that joined her name 
 with the name of France and of Napoleon, and hurled it up- 
 ward in fierce tumultuous idolatrous love to those cruel cloud- 
 less skies that shone above the dead. She was their child, 
 their treasure, their idol, their young leader in war, their 
 young angel in suffering ; she was all their own, knowing 
 with them one common mother — France. Honour to her was 
 honour to them : they gloried with heart and soul in this 
 bright young fearless life that had been among them ever 
 since her infant feet had waded through the blood of slaughter- 
 fields, and her infant lips had laughed to see the tricolor float 
 in the sun above the smoke of battle. 
 
 And as she heard, her face became very pale, her large eyes 
 grew dim and very soft, her mirthful mouth trembled with 
 the pain of a too intense joy. She lifted her head, and all 
 the unutterable love she bore her country and her people 
 thrilled through the music of her voice : 
 
 *Frangais ! — ce n'dtait Hen i ' 
 
 That was all she said; in that one first word of their 
 common nationality, she spoke alike to the Marshal of the 
 Empire and to the conscript of the ranks. ' Fran9ais I ' 
 that one title made them all equal in her sight ; whoever 
 claimed it was honoured in her eyes, and was precious to 
 her heart, and when she answered them that it was nothing, 
 this thing which they glorified in her, she answered but 
 what seemed the simple truth in her code. She would 
 have thought it * nothing ' to have perished by shot, or 
 steel, or flame, in day-long torture for that one fair sake 
 of France. 
 
 Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she waa 
 docile and submissive as the most patient child; here she 
 deemed the greatest and the hardest thing that she could ever 
 do far less than all that she would willingly have done. And 
 as she looked upon the host whose thousand and ten thousand 
 voices rang up to the noonday sun in her homage, and in hera 
 alone, a hght like a glory beamed upon her face that for one© 
 
$tZ UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 was white and still and very grave ; — none who saw her face 
 then ever forgot that look. 
 
 In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud 
 and pure ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, 
 in all its perfect splendour. In that moment she knew that 
 divine hour which, born of a people's love and of the impos- 
 sible desires of genius in its youth, comes to so few human 
 lives — knew that which was known to the young Napoleon 
 when, in the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed 
 I the Conqueror of Italy. And in that moment there was an 
 '■ intense stillness ; the Army crowned as its bravest and its 
 best a woman-child in the spring-time of her girlhood. 
 
 Then Cigarette laid her hand on the Cross that had been 
 the dream of her years since she had first seen the brazen 
 glisten of the eagles above her wondering eyes of infancy, 
 and loosened it from above her heart, and stretched her hand 
 out with it to the great Chief. 
 
 ' Monsieur le Mar^chal, this is not for me.* 
 
 * Not for you ! The Emperor bestows it ' 
 
 Cigarette saluted with her left hand, still stretching to him 
 the decoration with the other. 
 
 * It is not for me — nor will I wear it unjustly.' 
 'Unjustly! What is your meaning? My child, you 
 
 talk strangely. The gifts of the Empire are not given 
 lightly.' 
 
 'No; and they shall not be given unfairly. Listen.' 
 The colour had flushed back, bright and radiant, to her 
 cheek ; her eyes glanced with their old daring ; her con- 
 temptuous, careless eloquence returned, and her voice echoed, 
 every note distinct as the notes of a trumpet-call, down the 
 ranks of the listening soldiery. • Hark you ! The Emperor 
 sends me this Cross ; France thanks me ; the Army applauds 
 me. Well, I thank them, one and all. Cigarette was never 
 yet ungrateful ; it is the sin of the coward. But I say I will 
 not take what is unjustly mine, and this preference to me is 
 unjust. I saved the day at Zaraila ? — oh-he I grand cliosc ca I 
 And how ? — by scampering fast on my mare, and asking iot 
 a squadron or two of my Spahis — that was all. If I had not 
 done so much — I, a soldier of Africa — why, I should have 
 deserved to have been shot like a cat — bah ! — should I not ? 
 It was not I who saved the battle. Who was it ? It was a 
 Chasseur d'Afrique, I toll you. What did he do? Why, 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 519 
 
 this. When his officers were all gone down, he rallied, and 
 gathered his handful of men, and held the ground with them 
 all through the day — two — four — six — eight — ten hours 
 in the seorch of the sun. The Arbicos, even, were forced to 
 see that was grand ; they offered him life if he would yield. 
 All his answer was to form his few horsemen into line as well 
 as he could for the slain, and charge — a last charge in which 
 he knew not one of his troop could live through the swarms 
 of the Arbis around them. That I saw with my own eyes. 
 I and my Spahis just reached him in time. Then who is it 
 that saved the day, I pray you ? — I, who just ran a race for 
 fun and came in at the fag-end of the thing, or this man who 
 lived the whole day through in the carnage, and never let go 
 of the guidon, but only thought how to die greatly ? I tell 
 you, the Cross is his, and not mine. Take it back, and give 
 it where it is due.' 
 
 The Marshal listened, half amazed, half amused — half 
 prepared to resent the insult to the Empire and to discipline, 
 half disposed to award that submission to her caprice which 
 all Algeria gave to Cigarette. 
 
 * Mademoiselle,' he said, with a grave smile, * the honours 
 of the Empire are not to be treated thus. But who is this 
 man for whom you claim so much ? ' 
 
 * Who is he ? ' echoed Cigarette, with all her fiery disdain 
 for authority ablaze once more like brandy in a flame. 
 * Oh-he ! Napoleon Premier would not have left his Mar- 
 shals to ask that 1 He is the finest soldier in Africa, if it be 
 possible for one to be finer than another where all are so 
 great. They know that ; they pick him out for all the dan- 
 gerous missions. But the Black Hawk hates him, and so 
 France never hears the truth of all that he does. I tell you, 
 if the Emperor had seen him as I saw him on the field of 
 Zaraila, his would have been the Cross, and not mine.' 
 
 * You are generous, my Little One.' 
 
 * No ; I am just.' 
 
 Her brave eyes glowed in the sun, her voice rang as clear 
 as a bell. She raised her head proudly and glanced down 
 the line of her army. She was just — that was the one virtue 
 in Cigarette's creed without which you were poltroon, 01 
 liar, or both. 
 
 She alone knew what neglect, what indifference, what 
 unintentional but none the less piercing insults she had to 
 
520 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 avenge; she alone knew of that pain with which she had 
 heard the name of her patrician rival murmured in delirious 
 slumber after Zaraila ; she alone knew of that neghgent 
 caress of farewell with which her lips had been touched as 
 lightly as his hand caressed a horse's neck or a bird's wing. 
 But these did not weigh with her one instant to make her 
 withhold the words that she deemed deserved ; these did 
 not balance against him one instant the pique and the pain 
 of her own heart in opposition to the due of his courage and 
 his fortitude. 
 
 Cigarette was rightly proud of her immunity from the 
 weaknesses of her sex ; she had neither meanness nor selfish- 
 ness. 
 
 The Marshal listened gravely, the groups around him 
 smilingly. If it had been any other than the Little One, 
 it would have been very different ; as it was, all France and 
 all Algeria knew Cigarette. 
 
 * What may be the name of this man whom you praise so 
 greatly, my pretty one ? ' he asked her. 
 
 ' That I cannot tell. Monsieur le Mar^chal. All I know 
 is he calls himself here Louis Victor.* 
 
 * Ah I I have heard much of him. A fine soldier, 
 but * 
 
 * A fine soldier without a " but," ' interrupted Cigarette, 
 with rebellious indifference to the rank of the great man 
 she corrected, * unless you add, "but never done justice by 
 his Chief." ' 
 
 As she spoke, her eyes for the first time glanced over the 
 various personages who were mingled among the staff of the 
 Marshal, his invited guests for the review upon the plains. 
 The colour burned more duskily in her cheek, her eyes glit- 
 tered with hate ; she could have bitten her little, frank, witty 
 tongue through and through for having spoken the name of 
 that Chasseur who was yonder, out of earshot, where the 
 lanceheads of his squadrons glistened against the blue skies. 
 She saw a face which, though seen but once before, she knew 
 instantly again — the face of ' Miladi.' And she saw it 
 change colour, and lose its beautiful hue and grow grave and 
 troubled as the last words passed between herself and the 
 French Marshal. 
 
 ! * Ah I can she feel ? ' wondered Cigarette, who, with a 
 i common error of such vehement young democrats as herself 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 5ax 
 
 always thought that hearts never ached in the Patrician 
 Order, and thought so still when she saw the listless proud 
 tranquillity return, not again to be altered, over the perfect 
 features that she watched with so much violent instinctive 
 hate. * Did she heed his name, or did she not ? What are 
 their faces in that Order ? Only alabaster masks ! ' mused 
 the child. And her heart sank, and bitterness mingled with 
 her joy, and the soul that had a moment before been so full 
 of all pure and noble emotion, all high and patriotic and 
 ideahc thought, was dulled and soiled and clogged with baser 
 passions. So ever do unworthy things drag the loftier nature 
 earthward. 
 
 She scarcely heard the Marshal's voice as it addressed her 
 with a kindly indulgence, as to a valued soldier and a spoilt 
 pet in one. 
 
 * Have no fear, Little One. Victor's claims are not for- 
 gotten, though we may await our own time to investigate 
 and reward them. No one ever served the Empire and 
 remained unrewarded. For yourself, wear your Cross proudly. 
 It glitters above not only the bravest but the most generous 
 heart in the service.' 
 
 None had ever won such warm words from the redoubted 
 chief, whose speech was commonly rapid and stern as his 
 conduct of war, and who usually recompensed his men for 
 fine service rather with a barrel of brandy to season their 
 rations than with speeches of military eulogium. But it 
 failed to give delight to Cigarette. She felt resting upon 
 her the calm gaze of those brilliant azure eyes ; and she 
 felt, as she had done once in her rhododendron shelter, as 
 though she were some very worthless, rough, rude, untaught 
 and coarse little barbarian, who was, at best, but fit for a 
 soldier's jest and a soldier's riot in the wild licence of the 
 barrack-room or the campaigning tent. It was only the eyes 
 of this woman, whom he loved, which ever had power to 
 awaken that humiliation, that impatience of herself, that 
 consciousness of something lost and irrevocable, which moved 
 her now. 
 
 Cigarette was proud with an intense pride of all her fiery 
 liberty from every feminine trammel, of all her complete 
 immunity from every scruple and every fastidiousness of her 
 Bex. But, for once, within sight of that noble and haughty 
 beauty a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter inferiority, 
 
522 UNDi^R TWO FLAGg 
 
 i of utter debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless 
 and indomitable spirit. Some vague weary feeling that her 
 youth was fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older 
 years would be very dark, very terrible, came on her even in 
 this hour of the supreme joy, the supreme triumph, of her 
 life. Even her buoyant and cloudless nature did not escape 
 that mortal doom which pursues and poisons every ambition 
 in the very instant of its full fruition.- 
 
 The doubt, the pain, the self-mistrust were still upon her 
 as she saluted once again and paced down the ranks of the 
 assembled divisions; while every lance was carried, every 
 sword lifted, every bayonet presented to the order, Portez 
 vos armes 1 ' as she went ; greeted as though she were an 
 empress, for that cross which glittered on her heart, for that 
 courage wherewith she had saved the Tricolor. 
 
 The great shouts rent the air ; the clash of the lowered 
 arms saluted her ; the drums rolled out upon the air ; the 
 bands of the regiments of Africa broke into the fiery rapture 
 of a war-march ; the folds of the battle-torn flags were flung 
 out wider and wider on the breeze. Grey -bearded men gazed 
 on her with tears of delight upon their grizzled lashes, and 
 young boys looked at her as the children of France once gazed 
 upon Jeanne d'Arc, where Cigarette, with the red ribbon on 
 her br^aistprotgrBtowly in the noonday light along the line of 
 troops. 
 
 It was the paradise of which she had dreamed ; it was the 
 homage of the army she adored ; it was one of those hours in 
 which life is transfigured, exalted, sublimated into a divine 
 glory by the pure love of a people ; and yet in that instant, 
 so long, so passionately desired, the doom of all genius was 
 hers. There was the stealing pain of a weary unrest, amid 
 
 I the sunlit and intoxicating joy of satisfied aspiration. 
 
 , The eyes of Venetia Corona followed her with something 
 
 i of ineffable pity. * Poor little unsexed child 1 ' she thought. 
 
 \ * How pretty and how brave she is I and — how true to 
 
 \him!' 
 
 The Seraph, beside her in the group around the flag-staff, 
 smiled and turned to her. 
 
 *I said that little Amazon was in love with this fellow 
 Victor; how loyally she stood up for him. But I dare say 
 she would be as quick io send a bullet through him, if ha 
 Bhould ever displease her,' 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 513 
 
 ' Why ? Where there is so much courage there must be 
 much nobility, even in the abandonment of such a life as 
 hers.' 
 
 *Ah, you do not know what half -French, half- African 
 natures are. She would die for him just now very likely ; . 
 but if he ever forsake her, she will be quite as likely to run | 
 her dirk through him.' 
 
 ' Forsake her 1 what is he to her ? ' 
 
 There was a certain impatience in the tone, and something 
 of contemptuous disbelief, that made her brother look at her 
 in wonder. 
 
 ' What on earth can the loves of a camp concern Jier ? ' he 
 thought, as he answered : * Nothing that I know of ; but 
 this charming little tigress is very fond of him. By-the-way, 
 san you point the man out to me ? I am curious to see him.' 
 
 * Impossible 1 There are ten thousand faces, and the 
 cavalry squadrons are so far off.' 
 
 She spoke with indifference, but she grew a little pale as 
 she did so, and the eyes that had always met his so frankly, 
 so proudly, were turned from him. He saw it, and it 
 troubled him with a trouble the more perplexed that he could 
 assign to himself no reason for it. That it could be caused 
 by any interest felt for a Chasseur d' Afrique by the haughtiest 
 lady in all Europe would have been too preposterous and too 
 insulting a supposition for it ever to occur to him. And he 
 did not dream the truth — the truth that it was her with- 
 holding, for the first time in all her life, any secret from him 
 which caused her pain ; that it was the fear lest he should 
 learn that his lost friend was living thus which haunted her 
 with that unspoken anxiety. 
 
 They were travelling here with the avowed purpose of 
 seeing the milKtary operations of the south ; she could not 
 have prevented him from accepting the Marshal's invitation 
 to the re\iew of the African Army without exciting comment 
 and interrogation ; she was forced to let events take their 
 own course, and shape themselves as they would ; yet an 
 apprehension, a dread, that she could hardly form into distinct 
 shape, pursued her. It weighed on her with an infinite 
 oppression — this story which she alone had had revealed to 
 her, this life whose martyrdom she alone had seen, and whose 
 secret even she could not divine. It affected her more 
 powerfully, it grieved her more keenly, than Bhe herself 
 
524 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 knew. It brought her close, for the only time in ber experi- 
 ence, to a life absolutely without a hope, and one that 
 accepted the despair of such a destiny with silent resignation, 
 it moved her as nothing less, as nothing feebler or of more 
 common type, could ever have found power to do. There 
 were a simplicity and a greatness in the mute, unpretentious, 
 almost unconscious, heroism of this man, who for the sheer 
 sake of that which he deemed the need of ' honour,' accepted 
 the desolation of his entire future, which attracted her as 
 nothing else had ever done, which made her heart ache when 
 she looked at the glitter of the Franco- Arab squadrons, where 
 their sloped lances glistened in the sun, with a pang that she 
 had never felt before. Moreover, as the untutored, half- 
 , barbaric, impulsive young heart of Cigarette had felt, so felt 
 I the high-bred, cultured, world-wise mind of Venetia Corona 
 '■ — that this man's exile was no shame, but some great 
 I sacrifice ; a sacrifice whose bitterness smote her with its own 
 i suffering, whose mystery wearied her with its own perplexity, 
 as she gazed down the line of the regiments to where the 
 shot-bruised Eagle of Zaraila gleamed above the squadrons 
 of the Chasseurs d'Afrique. 
 
 He, in his place among those squadrons, knew her, though 
 BO far distant, and endured the deadUest trial of patience 
 which had come to him while beneath the yoke of African 
 discipline. To leave his place was to incur the heaviest 
 punishment ; yet he could almost have risked that sentence 
 rather than wait there. Only seven days had gone by since 
 he had been with her under the roof of the caravanserai ; but 
 it seemed to him as if these days had aged him more than all 
 the twelve year? that he had passed upon the Algerian soil. 
 He was thankfux' that the enmity of his relentless chief had 
 placed such shades of evil report between his name and the 
 rewards due to his service, that even the promised recognition 
 of his brilliant actions at Zaraila and elsewhere was postponed 
 awhile on the plea of investigation. He was thankful that 
 the honours which the whole Army expected for him, and 
 which the antagonism of Chateauroy would soon be powerless 
 to avert any longer from their meet bestowal, did not force 
 liim to go up there in the scorching light of the noon, and 
 take those honours as a soldier of France, under the eyes of 
 the man he loved, of the woman he adored. 
 As it was, he sat motionless as a statue in bis saddle, and 
 
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS 525 
 
 never looked westward to where the tricolors of the flag-staff 
 drooped above the head of Venetia Corona. 
 
 Thus, he never heard the gallant words spoken in hig 
 behalf by the loyal hps that he had not cared to caress. Aa 
 she passed down the ranks, indeed, he saw and smiled on his 
 little champion ; but the smile had only a weary kindness of 
 recognition in it, and it wounded Cigarette more than though 
 he had struck her through the breast with his lance. 
 
 The moment that he dreaded came ; the troops broke up 
 and marched past the representative of their empire, the 
 cavalry at the head of the divisions. He passed among the 
 rest ; he raised his lance so that it hid his features as much as 
 its slender shaft could do ; the fair and noble face on which 
 his glance flashed was very pale and very grave; the one 
 beside her was sunny and frank, and unchanged by the years 
 that had drifted by, and its azure eyes, so like her own, 
 sweeping over the masses with all the swift, keen appreciation 
 of a Eoilitary glance, were so eagerly noting carriage, 
 accoutrement, harness, horses, that they never once fell upon 
 the single soldier whose heart so unutterably longed for, even 
 while it dreaded, his recognition. 
 
 Venetia gave a low, quick breath of mingled pain and 
 relief as the last of the Chasseurs paced by. The Seraph 
 Btarted, and turned his head : 
 
 * My darhng ! Are you not well ? ' 
 'Perfectly!' 
 
 *You do not look so; — and you forgot now to point me 
 out this special trooper. I forgot him too/ 
 
 * He goes there — the tenth from here.* 
 fe Her brother looked ; it was too late : 
 
 ' He is taller than the otheri/. That is all I can see now 
 that his back is turned. I will seek him out when • * 
 
 * Do no such thing I ' 
 
 * And why ? It was your own request that I inquired ' 
 
 * Think me changeable as you will. Do nothing to seek 
 him, to inquire for him- 
 
 ' But why ? A man who at Zaraila- 
 
 Never mind 1 Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur 
 d'Afrique at my instance.* 
 
 The colour flushed her face as she spoke ; it was with the 
 Bcorn, the hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which 
 Bhe for the sole time in life soiled her lips. He noting il 
 
5a6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 shook himself restlessly in his saddle. If he had not known 
 her to be the noblest and the haughtiest of all the imperial 
 women who had crowned his house with their beauty and their 
 honour, he could have believed that some interest, degrading as 
 disgrace, moved her towards this foreign trooper, and caused 
 her altered wishes and her silence. As it was, so much insult 
 to her as would have existed in the mere thought was impos- 
 sible to him ; yet it left him annoyed and vaguely disquieted. 
 
 The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout 
 the entertainments that succeeded to the military inspec- 
 tion, in the great white tent glistening with gilded bees and 
 brightened with tricolor standards which the ingenuity of the 
 soldiers of the administration had reared as though by magic 
 amid the barrenness of the country, and in which the skill of 
 camp cooks served up a delicate banquet. The scene was 
 very picturesque, and all the more so for the wude-spread 
 changing panorama without of the canvas city of the camp. 
 It was chiefly designed to pleasure the great lady who had 
 come so far southward; all the resources which could be 
 employed were exhausted to make the occasion memorable 
 and worthy of the dignity of the guests whom the Viceroy 
 of th6 Empire delighted to honour. Yet she, seated there on 
 his right hand, where the rich skins and cashmeres and 
 carpets were strewn on a dais, saw in reality little save a 
 confused blending of hues, and metals, and orders, and 
 weapons, and snowy beards, and olive faces, and French 
 elegance and glitter fused with the grave majesty of Arab 
 pomp. For her thoughts were not with the scene around 
 her, but with the soldier who was without in tliat teeming 
 crowd of tents, who lived in poverty, and danger, and the 
 hard slavery of unquestioning obedience, and asked only to 
 be as one dead to all who had known and loved him in his 
 youth. It was in vain that she repelled the memory ; it 
 usurped her, and would not be displaced. 
 
 Meantime, in another part of the camp, the heroine of 
 Zaraila was feasted, not less distinctively, if more noisily and 
 more familiarly, by the younger officers of the various regi- 
 ments. La Cigarette, many a time before the reigning spirit 
 of suppers and carouses, was banqueted with all the ^clat 
 that befitted that cross which sparkled on her blue and scarlet 
 vest. High throned on a pyramid of knapsacks, canteens, 
 and rugs, toasted a thousand times in ^U brandies and red 
 
THE GIF! OF THE CROSS S?7 
 
 wines that the stores would yield, sung of in improvised odea 
 that were chanted hy voices which might have won Euro- 
 pean fame as tenor or as basso, caressed and sued with all 
 the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and lightly-go love of the camp, 
 with twice a hundred flashing, darkhng eyes bent on her in 
 the hot admiration that her vain coquette spirit found dehght 
 in, ruling as she would with jest, and caprice, and command, 
 ftnd bravado all these men who were terrible as tigers to 
 their foes, the Little One reigned alone ; and — like many who 
 have reigned before her — found lead in her sceptre, dross u^i 
 her diadem, satiety in her kingdom. I 
 
 When it was over, this banquet that was all in her honour, 
 and that three months before would have been a paradise to 
 her, she shook herself free of the scores of arms outstretched 
 to keep her captive, and went put into the night alone. She 
 did not know what she ailed, but she was restless, oppressed, 
 weighed down with a sense of dissatisfied weariness that had 
 never before touched the joyous and elastic nature of the 
 child of France. 
 
 And this, too, in the moment when the very sweetest and 
 loftiest of her ambitions was attained I When her hand 
 wandered to that decoration on her heart which had been 
 ever in her sight what the crown of wild olive and the wreath 
 of summer grasses were to the youths and to the victors of 
 the old dead classic years I As she stood in solitude under 
 the brilliancy of the stars, tears, unfamiliar and unbidden, 
 rose in her eyes as they gazed over the hosts around her. 
 
 ' How they live only for the slaughter I how they perish 
 like the beasts of the field ! ' she thought. Upon her, as on 
 the poet or the patriot who could translate and could utter 
 the thought as she could not, there weighed the burden of 
 that heart-sick consciousness of the vanity of the highest 
 hope, the futility of the noblest effort, to bring light mto 
 the darkness of the suffering, toiling, blind throngs of human 
 life. 
 
 ' There is only one thing worth doing — to die greatly ! ' 
 thought the aching heart of the child -soldier, unconsciously 
 returning to the only end that the genius and the greatness 
 of Greece could find as issue to the terrible jest, the myste- 
 rious despair, of all existence. 
 
.--i" 
 -/-. 
 
 528 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 CHAPTEK XXXIV 
 
 THE DESEBT HAWK AND THE PAKADISE-BIBD 
 
 Some way distant, parted by a broad strip of unoccupied 
 ground from the camp, were the grand marquees set aside for 
 the Marshal and for his guests. They were twelve in number, 
 gaily decorated as far as decoration could be obtained in the 
 southern provinces of Algeria, and had, Arab-like, in front of 
 each the standard of the Tricolor. Before one were two other 
 standards also — the flags of England and of Spain. Cigarette, 
 looking on from afar, saw the alien colours wave in the torch- 
 light flickering on them. * That is hers' thought the Little 
 One, with the mournful and noble emotions of the previous 
 moments swiftly changing into the violent, reasonless, tumul- 
 tuous hatred at once of a rival and of an Order. 
 
 Cigarette was a thorough democrat. When she was two 
 years old she had sat on the topmost pile of a Parisian barri- 
 cade, with the red bonnet on her curls, and had clapped her 
 tiny hands for delight when the bullets flew, and the * Mar- 
 seillaise ' rose above the cannonading ; and the spirit of the 
 musketry and of the * Marseillaise ' had together passed into 
 her and made her what she was. She was a genuine demo- 
 crat ; and nothing short of the pure isonomy of the Greeks 
 was tolerated in her political philosophy, though she could 
 not have told what such a word had meant for her life. She 
 had all the furious prejudices and all the instinctive truths 
 in her of an uncompromising Rouge ; and a sight alone of 
 those lofty standards, signalising the place of rest of the 
 ' aristocrats,* while her * children's ' lowly tents wore in 
 her sight all the dignity and all the distinction of the true 
 field, would have aroused her ire at any time. But now a 
 hate tenfold keener moved her ; she had a jealousy of the 
 one in whose honour those two foreign ensigns floated, that 
 was the most bitter thing which had ever entered her short 
 and sunny life — a hate the hotter because tinged with that 
 sickening sense of self-humiliation, because mingled with 
 that wondering emotion at beholding something so utterly 
 unlike to all tliat she had known or dreamt. 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 529 
 
 She had it in her, could she have had the power, to 
 mercilessly and brutally destroy this woman's beauty, which 
 was so far above her reach, as she had once destroyed the 
 ivory wreath ; yet, as that of the snow-white car\Ting had 
 done, so did this fair and regal beauty touch her, even in the 
 midst of her fury, with a certain reverent awe, with a certain 
 dim sense of something her own life had missed. She had 
 trodden the ivory in pieces with all the violence of childish, 
 savage, uncalculating hate, and she had been chidden, as by 
 a rebuking voice, by the wreck which her action had made 
 at her feet : so could she now, had it been possible, have 
 ruined and annihilated the loveliness that filled his heart and 
 his soul ; but so would she also, the moment her instinct to 
 avenge herself had been sated, have felt the remorse and the 
 shame of having struck down a delicate and gracious thing 
 that even in its destruction had a glory that was above 
 her. 
 
 Even her very hate attracted her to the sight, to the study, 
 to the presence of this woman, who was as dissimilar to all 
 of womanhood that had ever crossed her path, in camp and 
 barrack, as the pure, white, gleaming lily of the hothouse is 
 unlike the wind-tossed, sand-stained, yellow leaf dcsvn-trodden 
 in the mud. An irresistible fascination drew her towards the 
 self-same pain which had so wounded her a few hours before 
 — an impulse more intense than curiosity, and more vital 
 tha.n caprice, urged her to the vicinity of the only human 
 being who had ever awakened in her the pangs of humiliation, 
 the throbs of envy. 
 
 And she went to that vicinity, now that the daylight had 
 just changed to evening, and the ruddy torch-glare was glow- 
 ing everywhere from great pine boughs thrust in the ground, 
 with their resinous branches steeped in oil and flaring alight. 
 There was not a man that night in camp who would Lave 
 dared oppose the steps of the young heroine of the Cross 
 wherever they might choose, in their fantastic flight, to 
 wander. The sentinels passing up and dovv^n the great space 
 before the marquees challenged her, indeed, but she was quick 
 to give the answering password, and they let her go by them, 
 their eyes turning after the little picturesque form that every 
 Boldier of the Corps of Africa loved almost like the flag be- 
 neath which he fought. Once in the magic circle, she paused 
 awhile, the desire that urged her on, and the hate that ira- 
 
 M M 
 
530 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 pelled her backward, keeping her rooted there m the duslcy 
 shadow which the flapping standards threw. 
 
 To creep covertly into her rival's presence, to hide herself 
 like a spy to see what she wished, to show fear, or hesitation, 
 or deference, were not in the least what she contemplated. 
 What she intended was to confront this fair, strange, cold, 
 cruel thing, and see if she were of flesh and blood like other 
 living beings, and do the best that could be done to outrage, 
 to scourge, to challenge, to deride her with all the insolent 
 artillery of camp ribaldry, and show her how a child of the 
 people could laugh at her rank, and affront her purity, and 
 scorn her power. Definite idea there was none in her ; she 
 had come on impulse ; but a vague longing in some v/ay to 
 break down that proud serenity which galled her so sharply, 
 and bring hot blood of shame into that delicate face, and 
 cast indignity on that imperious and unassailable pride, con- 
 sumed her. 
 
 She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been 
 told by an old Invalide had done in the '89 — a girl of the 
 people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one 
 above her rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his 
 own order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like scornful aristo- 
 crat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid 
 lustre of sweet contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore 
 her wrong in silence — she was a daughter of the south and of 
 the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong 
 and fierce, and braced with the salt lashing of the sea and 
 with the keen breath of the stormy mistral. She held her 
 peace while the great lady was wooed and won, v/hile the 
 marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the 
 people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in 
 those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days. 
 
 She held her peace; and the_ Terror came, and the streets 
 of the city by the sea ran blood^and^the scorch of the sun 
 blazed, every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her ven- 
 geance. She stood and saw the axe fall down on the proud 
 snow- white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and 
 she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and 
 smote the lips his lips had kissed, a cruel blow that blurred 
 their beauty out, and twined a fish-hook in the long and 
 glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through 
 dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 531 
 
 town, and through the shouting crowds of the multitudes, 
 and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves 
 flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down 
 to make their feast. ' Voild tes secondes noces I ' she cried 
 where she stood, and laughed by the side of the gray angry 
 water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink down- 
 ward like a heap of sea-tossed weed. 
 
 That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now 
 as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boy- 
 hood, had seen the entry of the Marseillaise to Paris. She 
 knew what the woman of the people had felt when she had 
 bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters 
 that fair and fallen head. 
 
 * I could do it — I could do it,' she thought, with the 
 savage instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving 
 uppermost only its ferocity — the same ferocity as had moved 
 the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head 
 of her rival. The school in which the child-soldier had been 
 reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses, to 
 leave in their inborn uncontrolled force all those native desires 
 which_the human shares with the animalnature. There had 
 been no more to teach her that these were criminal or for- 
 bidden than there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel 
 to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature 
 had made her ; she was no more trained to self-control, or to 
 the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons 
 in its play under the great broad tropic leaves. 
 
 Now, she acted on her impulse ; her impulse of open scorn 
 of rank, of reckless vindication of her right to do just what- 
 soever pleasured her ; and she went boldly forward and dashed 
 aside, with no gentle hand, the folds that hung before the 
 entrance of the tent, and stood there with the gleam of the 
 starry night and the glow of the torches behind her, so that 
 her picturesque and brightly-coloured form looked painted on 
 a dusky lurid background of shadow and of flame. 
 
 The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made 
 them both look up ; they were Venetia Corona and a Le- 
 vantine woman, who was her favourite and most devoted 
 attendant, and had been about her from her birth. The tent 
 was the first of three set aside for her occupance, and had 
 been adorned with as much luxury aa was procurable, and 
 with many of the rich and curious things of Algerian art and 
 
 MU2 
 
532 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 wcrkmanship, so far as they could be hastily collected by. 
 the skill and quickness of the French intendance. Cigarette 
 stood silently looking at the scene on which she had thus 
 broken without leave or question ; she saw nothing of it 
 I except one head lifted in surprise at her entrance — ^just such 
 i a head, just so proudly carried, just so crowned with gleam- 
 ing hair as that which the Marseillaise had dragged through 
 the dust of the streets and cast out to the lust of the sharks. 
 Venetia hesitated a moment in astonished wonder ; then, with 
 the grace and the courtesy of her race, rose and approached 
 the entrance of her tent, in which that figure, half a soldier, 
 half a child, was standing, with the fitful reddened light behind. 
 She recognised whose it was. 
 
 * Is it you, ma petite ? * she said kindly. * Come within. 
 Do not be afraid ' 
 
 She spoke v/ith the gentle consideration of a great lady to 
 one whom she admired for her heroism, compassionated for 
 her position, and thought naturally in need of such encourage- 
 ment. She had liked the frank, fearless, ardent brunette 
 face of the Little Friend of the Flag ; she had liked her fiery 
 and indomitable defence of the soldier of Zaraila ; she felt an 
 interest in her as deep as her pity, and she was above the 
 scruples which many women of her rank might have had as 
 to the fitness of entering into conversation with this child of 
 the army. She was gentle to her as to a young bird, a young 
 kitten, a young colt ; what her brother had said of the vivan- 
 diere's love for one whom the girl only knew as a trooper of 
 Chasseurs filled with an indefinable compassion the woman 
 who knew him as her own equal and of her own Order. 
 
 Cigarette, for once, answered nothing ; her eyes very lower- 
 ing, burning, savage. 
 
 * You wish to see me ? ' Venetia asked once more. • Come 
 nearer. Have no fear * 
 
 The one word unloosed the spell which had kept Cigarette 
 speechless : the one word was an insult beyond endurance, 
 that lashed all the worst spirit in her into flame. 
 
 * Fear 1 ' she cried, with a camp oath, whose blasphemy 
 was happily unintelligible to her listener. * Fear 1 You 
 think I fear you ! — the darling of the army, who saved the 
 squadron at Zaraila, who has seen a thousand days of blood- 
 shed, who has killed as many men with her own hand as any 
 Lascar among them all — fear yoUt you hothouse flower, you 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 533 
 
 paradise-bird, you silver pheasant, who never did aught but 
 spread your dainty colours in the sun, and never earned so 
 much as the right to eat a piece of black bread, if you had 
 
 your deserts ! Fear ymi 1 1 Why ! do you not know 
 
 that I could kill you where you stand as easily as I could 
 wring the neck of any one of those gold-winged orioles that 
 flew above your head to-day, and who have more right to live 
 than you, for they do at least labour in their own fashion for 
 their food, and their drink, and their dwelling ? Dieu de 
 Dieu ! Why, I have killed Arabs, I tell you — great gaunt, 
 grim men — and made them bite the dust under my fire. Do 
 you think I would check for a moment at dealing you death, 
 you beautiful, useless, honeyed, poisoned, painted exotic, that 
 has every wind tempered to you, and thinks the world only 
 made to bear the fall of your foot I ' 
 
 The fury of words was poured out without pause, and with 
 an intense passion vibrating through them ; the wine was 
 hot in her veins, the hate was hot in her heart ; her eyes 
 glittered with murderous meaning, and she darted with one 
 Bwift bound to the side of the rival she loathed, with the 
 pistol half out of her belt ; she expected to see the one she 
 threatened recoil, quail, hear the threat in terror; she mistook 
 the nature with which she dealt. Venetia Corona never 
 moved, never gave a sign of the amazement that awoke in 
 her ; but she put her hand out, and clasped the barrel of the 
 weapon, while her eyes looked down into the flashing, 
 looming, ferocious ones that menaced her, with calm con- 
 temptuous rebuke, in which something of infinite pity was 
 mingled. 
 
 ' Child, are you mad ? ' she said gravely. ' Brave natures 
 do not stoop to assassination, which you seem to deify. If 
 you have any reason to feel evil against me, tell me what it 
 is ; I always repair a wrong if I can. But as for those 
 threats, they are most absurd if you do not mean them, they 
 are most wicked if you do.' 
 
 The tranquil, unmoved, serious words, stilled the vehement 
 passion she rebuked with a strange and irresistible power ; 
 under her gaze the savage lust in Cigarette's eyes died out, 
 and their lids drooped over them ; the dusky scarlet colour 
 faded from her cheeks ; for the first time in her life she felt 
 humiliated, vanquished, awed. If this ' aristocrat ' had 
 shown one sign of fear, one trace of apprehension, all her 
 
534 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 violent and reckless hatred would have reigned on, and, it 
 might have been, have rushed from threat to execution ; but 
 showing the only quality, that of courage, for which she had 
 respect, her great rival confused and disarmed her. She was 
 only sensible, with a vivid, agonising sense of shame, that 
 her only cause of hatred against this woman was that he 
 loved her. And this she would have died a thousand deaths 
 rather than have acknowledged. 
 
 She let the pistol pass into Venetia's grasp , and stood, 
 irresolute and ashamed, her fluent tongue stricken dumb, 
 her intent to wound, and sting, and outrage with every vile 
 coarse jest she knew, rendered impossible to execute. The 
 purity and dignity of her opponent's presence had their 
 irresistible influence, an influence too strong for even her 
 d^bonnaire and dangerous insolence. She hated herself in 
 that moment more than she hated her rival. 
 
 Venetia laid the loaded pistol down, away from both, 
 and seated herself on the cushions from which she had risen. 
 Then she looked once more long and quietly at her unknown 
 antagonist. 
 
 ' Well ? ' she said at length. * Why do you venture to 
 come here ? And why do you feel this malignity towards a 
 stranger who never saw you until this morning ? ' 
 
 Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, 
 though a rare and galling sense of intense inferiority, of 
 intense mortification, was upon her ; though she would 
 almost have given the Cross which was on her breast that 
 she had never come into this woman's sight. 
 
 ' Oh-h6 ! ' she answered, recklessly, with the red blood 
 flushing her face again at the only evasion of truth of which 
 the little desperado, with all her sins, had ever been guilty. 
 * I hate you, Miladi, because of your Order — because of your 
 nation — because of your fine dainty ways — because of your 
 aristocrat's insolence — because you treat my soldiers like 
 paupers — because you are one of those who do no more to 
 have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in 
 the sun, and who oust the people out of their dues as the 
 cuckoo kicks the poor birds that have reared it, out of 
 the nest of down, to which it never has carried a twig or a 
 moss I ' 
 
 Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and 
 of surprise that bitterly discomfited the speaker. To Venetia 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 535 
 
 Corona the girl-soldier seemed mad ; but it was a madnesa 
 that interested her, and she knew at a glance that thia 
 child of the army waa of no common nature and no common 
 mind. 
 
 * I do not wish to discuss democracy with you,' she 
 answered, with a tone that sounded strangely tranquil to 
 Cigarette after the scathing acrimony of her own. * I should 
 probably convince you, as little as you would convince me ; 
 and I never waste words. But I heard you to-day claim a 
 certain virtue — ^justice. How do you reconcile with that 
 your very hasty condemnation of a stranger of whose motives, 
 actions, and modes of life it is impossible you can have any 
 accurate knowledge ? ' 
 
 Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her 
 heart was hot with rage. She had come prepared to upbraid 
 and to outrage this patrician with every jibe and grossness 
 camp usage could supply her with, and — she stood dumb 
 before her ! She could only feel an all-absorbing sense of 
 being ridiculous, and contemptible, and puerile in her sight. 
 
 * You bring two charges against me,' said Venetia, when 
 she had vainly awaited answer. ' That I treat your com- 
 rades like paupers, and that I rob the people— my own 
 people I imagine you to mean — of their dues. In the first, 
 how will you prove it ? — in the second, how can you know 
 it?' 
 
 * Pardieu, Miladi ! ' swore Cigarette, recklessly, seeking 
 only to hold her own against the new sense of inferiority U-^- 1 
 and of inability that oppressed her. 'I was in the hospital- 
 when your fruits and your wines came; and as for yourf''^^ 
 people, I don't speak of them — they are all slaves, they say,- • ,_ 
 in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think 
 they can turn any gold in the furrows 1 — I speak of the 
 people. Of the toiling, weary, agonised, joyless, hapless 
 multitudes who labour on, and on, and on, ever in darkness, 
 that such as you may bask in sunlight and take your pleasures 
 wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered 
 poor I What right have you to have your path strewn with 
 roses, and every pain spared from you ; to only lift your 
 voice and say, "Let that be done," to see it done? — to find 
 
 life one long sweet summer day of gladness and abundance, 
 while they die out in agony by thousands, ague-stricken, 
 famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want only 
 
V 
 
 536 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn to 
 dawn like gold upon your head ? ' 
 
 Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her 
 hearer's face grew very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke ; 
 those luminous earnest eyes, whose power even the young 
 democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers. 
 
 * Ah, child ! do you think we never think of that ? You 
 \ wrong me — you wrong my Order. There are many besides 
 
 myself who turn over that terrible problem as despairingly 
 as you can ever do. As far as in us lies, we strive to 
 remedy its evil ; the uttermost effort can do but little, but 
 that little is only lessened — fearfully lessened — whenever 
 Class is arrayed against Class by that blind antagonism which 
 animates yourself.' 
 
 Cigarette's intelligence was too rapid not to grasp the 
 truths conveyed by these words ; but she was in no mood 
 to acknowledge them. 
 
 * Nom de Dieu, Miladi I * she swore in her teeth. ' If 
 you do turn over the problem — you aristocrats — it is pretty 
 work, no doubt ! just putting the bits of a puzzle-ball together 
 BO long as the game pleases you, and leaving the puzzle in 
 chaos when you are tired I Oh-h6 ! I know how fine ladies 
 and fine gentlemen play at philanthropies I But I am a child 
 of the People, mark you ; and I only see how birth is an 
 angel that gives such as you eternal sunlight and eternal 
 summer, and how birth is a devil that drives down the 
 millions into a pit of darkness, of crime, of ignorance, of 
 misery, of suffering, where they are condemned before they 
 have opened their eyes to existence, where they are sentenced 
 before they have left their mothers' bosoms in infancy. You 
 do not know what that darkness is. It is night — it is ice — ■ 
 it is hell ! ' 
 
 Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard ; pain had 
 been so far from her own life, and there was an intense 
 eloquence in the low deep words that seemed to thrill through 
 the stillness. 
 
 * Nor do you know how many shadows chequer that light 
 which you envy I But I have said ; it is useless for nie to 
 argue these questions with you. You commence with a 
 hatred of a class; all justice is over wherever that element 
 enters. K I were what you think, I should bid you leave 
 my presence which you have entered so rudely. I do not 
 
 U* 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 537 
 
 clesire to do that. I am sure that the heroine of Zaraila has 
 BOinething nobler in her than mere malignity against a person 
 who can never have injured her ; and I would endure her 
 insolence for the sake of awakening her justice. A virtue, 
 that was so great in her at noon, cannot be utterly dead at 
 nightfaU ? ' 
 
 Cigarette's fearless eyes dropped under the gaze of those 
 bent so searchingly, yet so gently, upon her ; but only for 
 a moment ; she raised them afresh with their old dauntless 
 frankness. 
 
 * Dieu ! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth 
 from a French soldier, and failed to get them ! I hate you, 
 never mind why — I do, though you never harmed me. I 
 came here for two reasons : one, because I wanted to look at 
 you close — you are not like anything that I ever saw ; the 
 other, because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage 
 you, if I could find a way how. And you will not let me do 
 it. I do not know what it is in you.' 
 
 In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer 
 homage than lay in that irate reluctant wonder of this fiery 
 foe. 
 
 She smiled slightly. 
 
 * My poor child, it is rather something in yourself — a 
 native nobility that will not allow you to be as unjust and aa 
 insolent as your soul desires ' 
 
 Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience. 
 
 * Pardieu ! do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my 
 '* insolence " in earnest ! You may be a sovereign grande 
 dame everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you 
 for me, I promise you ! ' 
 
 * I do not seek to do so. If I did not feel interest in you, 
 do you suppose I should suffer for a moment the ignorant 
 rudeness of an ill-bred child ? You fail in the tact, as in the 
 courtesy, that belong to your nation.' 
 
 The rebuke was gentle, but it was all the more severe for 
 its very serenity. It cut Cigarette to the quick ; it covered 
 her with an overwhelming sense of mortification and of 
 failure. She was too keen and too just, despite all her 
 vanity, not to feel that she deserved the condemnation, and 
 not to know that her opponent had all the advantage and all 
 the justice on her side. She had done nothing by coming 
 here ; nothing except to appear as an insolent and wayward 
 
538 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 child before hei? superb rival, and to feel a very anguish of 
 inferiority before the grace, the calm, the beauty, the name- 
 less potent charm of this woman, whom she had intended to 
 humiliate and injure 1 
 
 The inborn truth within her, the native generosity and 
 candour that soon or late always overruled every other element 
 in the Little One, conquered her now. She dashed down her 
 Cross on the ground and trod passionately on the decoration 
 she adored. 
 
 ' I disgrace it the first day I wear it I You are right, 
 though I hate you, and you are as beautiful as a sorceress I 
 There is no wonder he loves you I ' 
 
 ' He 1 Who ? • 
 
 There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the 
 interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the 
 interview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose. 
 
 The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she 
 said ; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many 
 emotions in her. 
 
 *The man who carves the toys you give your dog to 
 break 1 ' she answered, bitterly. * Dieu de Dieu 1 he loves 
 you. When he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he 
 said so ; but he never knew what he said, and he never 
 knew that I heard him. You are like the women of his old 
 world ; though through you he got treated like a dog, he 
 loves you ! ' 
 
 • Of whom do you venture to speak ? * 
 
 The cold calm dignity of the question, whose very tone 
 was a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of 
 Cigarette's speech. 
 
 * Sacre bleu ! of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his 
 wares to you like a hawker. And you think it insult, I will 
 warrant — insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, 
 and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to ennoble 
 him, to dare to love Madame la Princesse Corona 1 I think 
 otherwise. I think that Madame la Princesse Corona never 
 had a love of so much honour, though she has had princes 
 and nobles and all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, 
 through that beauty that is like a spell 1 * 
 
 Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own 
 hatred for her rival which drove her to magnify the worth 
 of the passion of which she was so jealous, that she might 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 539 
 
 lessen, if she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, 
 she never paused to care what she said, or heed what it3 
 consequences might become. She felt incensed, amazed, 
 irritated, to see no trace of any emotion come on her hearer's 
 face ; the hot, impetuous, expansive, untrained nature under- 
 rated the power for self-command of the Order she so blindly 
 hated. 
 
 * You speak idly and at random, like the child you are,' 
 the grande davie answered her with chill contemptuous rebuke. 
 ' I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you 
 his confidante in such a matter ? ' 
 
 * He ! ' retorted Cigarette. * He belongs to your class, 
 Miladi. He is as silent as the grave. You might kill him, 
 and he would never show it hurt. I only know what he 
 muttered in his fever.' 
 
 * When you attended him ? * 
 
 ' Not 1 1 ' cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that 
 she was betraying herself. 'He lay in the scullion's tent 
 where I was ; that was all ; and he was delirious with tha 
 shot- wounds. Men often are ' 
 
 ' Wait ! Hear me a little while, before you rush on in 
 this headlong and foolish speech,' interrupted her auditor, 
 who had in a moment's rapid thought decided on her course 
 with this strange wayward nature. * You err in the con- 
 struction you have placed on the words, whatever they were^^ 
 
 which you heard. The gentleman — he is a gentleman—^ jf 
 whom you speak of bears me no love. We are almost 
 strangers. But, by a strange chain of circumstances he is 
 connected with my family ; he once had great friendship with 
 my brother ; for reasons that I do not know, but which are 
 imperative with him, he desires to keep his identity unsus- 
 pected by every one ; an accident alone revealed it to me, and 
 I have promised him not to divulge it. You understand ? ' ^ 
 
 Cigarette gave an affirmative gesture. Her eyes were 
 fastened suddenly, yet with a deep bright glow in them, upon 
 her companion ; she was beginning to see her way through 
 his secret — a secret she was too intrinsically loyal even now 
 to dream of betraying. 
 
 'You spoke very nobly for him to-day. You have the 
 fealty of one brave character to another, I am sure ? ' pursued 
 Venetia Corona, purposely avoiding all hints of any warmer 
 feeling on her listener's part, since she saw how tenacious the 
 
540 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 girl was of any confession of it. * You would do him service 
 if you could, I fancy ; am I right ? * 
 
 * Oh yes 1 ' answered Cigarette, with an over-assumption 
 of carelessness. * He is hon-zig ; we always help each other. 
 Besides, he is very good to my men. What is it you want 
 of me ? • 
 
 * To preserve secrecy on what I have told you for his sake ; 
 and to give him a message from me.' 
 
 Cigarette laughed scornfully ; she was furious with herself 
 for standing obediently like a chidden child to hear this 
 patrician's bidding, and to do her will. And yet, try how 
 she would, she could not shake off the spell under which 
 those grave, sweet, lustrous eyes of command held her. 
 
 * Pardieu, Miladi ! Do you think I babble Uke any young 
 hleu drunk with his first measure of wine ? As for your 
 message, you had better let him come and hear what you have 
 to say ; I cannot promise to remember it 1 ' 
 
 * Your answer is reckless ; I want a serious one. You 
 Bpoke like a brave and a just friend to him to-day ; are you 
 willing to act as such to-night? You have come here 
 strangely, rudely, without pretext or apology; but I think 
 better of you than you would allow me to do if I judged only 
 from the surface. I believe that you have loyalty, as I know 
 that you have courage.' 
 
 Cigarette set her teeth hard. 
 
 * What of that ? I have them en militaire, that is all.' 
 
 ' This of it. That one who has them will never cherish 
 malice unjustifiably, or fail to fulfil a trust.' 
 
 Cigarette's clear brown skin grew very red. 
 
 *That is true,' she muttered, reluctantly. Her better 
 nature was growing uppermost, though she strove hard to 
 keep the evil one predominant. 
 
 * Then you will cease to feel hatred towards me for so 
 senseless a reason as that I belong to an aristocracy that 
 offends you ; and you will remain silent on what I tell you 
 concerning the one whom you know as Louis Victor?' 
 
 Cigarette nodded assent ; the sullen fireglow still burnt in 
 her eyes, but she succumbed to the resistless influence which 
 the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had 
 over her. She was studying Venetia Corona all this while 
 with the keen rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy, 
 studying her features, her form, her dress, her attitude, ail 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 541 
 
 the many various and intangible marks of birth and breeding 
 which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem 
 BO strange, so dazzling, so marvellous a sorceress to her ; and 
 all the while the sense of her ov/n inferiority, her own worth- 
 lessness, her own boldness, her own debasement was growing 
 upon her, eating sharply as aquafortis into brass, into the 
 metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbear- 
 ably, yet making her heart ache with a sad pathetic pity for 
 herself. 
 
 ' He is of your Order, then ? ' she asked, abruptly. 
 
 * He was — yes.* 
 
 * Oh-h6 ! ' cried Cigarette, with her old irony. ' Then 
 he must be always, mustn't he ? You think too much of your 
 blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, 
 whether it run under a King's purple or a Roumi's canvas 
 shirt. Blood tells, they say 1 Well, perhaps it does. Some 
 say my father was a Prince of France ; maybe ! So, he is 
 of your Order ? Bah I I knew that the first day I saw his 
 hands. Do you want me to tell you why he lives among us, 
 buried like this ? ' 
 
 ' Not if you violate any confidence to do so.' 
 
 * Pardieu ! he makes no confidence, I promise you. Not 
 ten words will Monseigneur say, if he can help it, about any- 
 thing. He is as silent as a lama ; itis pojmlacier to talk ! But 
 we learn things without being told in camp ; and I know 
 well enough he is here to save some one else, in some one's 
 place ; it is a sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this 
 martyrdom.' 
 
 Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere 
 thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and re- 
 serve of her class, made her shrink from discussing the history 
 of one whom she knew — shrink from having any argument 
 on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young 
 camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her 
 privacy. Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Ciga- 
 rette ; the child was the only means through which she 
 could send him a warning that must be sent ; and there were 
 a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the * aristocrat,* | 
 to whom she was as singular and novel a rarity as though | 
 she were some young savage of desert western isles. ■: 
 
 * Look you, Miladi,* said Cigarette, half sullenly, half 
 passionately, for the words were wrenched out of her gene- 
 
542 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 rosity, and choked her in their utterance, * that man suffers t 
 his life here is a hell upon earth — I don't mean for tha 
 danger, he is hon soldat; but for the indignity, the subordi- 
 nation, the licence, the brutality, the tyranny. He is as if he 
 were chained to the galleys. He never says anything, oh no ! 
 he is of your kind, you know ! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu ! 
 he suffers. Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing 
 for him ? Can you ransom him in no way ? Can you go 
 away out of Africa and leave him in this living death to 
 get killed and thrust into the sand, like his comrade the 
 other day ? ' 
 
 Her hearer did not answer ; the words made her heart 
 ache ; they cut her to the soul. It was not for the first time 
 that the awful desolation of his future had been present 
 before her ; but it was the first time that the fate to which 
 she would pass away and leave him had been so directly in 
 words before her. Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses 
 of her better nature, and abandoning self with the same reck- 
 less impetuosity with which a moment before she would, if she 
 could, have sacrificed her rival, saw the advantage gained, 
 and pursued it with rapid skill. She was pleading against 
 herself ; no matter, in that instant she was capable of crucify- 
 ing herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent. 
 
 * I have heard,' she went on, vehemently, for the utter- 
 ance to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, ' that 
 you of the Noblesse are staunch as steel to your own people. 
 It is the best virtue that you have. Well, he is of your people. 
 Will you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave 
 him to eat his heart out in bitterness and misery ? He was 
 your brother's friend ; he was known to you in his early 
 time ; you have said so. And you are cold enough and cruel 
 enough, Miladi, not to make one effort to redeem him out of 
 bondage ? — to go back to your palaces, and your pleasures, 
 and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and be happy, while 
 this man is left on bearing his yoke here ? — and it is a yoke 
 that galls, that kills 1 — bearing it until, in some day of 
 desperation, he rebels, and is shot like a dog ; or, in some 
 day of mercy, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and 
 makes its pulse cease for ever ? If you do, you patricians 
 are worse still than I thought you I ' 
 
 Venetia heard her without interruption ; a great sadness 
 oame over her face as the mid phrases followed each other. 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 543 
 
 She was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the 
 challenge and the insolence of their manner. She knew that 
 the Little One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious 
 to conceal her love ; and she was touched, not less by the 
 magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from 
 the African service, than by the hopelessness of his coming 
 years as thus prefigured before her. 
 
 * Your reproaches are unneeded,' she replied, slowly and 
 wearily. * I could not abandon one who was once the friend 
 of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great 
 pain. But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think I 
 could do with so much ease. I am not in its secret ; I do 
 not know the reason of its seeming suicide ; I have no more 
 connection with its intricacies than you have. This gentle- 
 man has chosen his own path ; it is not for me to change hia 
 choice or spy into his motives.' 
 
 Cigarette's flashing searching eyes bent all their brown 
 light on her. 
 
 * Mada;me Corona, you are courageous ; to those who are 
 so, all things are possible.' 
 
 * A great fallacy ! You must have seen many courageous 
 men vanquished. But what would you imply by it ? ' 
 
 * That you can help this man if you will.' 
 
 ' Would that I could ; but I can discern no means * 
 
 * Make them.' 
 
 Even in that moment her listener smiled involuntarily at 
 the curt imperious tones, decisive as Napoleon's ' Bartons I * 
 before the Passage of the Alps. 
 
 *Be certain, if I can, I will. Meantime, there is one 
 pressing danger of which you must be my medium to warn 
 him. He and my brother must not meet. Tell him that the 
 latter, knowing him only as Louis Victor, and interested in 
 the incidents of his military career, will seek him out early 
 to-morrow morning before we quit the camp. I must leave 
 it to him to avoid the meeting as best he may be able.' 
 
 Cigarette smiled grimly. 
 
 ' You do not know much of the camp. Victor is only a 
 bas-officier ; if his officers call him up, he must come, or be 
 thrashed like a slave for contumacy. He has no will of hia 
 own.' 
 
 Venetia gave an irrepressible gesture of pain. 
 
 •True; I forgot. Well, go and send him to me. My 
 
544 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 brother must be taken into hig confidence, whatever that 
 confidence reveals. I will tell him so. Go and send him to 
 me ; it is the last chance.' 
 
 Cigarette gave no movement of assent ; all the jealous rage 
 in her flared up afresh to stifle the noble and unselfish 
 instincts under which she had been led during the later 
 moments. A coarse and impudent scoff rose to her tongue, 
 but it remained unuttered ; she could not speak it under that 
 glance, which held the evil in her in subjection, and compelled 
 her reluctant reverence against her will. 
 
 * Tell him to come here to me,' repeated Venetia, with 
 the calm decision of one to whom any possibility of false 
 interpretation of her motives never occurred, and who was 
 habituated to the free action that accompanied an unassailable 
 rank. * My brother must know what I know. I shall be 
 alone, and he can make his way hither, without doubt, 
 unobserved. Go and say this to him. You are his loyal 
 little friend and comrade.' 
 
 ' If I be, I do not see why I am to turn your lackey, 
 Madame,' said Cigarette, bitterly. 'If you want him, you 
 can send for him by other messengers 1 ' 
 
 Venetia Corona looked at her steadfastly, with a certain 
 contempt in the look. 
 
 * Then your pleading for him was all insincere ? Let the 
 m-atter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, 
 which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and un- 
 desired.' 
 
 The undeviating gentleness of the tone made the rebuke 
 cut deeper, as her first rebuke had cut, than any sterner 
 censure or more peremptory dismissal could have done. 
 Cigarette stood irresolute, ashamed, filled with rage, torn by 
 contrition, impatient, wounded, swayed by jealous rage and 
 by the purer impulses she strove to stifle. 
 
 The Cross she had tossed down caught her sight as it 
 glittered on the carpet strewn over the hard earth ; she 
 stooped and raised it; the action sufficed to turn the tide 
 with her impressionable, ardent, capricious nature: she 
 would not disgrace that. 
 
 *i will go,' she muttered in her throat; *and you — you 
 — God 1 no wonder men love you when even I cannot 
 hate you 1 ' 
 
 Almost ere the words were uttered she had dashed aside 
 
THE DESERT HAWK AND PARADISE-BIRD 545 
 
 the bungings before the tent entrance, and had darted out 
 into the night air. Venetia Corona gazed after the swiftly 
 flying figure as it passed over the starUt ground, lost in 
 amazement, in pity, and in regret, wondering afresh if she 
 had only dreamt of this strange interview in the Algerian 
 camp, which seemed to have come and gone with the blinding 
 rapidity of lightning. « 
 
 * A little tigress I * she thought ; * and yet with infinite 
 nobility, with wonderful germs of good in her. Of such a 
 nature what a rare life might have been made 1 As it is, her 
 childhood w^e smile at and forgive ; but, great Heaven 1 what 
 will be her maturity, her old age ! Yet how she loves him 1 
 And she is so brave she will not show it.' 
 
 With the recollection came the remembrance of Cigarette's 
 words as to his own passion for herself, and she grew paler 
 as it did so. ' God forbid he should have that pain too I ' 
 she murmured. 'What could it be save misery for us 
 both ? • 
 
 Yet she did not thrust the fancy from her with con- 
 temptuous nonchalance as she had done every other of the 
 many passions she had excited and disdained ; it had a great 
 sadness and a greater terror for her. She dreaded it un- 
 speakably for him ; also, perhaps, unconsciously, she dreaded 
 it slightly for herself. 
 
 She wished now that she had not sent for him. But it was 
 done ; it w'as for sake of their old friendship ; and she was not 
 one to vainly regret what was unalterable, or to desert what 
 she deemed generous and right for the considerations of 
 prudence or of egotism. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 OBDEAL BY FIBB 
 
 Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned 
 throughout the camp as the men surrendered themselves to 
 the enjoyment of the largesses of food and of wine allotted 
 to them by their Marshal's command in commemoration of 
 Zaraila, one alone remained apart, silent and powerless to 
 
546 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 rouso himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endu- 
 rance, of their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him 
 well, and they also loved him too well to press such participa- 
 tion on him. They knew that it was no lack of sympathy 
 with them that made him so grave amid their mirth, so mute 
 amid their volubility. Some thought that he was. sorely 
 wounded by the delay of the honoii^'s promised him. Others, 
 who knew him better, thought that it was the loss of his 
 brother-exile which weighed on him, and made all the scene 
 around him full of pain. None approached him ; but while 
 they feasted in their tents, making the celebration of Zaraila 
 equal to the Jour de Mazagran, ha sat alone over a picket-fire 
 on the far outskirts of the camp. 
 
 His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to 
 risk with every moment that ordeal of recognition which he 
 BO unutterably dreaded ; and to flee was to leave his name 
 to the men, with whom he had 5?erved so long, covered with 
 obloquy and odium, buried under all the burning shame and 
 degradation of a traitor's and deserter's memory. The latter 
 course was impossible to him ; the only alternative was to 
 trust that the vastness of that great concrete body, of which 
 he was one unit, would suffice to hide him from the discovery 
 of the friend w^hose love he feared as he feared the hatred of 
 no foe. He had not been seen as he had passed the flag-staff, 
 there was little fear that in the few remaining hours any 
 chance could bring the illustrious guest of a Marshal to the 
 outpost of the scattered camp. 
 
 Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pine- 
 wood ; she was so near, and he could not behold her ! — 
 though he might never see her face again ; though they must 
 pass out of Africa, home to the land that he desired as only 
 exiles can desire, while he still remained silent, knowing that, 
 until death should release him, there could be no other fate 
 for him save only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncom- 
 panioned, unpitied, unrewarded life. But to break his word 
 as the price of his freedom was not possible to his nature or 
 in his creed. This fate was, in chief, of his own making ; he 
 accepted it without rebellion, because rebelUon 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 only course left to a man who, in losing the position, 
 i bad not abandoned the instincts of a gentleman. 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 547 
 
 The evening wore away, unmeasured by him ; the echoes 
 of the soldiers' mirth came dimly on his ear ; the laug>iter, 
 and the songs, and the music were subdued into one corilused 
 murmur by distance ; there was nothing near him except a 
 few tethered horses, and far away the mounted figure of the 
 videtto who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encamp- 
 ment. The fire 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 sat motionless, sunk in thought, with 
 his head drooped upon his breast. The voice of Cigarette 
 broke on his musing. 
 
 * JBeati sire, you are wanted yonder.' 
 
 He looked up wearily ; could he never be at peace ? He 
 did not notice that the tone of the greeting was rough and 
 curt ; he did not notice that there was a stormy darkness, a 
 repressed bitterness, stern and scornful, on the Little One's 
 face ; he only thought that the very dogs were left sometimes 
 at rest and unchained, but a soldier never. 
 
 * You are wanted ! ' repeated Cigarette, with imperioua 
 contempt. 
 
 He rose, on the old instinct of obedience. 
 
 ' For what ? ' 
 
 She stood looking at him without replying ; her mouth 
 was tightly shut in 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 full of fatigue his move- 
 ments. Her silence recalled him to the memory of the past 
 day. 
 
 ' Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without 
 sympathy in all your honours,' he said, gently, as he laid his 
 hand on her shoulder. 'Believe me, it was unintentional. 
 No one knows better than I how richly you deserve them ; 
 no ona rejoices more that you should have received them.' 
 
 The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scor- 
 pion ; she shook herself roughly out of his hold. 
 
 ' Poirit de phrases I All the army is at my back ; do you 
 think I cannot do without you ? Sympathy too 1 Bah 1 We 
 don't know those fine words in camp. You are wanted, I tell 
 you — go ! ' 
 
 * But where ? ' 
 
 * To your Silver Pheasant yonder — go I 
 
 * Who ? I do not ' 
 
 tl m2 
 
548 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ' Dame ! Can you not understand ? Milady wants to see 
 you ; I told her I would send you to her. You can use your 
 dainty sentences with her ; she is of your Order I ' 
 
 * What ! she wishes * 
 
 * Go ! * reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot. 
 * You know the great tent where she is throned in honour — 
 Morbleu — as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my 
 soldiers' linen were not of more use and more deserved such 
 lodgment than Madame la Princesse, who has never done 
 aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold ! 
 She waits for you. Where are your palace manners ? Go to 
 her, I tell you. She is of your 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. He paused one moment, doubting 
 whether she did not play some trick upon him ; then, 
 without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the 
 evening shadows. 
 
 Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very 
 evil, almost savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery 
 jealousy, that ached so hotly in her, and was chained down 
 by that pride, which was as intense in the Vivandiere of 
 Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court. 
 Eeckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her 
 j sex would have deemed, and capable of the utmost abandon- 
 ment to her passion had it been returned, the haughty young 
 soul of the child of the People was as sensitively delicate in 
 i this one thing as the purest and chastest among women could 
 } have been ; she dreaded above every other thing that he 
 I should ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired 
 ! his love. 
 
 Her honour, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural 
 instinct to do the thing that was right, even to her foes, any 
 one of the unstudied and unanalysed qualities in her had 
 made her serve him even at her rival's bidding. But it had 
 cost her none the less hardly because so manfully done ; none 
 the less did all the violent ruthless haste, the vivid childlike 
 fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat 
 in her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that 
 beauty which had subdued even herself, and with that nobler 
 impulse of self-sacrifice which grew side by side with tha 
 baser impulses of passion. 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 549 
 
 As she crouched down by the side of the fire, all the * 
 gracious spiritual light that had been upon her face was gone ; 
 there was something of the goaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity 
 of a brave animal hard pressed and overdriven. 
 
 Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her 
 love for him, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, 
 and the desire of vengeance that reigned in her. Carried 
 away by the first, she had, for the hour, risen above the last, 
 and allowed the nobler wish to serve and rescue him prevail 
 over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was ever pre- 
 meditated ; all was the offspring of the caprice or the impulse 
 of the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed : 
 she was only sensible of the burning envy that consumed 
 her of this woman who seemed to her more than mortal in 
 her wonderful fair lovehness, in her marvellous difference 
 from everything of their sex that the camp and the barrack 
 ever showed. 
 
 ' And I have sent him to her when I should have fired | 
 my pistol into her breast I ' she thought, as she sat by the 
 dying embers. And she remembered once more the story of 
 the Marseilles fisherwoman. She understood that terrible 
 vengeance under the hot southern sun, beside the ruthless •^ 
 southern seas. \^ 
 
 Meanwhile, he, who so little knew or heeded how ho 
 occupied her heart, passed unnoticed through the movements 
 of the military crowds, crossed the breadth that parted the 
 encampment from the marquees of the Generals and their 
 guests, gave the countersign and approached unarrested, and 
 so far unseen save by the sentinels, the tents of the Corona 
 suite. The Marshal and his male visitors were still over their 
 banquet wines ; she had withdrawn early, on the plea of 
 fatigue ; there was no one to notice his visit except the men 
 on guard, who concluded that he went by command. In the 
 dusky light, for the moon was very young, and the flare of 
 the torches made the shadows black and uncertain, no one 
 recognised him ; the few soldiers stationed about saw one of 
 their own troopers, and offered him no opposition, made him 
 no question. He knew the password ; that was sufficient. 
 The Levantine waiting near the entrance drew the tent-folds 
 aside and signed to him to enter ; another moment, and he 
 was in the presence of her mistress, in that dim amber light 
 from the standing candelabra, in that heavy soft- scented air 
 
550 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 perfumed from the aloe-wood burning in a brazier, tlirough 
 which he saw, half-bhnded at first coming from the darkness 
 without, that face which subdued and dazzled even the 
 antagonism and the lawlessness of Cigarette. 
 
 He bowed low before her, preserving that distant ceremonial 
 due from the rank he ostensibly held to hers. 
 
 ' Madame, this is very merciful I I know not how to thank 
 you.' 
 
 She motioned to him to take a seat near to her, while the 
 Levantine, who knew nothing of the English tongue, retired 
 to the farther end of the tent. 
 
 * I only kept my word,' she answered, * for we leave the 
 camp to-morrow ; Africa next week.' 
 
 * So soon 1 ' 
 
 She saw the blood forsake the bronzed fairness of his face, 
 and leave a dusky pallor there. It wounded her as if she 
 suffered herself. For the first time she believed what the 
 Little One had said ; — that this man loved her. 
 
 * I sent for you,' she continued, hurriedly, her graceful 
 languor and tranquillity, for the first time, stirred and 
 quickened by emotion, almost by embarrassment. ' It was 
 very strange, it was very painful, for me to trust that child 
 with such a message. But you know us of old ; you know 
 we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest 
 or outward semblance. We act as we deem right ; we do not 
 heed untrue constructions. There are many things I desire 
 to say to you ' 
 
 She paused ; he merely bent his head ; he could not trust 
 the calmness of his voice in answer. 
 
 * First,' she continued, * I must entreat you to allow 
 me to tell Philip what I know. You cannot conceive how 
 intensely oppressive it becomes to me to have any secret from 
 him. I never concealed so much as a thought from my 
 brother in all my life, and to evade even a mute question 
 from his brave frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him.' 
 
 * Anything else ? ' he muttered. ' Ask me anything else. 
 For God's sake, do not let him dream that I live ! * 
 
 * But why ? You still speak to me in enigmas. To- 
 morrow, moreover, before we leave, he intends to seek you 
 out as what he thinks you — a soldier of France. He is 
 interested by all he hears of your career; he was first 
 interested by what I told him of you when he saw the ivory 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 551 
 
 carvings at my villa. I asked the little Vivandi^re to tell you 
 this, but, on second thoughts, it seemed best to see you 
 myself once more, as I had promised.' 
 
 There was a slow weariness in the utterance of tlie words. 
 She had said that she could not reflect on leaving him to such 
 a fate as this of his in Africa without personal suffering, or 
 without an effort to induce him to reconsider his decision to 
 condemn himself to it for evermore. 
 
 * That French child,' she went on, rapidly, to cover both 
 the pain that she felt and that she dealt, 'forced her 
 entrance here in a strange fashion ; she wished to see me, I 
 suppose, and to try my courage too. She is a little brigand, 
 but she has a true and generous nature, and she loves you 
 very loyally.' 
 
 * Cigarette ? ' he asked, wearily ; his thoughts could not 
 stay for either pity or interest for her in this moment. * Oh 
 no ! — I trust not. I have done nothing to win her love ; and 
 she is a fierce little conclottiera who disdains all such weakness. 
 She forced her way in here ? That was unpardonable ; but 
 she seems to bear a singular dislike to you.' 
 
 * Singular indeed I I never saw her until to-day.' 
 
 He answered nothing ; the conviction stole on him that 
 Cigarette hated her because he loved her. 
 
 * And yet she brought you my message ? ' pursued his 
 companion. ' That seems her nature — violent passions, yet 
 thorough loyalty. But time is precious. I must urge on 
 you what I bade you come to hear. It is to implore you 
 to put your trust, your confidence, in Philip. You havei 
 acknowledged to me that you are guiltless — no one who 
 knows what you once were could ever doubt it for an instant 
 — then let him hear this, let him be your judge as to what 
 course is right and what wrong for you to pursue. It is 
 impossible for me to return to Europe knowing you are living 
 thus and leaving you to such a fate. What motive you have 
 to sentence yourself to such eternal banishment I am ignorant, 
 but all I ask of you is, confide in him. Let him learn that 
 you live ; let him decide whether or not this sacrifice of 
 yourself be needed. His honour is as punctilious as that of 
 any man on earth ; his friendship you can never doubt. Why 
 conceal anything from him ? ' 
 
 His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once 
 before had chilled her to the soul. 
 
55» UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * Do you think, if I could speak in honour, I should not tell 
 you all ? ' 
 
 A flush passed over her face, the first that the gaze of any 
 man had ever brought there. She understood him. 
 
 * But,* she said, gently and hurriedly, ' may it not be 
 that you overrate the obligations of honour? I know that 
 many a noble-hearted man has inexorably condemned himself 
 to a severity of rule that a dispassionate judge of his life 
 might deem very exaggerated, very unnecessary. It is so 
 natural for an honourable man to so dread that he should do a 
 dishonourable thing through self-interest or self-pity, that he 
 may very well overestimate the sacrifice required of him 
 through what he deems justice or generosity. May it not be 
 so with you ? I can conceive no reason that can be strong 
 enough to require of you such fearful surrender of every hope, 
 such utter abandonment of your own existence.' 
 
 Her voice failed slightly over the last words ; she could 
 not think with calmness of the destiny that he accepted. 
 Involuntarily some prescience of pain that would for ever 
 pursue her own life unless his were rescued lent an intense 
 earnestness, almost entreaty, to her argument. She did not 
 bear him love as yet ; she had seen too little of him, too 
 I lately only known him as her equal ; but there were in her, 
 I stronger than she knew, a pity, a tenderness, a regret, an 
 ' honour for him that drew her towards him with an indefinable 
 attraction, and would sooner or later warm and deepen into 
 love. Already it was sufficient, though she deemed it but 
 compassion and friendship, to make her feel that an intole- 
 rable weight would He heavy on her future if his should 
 remain condemned to this awful isolation and obhvion while 
 she alone of all the world should know and hold his secret. 
 He started from her side as he heard, and paced to and 
 i fro the narrow limits of the tent like a caged animal. For 
 j the first time it grew a belief to him, in his thoughts, that 
 were he free, were he owner of his heritage, he could rouse 
 her heart from its long repose and make her love him with 
 : the soft and passionate warmth of his dead Arab mistress — a 
 thing that had been as distant from her neghgence and her 
 pride as warmth from the diamond or the crystal. He felt 
 as if the struggle would kill him. He had but to betray his 
 brother, and he would be unchained from his torture ; he had 
 but to break his word, and he would be at liberty. All the 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 553 
 
 temptation that had before beset him paled and grew as 
 naught beside this possibility of the possession of her love 
 which dawned upon him now. 
 
 She, knowing nothing of this which moved him, believed 
 only that he weighed her words in hesitation, and strove to 
 turn the balance. 
 
 * Hear me,* she said, softly. * I do not bid you decide ; 
 I only bid you confide in PhiHp — in one who, as you must 
 well remember, would sooner cut off his own hand than 
 counsel a base thing, or do an unfaithful act. You are guilt- 
 less of this charge under which you left England ; you endure 
 it rather than do what you deem dishonourable to clear your- 
 self. That is noble — that is great. But it is possible, as I 
 say, that you may exaggerate the abnegation required of you. 
 Whoever was the criminal should suffer. Yours is mag- 
 nificent magnanimity ; but it may surely be also false justice 
 alike to yourself and the world.' 
 
 He turned on her almost fiercely in the suffering she dealt 
 him : 
 
 * It is I It was a madness — a Quixotism — the wild, un- 
 considered act of a fool. What you will ! But it is done ; 
 it was done for ever — so long ago — when your young eyes 
 looked on me in the pity of your innocent childhood. I can- 
 not redeem its folly now by adding to its baseness. I cannot 
 change the choice of a madman by repenting of it with a 
 coward's caprice. Ah, God 1 you do not know what you do 
 
 — how you tempt. For pity's sake, urge me no more. Help t'4^ 
 me — strengthen me — to be true to my word. Do not bid me "^ 
 do evil that I may enter paradise through my sin I * 
 
 He threw himself down beside her as the incoherent words 
 poured out, his arms flung across the pile of cushions on 
 which he had been seated, his face hidden on them. His 
 teeth clinched on his tongue till the blood flowed ; he felt 
 that if the power of speech remained with him he should 
 forswear every law that had bound him to silence, and tell 
 her all, whatever the cost. 
 
 She looked at him, she heard him, moved to a greater 
 agitation than ever had had sway over her, for the first time 
 the storm winds that swept by her did not leave her pas- 
 sionless and calm ; this man's whole future was in her hands. 
 She could bid him seek happiness dishonoured ; or cleave to 
 honour, and accept wretchedness for ever. 
 
554 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 It waa a fearful choice to hold. 
 
 * Answer me. Choose for me I ' he said, vehemently. 
 * Be my law, and be my God I ' 
 
 She gave a gesture almost of fear, 
 
 * Hush, hush I The woman does not live who should be 
 that to any man.' 
 
 * You shall be it to me I Choose for me I ' 
 
 * I cannot I You leave so much in darkness and un- 
 told ' 
 
 * Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for 
 me, save one thing only — that I love you.' 
 
 She shuddered. 
 
 * This is madness 1 What have you seen of me ? ' 
 
 * Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no 
 other woman. Ah I I was but an African trooper in your 
 sight, but in my own I was your equal. You only saw a 
 man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle charity 
 were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar ; 
 but I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, 
 the sweetness of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my 
 old world in her every grace and gesture. You forget I I 
 was nothing to you ; but you were so much to me. I loved 
 you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear. It is 
 madness I Oh yes I I should have said so too in those old 
 years. A madness I would have sworn never to feel. But I 
 have lived a hard life since then, and no men ever love like 
 those who suffer. Now you know all ; know the worst that 
 tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no obloquy, no loss 
 I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my 
 happiness with the price of dishonour as this one desire, to 
 stand in my rightful place before men, and be free to strive 
 with you for what they have not won ! ' 
 
 As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her 
 face ; it grew as white as his own, and her lips parted 
 slightly, as though to draw her breath was oppressive. The 
 wild words overwhelmed her with their surprise not less 
 than they shocked her with their despair. An intense 
 truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and 
 reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had 
 done. She had no love for him yet, or she thought not ; she 
 was very proud, and resisted such passions ; but in that 
 moment the thought swept by her that such love might be 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 555 
 
 possible. It was the nearest submission to it she had ever 
 given. She heard him in unbroken silence ; she kept silence 
 long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and her 
 dignity could be touched with it, she felt something akin to 
 terror at the magnitude of the choice left to her. 
 
 * You give me great pain, great surprise,' she murmured. 
 * All I can trust is, that your love is of such sudden birth that 
 it will die as rapidly ' 
 
 He interrupted her : 
 
 * You mean that, under no circumstances — not even were 
 I to possess my inheritance — could you give me any hope that 
 I might wake your tenderness ? ' 
 
 She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, \ 
 haughty instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had ; 
 made her so indifferent — and many said so pitiless — to all. 1 
 At his gaze, however, her own, changed and softened, grew 
 shadowed, and then wandered from him. 
 
 * I do not say that. I cannot tell * 
 
 The words were very low : she was too truthful to conceal 
 from him what half dawned on herself — the possibility that, 
 more in his presence and under different circumstances, she 
 might feel her heart go to him with a wanner and a softer 
 impulse than that of friendship. The heroism ofjiiajife had 
 moved her greatly. 
 " Tlis head dropped down again upon his arms. 
 
 ' God ! Is it possible at least ? I am blind — mad. 
 Make my choice for me 1 I know not what I do.' 
 
 The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down 
 over her colourless cheeks ; she looked at him with a pity that 
 made her heart ache with a sorrow only less than his own. 
 The grief was for him chiefly ; yet something of it for herself. 
 Some sense of present bitterness that fell on her from his 
 fate, some foreboding of future regret that would inevitably 
 and for ever follow her when she left him to his loneUness 
 and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any 
 her caressed and cloudless existence had encountered. Love 
 was dimly before her as the possibility he called it ; remote, 
 unrealised, still unacknowledged, but possible under certain ^ 
 conditions, only known as such when it was also impossible / 
 through circumstances. 
 
 He had suffered silently ; endured strongly ; fought greatly : \ 
 these were the only means through which any man could hava 
 
5S6 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ever reached her sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, 
 though a very noble and a very generous woman, she was also 
 a woman of the world. She knew that it was not for her to 
 Bay even thus much to a man who was in one sense wellnigh 
 a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime 
 whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt 
 sick at heart ; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing 
 than had moved her previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay 
 bare his past, and throw off the imputed shame that lay on 
 him. Yet all the grand traditions of her race forbade her to 
 counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led through a 
 forfeiture of honour. 
 
 * Choose for me, Venetia ! * he muttered at last once more. 
 She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and 
 
 thrust the gold hair off her temples. 
 
 * Heaven help me, I cannot — I dare not 1 And — I am no 
 longer capable of being just ! ' 
 
 There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she 
 felt that, so greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justi- 
 fication, his return to all which was his own, desired even 
 his presence among them in her own world, that she could 
 no longer give him calm and unbiassed judgment. He heard, 
 and the burning tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked 
 almost ere it was known, by the dread lest for her sake she 
 should ever give him so much pity that such pity became love. 
 
 He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her 
 eyes — a look under which her own never quailed or drooped, 
 but which they answered with that same regard which she 
 had given him when she had declared her faith in his 
 innocence. 
 
 *If I thought it possible you could ever care * 
 
 She moved slightly from him ; her face was very white 
 still, and her voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it 
 answered him : 
 
 * If I could — believe me, I am not a woman who would 
 bid you forsake your honour to spare yourself or me. Let us 
 speak no more of this I What can it avail, except to make 
 you suffer greater things ? Follow the counsels of your own 
 conscience. You have been true to them hitherto ; it is not 
 for me, or through me, that you shall ever be turned aside 
 from them.* 
 
 A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard. 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 557 
 
 * They are noble words. And yet it is so easy to utter, so 
 hard to follow them. If you had one thought of tenderness 
 for me, you could not speak them.* 
 
 A flush passed over her face. 
 
 * Do not think me without feeling — without sympathy — 
 pity ' 
 
 ' These are not love.* 
 
 She was silent ; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than 
 any emotion she had ever known. 
 
 ' If you loved me,' he pursued, passionately — * ah, God I 
 the very word from me to you sounds insult ; and yet there 
 is not one thought in me that does not honour you — if you 
 loved me, could you stand there and bid me drag on this life 
 for ever, nameless, friendless, hopeless, having all the bitter- 
 ness but none of the torpor of death, wearing out the doom of 
 a galley slave, though guiltless of all crime ? ' 
 
 * Why speak so ? You are unreasoning ; a moment ago 
 you implored me not to tempt you to the violation of what you 
 hold your honour ; because I bid you be faithful to it, you 
 deem me cruel I * 
 
 * Heaven help me ! I scarce know what I say. I ask 
 you, if you were a woman who loved me, could you decide 
 thus ? ' 
 
 * These are wild questions,' she murmured ; * what can 
 they serve? I believe that I should — I am sure that I 
 should. As it is — as your friend ' 
 
 ' Ah, hush I Friendship is crueller than hate.' 
 ' Cruel ? ' 
 
 * Yes ; the worst cruelty when we seek love — a stone 
 proffered us when we ask for bread in famine I ' 
 
 There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer ; she 
 was moved and shaken by it — not to fear, for fear was not in 
 her nature, but to something of awe, and something of the 
 despairing hopelessness that was in him. 
 
 * Lord Roy a] lieu,' she said, slowly, as if the familiar name 
 were some tie between them, some cause of excuse for these, 
 the only love words she had ever heard without disdain and 
 rejection — 'Lord Koyallieu, it is unworthy of you to take 
 this advantage of an interview which I sought, and sought 
 for your own sake. You pain me, you wound me. I cannot 
 tell how to answer you. You speak strangely, and without 
 warrant.' 
 
5S8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on 
 his chest. He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew 
 that ha had broken through every law he had prescribed him- 
 self, and that he had sinned against that code of chivalry 
 which should have made her sacred from such words while 
 they were those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in 
 secrecy and shame. Unless he could stand justified in her 
 sight and in that of all men, he had no right to seek to wring 
 out tenderness from her regret and from bar pity. Yet all 
 his heart went out to her in one irrepressible entreaty. 
 
 ' Forgive me, for pity's sake ! After to-night I shall never 
 look upon your face again.* 
 
 * I do forgive,' she said gently, while her voice grew very 
 sweet. * You endure too much already for one needless 
 pang to be added by me. All I wish is, that you had never 
 met me, so that this last, worst thing had not come unto 
 you I ' 
 
 A long silence fell between them ; where she leaned back 
 among her cushions, her face was turned from him. He 
 stood motionless in the shadow, his head still dropped upon 
 his breast, his breathing loud and slow and hard. To speak 
 of love to her was forbidden to him, yet the insidious tempta- 
 tion wound closer and closer round his strength. He had 
 only to betray the man he had sworn to protect, and she 
 would know his innocence, she would hear his passion ; he 
 would be free, and she — he grew giddy as the thought rose 
 before him — she might, with time, be brought to give him 
 other tenderness than that of friendship. He seemed to touch 
 the very supremacy of joy, to reach it almost with his hand, 
 to have honours, and peace, and all the glory of her haughty 
 loveliness, and all the sweetness of her subjugation, and all 
 the soft delights of passions before him in their golden 
 promise, and he was held back in bands of iron, he was 
 driven out from them desolate and accursed. 
 
 Unhke Cain, he had suffered in his brother's stead, yet, 
 like Cain, he was branded and could only wander out into 
 the darkness and the wilderness. 
 
 She watched him many minutes, he unconscious of her 
 gaze ; and while she did so, many conflicting emotions passed 
 over the colourless delicacy of her features ; her eyes were 
 filled and shadowed with many altering thoughts ; her heart 
 was waking from its rest, and the high, generous, unselfish, 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 559 
 
 nature in her strove with her pride of birth, her dignity of 
 habit. 
 
 ' Wait,' she said softly, with the old imperial command 
 of her voice subdued, though not wholly banished. ' I think 
 you have mistaken me somewhat. You wrong me if you 
 think that I could be so callous, so indifferent, as to leave you 
 here without heed as to your fate. Believe in your innocence 
 you know that I do, as firmly as though you substantiated 
 it with a thousand proofs ; reverence your devotion to your 
 honour you are certain that I must, or all better things were 
 dead in me.' 
 
 Her voice sank maudible for the instant ; she recovered 
 her self-control with an effort. 
 
 * You reject my friendship — you term it cruel — but at 
 least it will be faithful to you ; too faithful for me to pass 
 out of Africa and never give you one thought again. I believe 
 in you. Do you not know that that is the highest trust, to 
 my thinking, that one human life can show in another's ? 
 You decide that it is your duty not to free yourself from this 
 bondage, not to expose the actual criminal, not to take up 
 your rights of birth. I dare not seek to alter that decision. 
 But I cannot leave you to such a future without infinite pain, 
 and there must — there shall be — means through which you 
 will let me hear of you — through which, at least, I can know 
 that you are living.* 
 
 She stretched her hands toward him with that same gesture 
 with which she had first declared her faith in his guiltless- 
 ness ; the tears trembled in her voice and swam in her eyes. 
 As she had said, she suffered for him exceedingly. He, hear- 
 ing those words which breathed the only pity that had never 
 humiliated him, and the loyal trust which was but the truer 
 because the sincerity of faith in lieu of the insanity of love 
 dictated it, made a blind, staggering, unconscious movement 
 of passionate dumb agony. He seized her hands in his, and 
 held them close against his breast one instant, against th« 
 loud hard panting of his aching heart. 
 
 * God reward you I God keep you I K I stay, I shall tell 
 you all ; let me go, and forget that we ever met I I am dead 
 — let me be dead to you ? ' 
 
 With another instant he had left the tent and passed out 
 into the red glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia 
 Corona dropped her proud head down upon the silken 
 
56o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 cushions where his own had rested, and wept as women weep 
 over their dead — in such a passion as had never come to her 
 in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life. 
 ^ It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, 
 and had never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder. 
 
 His voice rang in her ear ; his face was before her with its 
 white still rigid anguish ; the burning accents of his avowal 
 of love seemed to search her very heart. If this man perished 
 in any of the thousand perils of war she would for ever feel 
 herself his assassin. She had his secret, she had his soul, 
 she had his honour in her hands ; and she could do nothing 
 better for them both than to send him from her to eternal 
 silence, to eternal soUtude ! 
 
 Her thoughts grew unbearable ; she rose impetuously from 
 her couch and paced to and fro the narrow confines of her 
 tent. Her tranquillity was broken down ; her pride was 
 abandoned; her heart, at length, was reached and sorely 
 wounded. The only man she had ever found, whom it would 
 have been possible to her to have loved, was one already 
 severed from her by a fate almost more hideous than death. 
 
 And yet, in her loneliness, the colour flushed back into her 
 face ; her eyes gathered some of their old light ; one dreaming 
 shapeless fancy floated vaguely through her mind. 
 
 If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, 
 and learned to give him back this love he bore her, it was in 
 her to prove that love at no matter what cost to her pride and 
 her lineage. If his perfect innocence were made clear in her 
 own sight, there was greatness and there was unselfishness 
 enough in her nature to make her capable of regarding alone 
 his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the opmion 
 of the world. If hereafter she grew to find his presence the 
 necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility, and of 
 that purity, she now believed it, she — proud as she was with 
 the twin pride of lineage and of nature — would be capable 
 of incurring the odium and the marvel of all who knew her 
 by uniting her fate to his own, by making manifest her 
 honour and her tenderness for him, though men saw in him 
 only a soldier of the empire, only a base-born trooper, beneath 
 her, as Eiom beneath the daughter of D'Orl^ans. She was of 
 a brave nature, of a great nature, of a daring courage, and of 
 a superb generosity. Abhorring dishonour, full of glory in 
 the stainless history of her race, and tenacious of the dignity 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 561 
 
 and of the magnitude of her House, she yet was too courageous 
 and too haughty a woman not to be capable of braving calumny 
 \£ conscious of her own pure rectitude beneath it, not to be 
 capable of incurring false censure, if encountered in the path 
 of justice and of magnanimity. It was possible, even on her- 
 self it dawned as possible, that so great might become her 
 compassion and her tenderness for this man, that she would, 
 in some distant future, when the might of his love and the 
 severity of his sunering should prevail with her, say to him : 
 
 ' Keep your secret from the world as you will. Prove your 
 innocence only to me ; let me and the friend of your youth 
 alone know your name and your rights. And knowing all — 
 knowing you myself to be hero and martyr in one — I shall 
 not care what the world thinks of you — what the world says 
 of me. I will be your wife : I have lands, and riches, and 
 honours, and greatness enough to suffice for us both.' 
 
 If ever she loved him exceedingly, she would becooie capable 
 
 of this sacrifice from the strength, and the graciousness, and 
 
 the fearlessness of her nature, and such love was not so distant 
 
 from her as she thought. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Outside her tent there was a peculiar mingling of light and 
 shadow ; of darkness from the moonless and now cloud-covered 
 sky, of reddened warmth from the tali burning pine-boughs 
 thrust into the soil in lieu of other illumination. The atmo- 
 sphere was hot from the flames, and chilly with the breath of 
 the night winds; it was oppressively still, though from afar 
 off the sounds of laughter in the camp still echoed, and near 
 at hand the dull and steady tramp of the sentinels fell on the 
 hard parched soil. Into that blended heat and cold, dead 
 blackness and burning glare, he reeled out from her presence, 
 drunk with pain as deliriously as -losn 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's obedience were killed in him. 
 
 ' Who goes there ? ' the challenge rang again. 
 
 Still he never heard, but went on blindly. From where 
 the tents stood, there was a stronger breadth of light through 
 which he had passed, and was passing still — a light strong 
 enough for it to be seen whence he came, but not strong 
 enough to show his features. 
 
 o O 
 
562 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 » 
 
 ' Halt, or I fire ! * The sentinel brought the weapon to his 
 shoulder and took a calm, close, sure aim. He did not speak ; 
 the password he had forgotten 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 ; he was mounted on his grey horse 
 and wrapped in his military cloak, about to go the round of 
 the cavalry camp. Their eyes met in the wavering light like 
 the glow from a furnace-mouth : in a glance they knew each 
 other. 
 
 * It is one of my men,' said the chief carelessly to the 
 sentinel. * Leave me to deal with him.' 
 
 The guard saluted, and resumed his beat. 
 
 * Why did you refuse the word, sir ? ' 
 
 * I did not hear.' 
 
 * And why did you not hear ? * 
 There was no reply. 
 
 * Why are you absent from your squadron ? * 
 There was no reply still. 
 
 ' Have you no tongue, sir ? The matraque shall soon make 
 you speak ! Why are you here ? ' 
 
 There was again no answer. 
 
 Chateauroy 's teeth ground out a furious oath ; yet a flash 
 of brutal delight glittered in his eyes. At last he had bounded 
 down this man, so long 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 distinctly uttered, in a deliberate refusal — in a deliberate 
 defiance. 
 
 The dark and evil countenance above him grew livid with 
 fury. 
 
 * I can have you thrashed Uke a dog for that answer, and I 
 will. But first listen here, beaic sire ! I know as well as 
 though you had confessed to me. Your silence cannot shelter 
 your great mistress's shame. Ah-ah ! la Faustine ! So 
 Madame votre Princesse is so cold to her equals, only to choose 
 her lovers out of my blackguards, and take her midnight in- 
 trigues like a camp courtezan ! ' 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 563 
 
 Cecil's face changed terribly as the vile words were spoken. 
 With the light and rapid sprinig of a leopard, he reached the 
 side of his commander, one hand" on the horse's mane, the 
 other on the wrist of his chief, that it gripped like an iron 
 vice. 
 
 * You lie I And you know that you lie I Breathe her 
 name once more, and, by God, as we are both living men, I 
 will have your life for your outrage 1 * 
 
 And, as he spoke, with his left hand he smote the lips that 
 had blasphemed against her. 
 
 It was broken asunder at last — all the long and bitter 
 patience, all the calm and resolute endurance, all the unde- 
 viating serenity beneath provocation, which had never yielded 
 through twelve long years, but which had borne with infamy 
 and with tyranny with such absolute submission for sake of 
 those around him, who would revolt at his sign, and be 
 slaughtered for his cause. The promise he had given to 
 endure all things for their sakes — the sakes of his soldiery, of 
 his comrades — was at last forgotten. All he remembered was 
 the vileness that dared touch her name, the shame that fchrough 
 him was breathed on her. Rank, duty, bondage, consequence, 
 all were forgotten in that one instant of insult that mocked in 
 its odious lie at her purity. He was no longer the soldier 
 bound in obedience to submit to the indignities that his chief 
 chose to heap on him ; he was a gentleman who defended a 
 woman's honour, a man who avenged a slur on the life that he 
 loved. 
 
 Chateauroy wrenched his wrist out of the hold that crushed 
 it, and drew his pistol. Cecil knew that the laws of active 
 service would hold him but justly dealt with if the shot laid 
 him dead in that instant for his act and his words. 
 
 * You can kill me — I know it. Well, use your preroga- 
 tive ; it will be the sole good you have ever done to me.* 
 
 And he stood erect, patient, motionless, looking into his 
 chief's eyes with a calm disdain, with an unuttered challenge 
 that, for the first moment, wrung something of savage respect 
 and of sullen admiration out from the soul of his great 
 foe. 
 
 He did not fire ; it was the only time in which any trait of 
 abstinence from cruelty had been ever seen in him. He signed 
 to the soldiers of the guard with one hand, while with the 
 other he still covered with his pistol the man whom martial 
 
 00 2 
 
564 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 law would have allowed him to have shot down, or have out 
 down, at his horse's feet. 
 
 ' Arrest him,' he said, simply. 
 
 Cecil offered no resistance ; he let them seize and disarm 
 him without an effort at the opposition which could have been 
 but a futile, unavailing trial of brute force. He dreaded lest 
 there should be one sound that should reach her in that tent 
 where the triad of standards drooped in the dusky distance. 
 He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of that 
 despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste 
 dignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. 
 He was content with what he had done — content to have met 
 once, not as soldier to 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 the innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had 
 allowed a passionate truth to force its way through the bar- 
 riers of rank and the bonds of subservience. Insult to himself 
 he had borne as the base prerogative of his superior, but insult 
 to her he had avenged with the vengeance of equal 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 his guards for ever on his ear, there was peace rather 
 than rebellion in his heart — the peace of one heartsick with 
 strife and with temptation, who beholds in death a merciful 
 ending to the ordeal of existence. ' I shall die in her cause 
 at least,' he thought. 'I could be content if I were only 
 sure that she would never know.' 
 
 For this was the chief dread which hung on him, that she 
 should ever know, and in knowing suffer for his sake. 
 
 The night rolled on, the army around him knew nothing of 
 what had happened. Chateauroy, conscious of his own coarse 
 guilt against the guest of his Marshal, kept the matter untold 
 and undiscovered, under the plea that he desired not to destroy 
 the harmony of the general rejoicing. The one or two field- 
 officers with whom he took counsel agreed to the wisdom of 
 letting the night pass away undisturbed. The accused was 
 the idol of his own squadron : there was no gauge what might 
 not be done by troops heated with excitement and drunk ^sdth 
 wine, if they knew that their favourite comrade had set the 
 example of insubordination, and would be sentenced to suffer 
 for it. Beyond these, and the men employed in his arrest and 
 
ORDEAL BY FIRE 565 
 
 gnard, none knew what had chanced ; not the soldiery beneath \ 
 that vast sea of canvas, many of whom would have rushed 
 headlong to mutiny and to destruction at his word ; not the 
 woman who in the solitude of her wr keful hours was haunted 
 by the memory of his love- words, and felt steal on her the 
 unacknowledged sense that if his future were left to misery, 
 happiness could never more touch her own ; not the friend of 
 his early days, laughing and drinking with the officers of the 
 staff. 
 
 None knew ; n_Qt- eyen Cigarette. She sat alone, so far 
 away that none sought her out, beside the picket-fire that had 
 long died out, with the little white dog of Zaraila curled on 
 the scarlet folds of her skirt. Her arms rested on her knees, 
 and her temples were leant on her hands tightly twisted among 
 the dark silken curls of her boyish, hair. Her face had the 
 eame dusky savage intensity upon it ; and she never once 
 moved from that rigid attitude. 
 
 She had the Cross on her heart — the idol of her long desire, 
 the star to which her longing eyes had looked up ever since 
 her childhood through the reek of carnage and the smoke of 
 battle ; and she would have flung it away like dross to have 
 had his lips touch hers once with love. 
 
 * Qiie je suis folle ! ' she muttered in her throat, * qiie je ' 
 suis folle I ' 
 
 And she knew herself mad ; for the desires and the delights / 
 of love die swiftly, but the knowledge of honour abides always. '^ 
 Love would have made her youth, sweet with an unutterable ,' 
 gladness, to glide from her and leave her weary, dissatisfied, , 
 forsaken. But that Cross, the gift of her country, the symbol \ 
 of her heroism, would be with her always, and light her for ': 
 ever with the honour of which it was the emblem ; and if her 
 life should 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 as she died to hear the living 
 watchers murmur : ' That life had glory — that life was lived 
 for France.' 
 
 She knew this : but she was young ; she w^ a woman- 
 child, she had the ardour of passionate youtKln her vems, slie 
 had the desolation of abandoned youth in her heart. And 
 honour looifed 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 
 
566 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 dawn was visible in the east. She stood awhile looking very 
 earnestly across the wide black city of tents. 
 
 ' I shall be best away for a time. I grow mad, treacherous, 
 wicked here,' she thought. * I will go and see Blanc-Bee* 
 
 Blanc-Bee was the soldier of the Army of Italy. 
 
 In a brief while she had saddled and bridled Etoile-Filante, 
 and ridden out of the camp without warning or farewell to 
 any : she was as free to come and to go as though she were 
 a bird on the wing. Thus she went, knowing nothing of hia 
 fate. And with the sunrise went also the woman whom he 
 loved— in ignorance. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 
 
 The warm transparent light of an African autumnal noon 
 shone down through the white canvas roof of a great tent in 
 the heart of the encamped divisions at the head-quarters of the 
 Army of the South. In the tent there was a densely packed 
 throng — an immense, close, hushed, listening crowd, of which 
 every man wore the uniform of France, of which the mute 
 undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be 
 broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something 
 that was almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness 
 in their eyes and the strained absorption of their coun- 
 tenances ; for they were in court, and that court was the 
 Conseil de Guerre of their own southern camp. 
 
 The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that 
 can be laid against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the 
 many eyes of the military crowd turned on him where he 
 stood surrounded by his guard, his crime against his chief 
 was forgotten, and they only remembered — Zaraila. 
 
 Many of those present had seen him throughout that day 
 of blood, dt the head of his decimated squadron, with the 
 guidon held aloft above every foe ; to them that tall, slender 
 form standing there, with a calm, weary dignity, that had 
 nothing of the passion of the mutinous or the consciousness 
 of the criminal in its serene repose, had shed upon it the 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 567 
 
 lustre of a heroism that roade them j;^ady almost^jio weep like 
 women that the death of a mutmeer shoulJ^be the sole answer 
 given by France to the saviour of her honour. 
 
 He preserved entire reticience in court. The instant the 
 acte d'accusation had been read to him, he had seen that his 
 chief would not dare to couple with it the proud, pure name 
 he had dared to outrage ; his most bitter anxiety was thus at 
 an end. For all the rest, he was tranquil. 
 
 No case could be clearer, briefer, less complex, more entirely 
 incapable of defence. The soldiers of the guard gave evidence 
 as to the violence and fury of the assault. The sentinel bore 
 witness to having heard the refusal to reply ; a moment after, 
 he had seen the attack made and the blow given. The 
 accuser merely stated that, meeting his sous-officier out of the 
 bounds of the cavalry camp, he had asked him where he had 
 been, and why he was there, and, on his commanding an 
 answer, had been assaulted in the manner described, with 
 violence sufficient to have cost his life had not the guard been 
 so near at hand. When questioned as to what motive he 
 could assign for the act, he replied that he considered his 
 corporal had always incited evil feeling and mutinous conduct 
 in the squadrons, and had, he believed, that day attributed 
 to himself his failure to receive the Cross. The statement 
 passed without contradiction by the prisoner, who, to the 
 interrogations and entreaties of his legal defenseur, onlyreplied 
 that the facts were stated accurately as they occurred, and 
 that his reasons for the deed he declined to assert. 
 
 When once more questioned as to his country and his past 
 by the president, he briefly declined to give answer. When 
 asked if the names by which he was enrolled were his own, 
 he replied that they were two of his baptismal names, which 
 had served his purpose on entering the army. When asked 
 if he accepted as true the charge of exciting sedition among 
 the troops, he rephed that it was so httle true that, over and 
 over again, the men would have mutinied if he had given 
 them a sign, and that he had continually induced them to 
 submit to discipline sheerly by force of his own example. 
 When interrogated as to the cause of the language he had 
 used to his commanding officer, he said briefly that the 
 language deserved the strongest censure as from a soldier to 
 his colonel, but that it was justified as he had used it, which 
 was as man to man, though he was aware the plea availed 
 
5t>*i UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 nothing in military law, and was impermissible for the safety 
 ©f the service. When it was inquired of him if he had not 
 repeatedly inveighed against his commanding officer for 
 severity, he briefly denied it ; no man had ever heard him 
 say a syllable that could have been construed into complaint ; 
 at the same time, he observed that all the squadrons knew 
 perfectly well personal enmity and oppression had been shown 
 him by his chief throughout the whole time of his association 
 with the regiment. When pressed as to the cause that he 
 assigned for this, he gave, in a few comprehensive outlines, 
 the story of the capture and the deliverance of the Emir's 
 bride ; this was all that could be elicited from him ; and even 
 this was answered only out of deference to the authority of 
 the court, and from his unwillingness, even now, to set a bad 
 example before the men with whom he had served so long. 
 When it was finally demanded of him if he had aught to 
 urge in his own extenuation, he paused a moment, with a 
 gaze under which even the hard eagle eyes grew restless, 
 looked across to Chateauroy, and addressed his antagonist 
 rather than the president : 
 
 ' Only this : that a tyrant, a liar, and a traducer cannot 
 wonder if men prefer death to submission beneath insult. 
 But I t4jm well aware this is no vindication of my act as a 
 soldier, and I have no desire to say words which, whatever 
 their truth, might become hereafter dangerous legacies, and 
 dangerous precedents to the army.' 
 
 That was all which he answered, and neither his coun- 
 sel nor his accusers could extort another syllable from 
 him. 
 
 He knew that what he had done was justified to his own 
 •onscience, but he did not seek to dispute that it was unjus- 
 tifiable in military law. True, had all been told, it was 
 possible enough that his judges would exonerate him morally, 
 even if they condemned him legally ; his act would be seen 
 blameless as a man's, even while still punishable as a 
 soldier's ; but to purchase immunity for himself at the cost 
 of bringing the fairness of her fame into the coarse babbit 
 of men's tongues was an alternative, craven and shameful, 
 which never even once glanced across his thoughts. 
 
 He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heart- 
 less and wellnigh worthless ; it was not to the woman whom 
 he loved with all the might of an intense passion, and whona 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 565 
 
 he knew pure and glorious as the morning sun, that he would 
 break his faith now. 
 
 All through the three days that the conseil sat his look and 
 his manner never changed ; the first was quite calm, though 
 very weary ; the latter courteous, but resolute, with the un- 
 changed firmness of one who knew his own past action justi- 
 fied ; for the rest, many noticed that, during the chief of the 
 long exhausting hours of his examination and his trial, hia 
 thoughts seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to 
 the present with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid 
 suspense of an accused, whose Hfe and death swung in the 
 judgment-balance. 
 
 In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left ; he knew 
 well enough that by the blow which had vindicated her honour 
 he had forfeited his own existence. All he wished was that 
 his sentence had been dealt without this formula of debate 
 anrl of delay, which could have issue but in one end. There 
 was not one man in court who was not more moved than he, 
 more quick to terror and regret for his doom. To many 
 among his comrades who had learned to love the gentle, 
 silent * aristocrat,' who bore every hardship so patiently, and 
 humanised them so imperceptibly by the simple force of an 
 Bnvaunted example, those three days were torture. Wild, 
 brutal brigands, whose year was one long razzia of plunder, 
 rapine, and slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls' 
 when they asked how the issue went for him ; and the blood- 
 Btained marauders, who thought as Httle of assassination for a 
 hidden pot of gold as butchers of drawing a knife across a 
 sheep's throat, grew still and fear-stricken with a great awe 
 when the muttering passed through the camp that they would | 
 see no more among their ranks that * woniarL!^ jace ' which '' 
 they had beheld so often foremost in the fight, with a look on 
 it that thrilled their hearts Hke their forbidden chant of the I 
 Marseillaise. For when the third day closed, they kneT that I 
 he must die. 
 
 There were men, hard as steel, ravenous of blood as tuI- 
 fcures, who, when they heard that sentence given, choked 
 great deep sobs down into the cavernous depths of thejrbroad 
 sea^d sinewy breasts ; but he never gave sigh or sign. TCe 
 never movedohce while the decree of death was read to him ; 
 and there was no change in the weary calmness of his eyes. 
 He bent his head in acquiescence. 
 
570 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * C'est bien ! ' he said, simply. 
 
 It seemed well to him : dead, his secret would lie in the 
 
 grave with him, and the long martyrdom of his life be ended. 
 ******* 
 
 In the brightness of the noon Cigarette leaned out of her 
 little oval casement that framed her head like an old black 
 oak carving — a head with the mellow bloom on its cheeks, 
 and the flash of scarlet above its dark curls, and the robin- 
 like^grace of^goise and balance as it hung out there in the 
 sun. 
 
 Cigarette had been there a whole hour in thought ; she 1 
 who never had wasted a moment in meditation or reverie, 
 and who found the long African day all too short for her 
 busy, abundant, joyous life, that was always full of haste and 
 work, just as a bird's will seem so, though the bird have no 
 more to do than to fly at its will through summer air, and 
 feed at its will from brook and from berry, from a ripe ear of 
 the corn or from a deep cup of the lily. For the first time 
 she was letting time drift away in the fruitless labour of vain 
 purposeless thought, because, for the first time also, happiness 
 was not with her. 
 
 They were gone for ever— all the elastic joyaunce, all the 
 free fair hours, all the dauntless gaiety of childhood, all the 
 sweet harmonious laughter of a heart without a care. They 
 were gone for ever ; for the touch of love and of pain had 
 been laid on her ; and never again would her radiant eyes 
 smile cloudlessly like the young eagle's at a sun that rose but 
 to be greeted as only youth can greet another dawn of life 
 that is without a shadow. 
 
 And she leaned wearily there with her cheek lying on the 
 cold grey Moorish stone ; the colour and the brightness were 
 in the rays of the light, in the rich hues of her hair and her 
 mouth, in the scarlet glow of her dress : there was no bright- 
 ness in her face. The eyes were vacant as they watched the 
 green lizard glide over the wall beyond, and the lips were 
 parted with a look of unspeakable fatigue ; the tire, not of the 
 limbs, but of the heart. She had come thither hoping to 
 leave behind her on the desert wind that alien care, that new 
 strange passion, which sapped her strength, and stung her 
 pride, and made her evil with such murderous lust of ven- 
 geance ; and they were with her still. Only something of 
 the deadly biting ferocity of jealousy had changed into a 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 571 
 
 passionate longing to be as that woman was who had his 
 love ; into a certain hopeless sickening sense of having for 
 ever lost that which alone could have given her such beauty 
 and such honour in the sight of men as those this woman had. 
 
 To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had 
 his passion should not return it. To the child of the camp, 
 though she often mocked at caste, all the inexorable rules, all 
 the reticent instincts of caste, were things unknown. She 
 would have thought love could have bridged over any gulf ; 
 she would have failed to comprehend all the thousand reasons 
 which would have forbidden any bond between the great aris- 
 tocrat and a man of low grade and of dubious name. She only 
 thought of love as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly 
 cherished, ^ildly indulged, and without tie or restraint. " 
 ~' And I came without^ my vengeance ! ' she mused. To the 
 nature that felt the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, 
 there was wounding humiliation in her knowledge that she had 
 left her rival unharmed, and had come hither, out from his 
 sight and his presence, lest he should see in her one glimpse 
 of that folly which she would have killed herself under her 
 own steel rather than have been betrayed either for his con- 
 tempt or his compassion. 
 
 ' And I came without my vengeance ! * she mused : in that 
 oppressive noon, in that grey and lonely place, in that lofty 
 tower-solitude, where there was nothing between her and the 
 hot, hard, cruel blue of the heavens, vengeance looked the only 
 thing that was left her, the only means whereby that void in 
 her heart could be filled, that shame in her hfe be washed 
 out. To love ! and to love a man who had no love for her, 
 whose eyes only beheld another's face, whose ears only thirsted 
 for another's voice ! Its degradation stamped her a traitress 
 in her own sight — traitress to her code, to her pride, to her , 
 country, to her flag ! 
 
 And yet at the core of her heart so tired a pang was aching ! 
 She who had gloried in being the child of the whole people, 
 the daughter of the whole army, felt lonely and abandoned, 
 as though she were some bird which an hour ago had been 
 flying in all its joy among its brethren, and now, maimed with 
 one shot, had fallen with broken pinion and torn plumage to 
 lie alone upon the sand and die. 
 
 The touch of a bird's wing brushing her hair brought the 
 dreamy comparison to her wandering thoughts. She started 
 
572 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and lifted her head ; it was a blue carrier-pigeon, one of the 
 many she fed at that casement, and the swiftest and surest of 
 several she sent with messages for the soldiers between the 
 various stations and corps. She had forgotten she had left 
 the bird at the encampment. 
 
 She caressed it absently, while the tired creature sank down 
 on her bosom ; then only she saw that there was a letter 
 beneath one wing. She unloosed it, and looked at it without 
 being able to tell its meaning ; she could not read a wordy 
 printed or written. Military habits were too strong with her 
 for the arrival not to change her reverie into action ; whoever 
 it was for, it must be seen. She gave the pigeon water and 
 grain, then wound her way down the dark, narrow stairs, 
 through the height of the tower, out into the passage below. 
 
 She found an old French cobbler sitting at a stall in a case- 
 ment stitching leather; he was her customary reader and 
 scribe in this quarter. She touched him with the paper. 
 * Bon Mathieu ! wilt thou read this to me ? ' 
 
 ' It is for thee, Little One, and signed " Petit Pot-d«- 
 terre." ' 
 
 Cigarette nodded listlessly. 
 
 * 'Tis a good lad, and a scholar,* she answered, absently. 
 'Read on 1 ' 
 
 And he read, aloud : 
 
 * There is ill news. I send the bird on a chance to find 
 thee. Bel-^-faire-peur struck the Black Hawk — a Ught blow, 
 but with threat to kill following it. He has been tried, and 
 is to be shot. There is no appeal to the Conseil de Revision. 
 The case is clear ; the Colonel could have cut him down, were 
 that all. I thought you should know. We are all sorry. It 
 was done on the night of the great fite. I am thy humble 
 lover and slave.' 
 
 So the boy-Zouave's scrawl, crushed, and blotted, and 
 written with great difficulty, ran in its brief phrases that the 
 slow muttering of the old shoemaker drew out in tedious 
 length. 
 
 Cigarette heard ; she never made a movement or gave a 
 Bound, but all the blood fled out of her brilliant face, leaving 
 it horribly blanched beneath its brown sun-scorch ; and hei 
 eyes, distended, senseless, sightless, were fastened on the old 
 man's slowly-moving mouth. 
 
 * Read it again I ' she said, simply, when all was ended. 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 573 
 
 He started, and looked up at her face : the voice had not one 
 accent of its own tones left. 
 
 He obeyed, and read it once more to the end. Then a 
 loud shuddering sigh escaped her, Hke the breath of one 
 stifling under flames. 
 
 ' Shot ! ' she said, vacantly. * Shot I ' 
 
 Her vengeance had come without her once lifting her hand 
 to summon it. 
 
 The old man rose hurriedly. 
 
 ' Child I art thou ill ? ' 
 
 * The blow was struck for her I ' she muttered. * It was 
 that night, you hear — that night ? * 
 
 ' What night ? Thou lookest so strangely I Dost thou 
 love this doomed soldier ? ' 
 
 Cigarette laughed — a laugh whose echo thrilled horribly 
 through the lonely Moresco courtway. 
 
 ' Love ? love ? I hated him, look you I So I said. And 
 I longed for my vengeance. It is come ! * 
 
 She w^as still a moment : her white, parched mouth quivering 
 as though she were under physical torture, her strained eyes 
 fastened on the empty air, the veins in her throat swelling 
 and throbbing till they glowed to purple. Then she crushed 
 the letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any antelope, 
 through the streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the 
 city to the quay. 
 
 The people ever gave way before her ; but now they scat- 
 tered like frightened sheep from her path. There was some- 
 thing that terrified them in that bloodless horror set upon her 
 face, and in that fury of resistless speed with which she 
 rushed upon her way. 
 
 Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she 
 paused ; it was as one face, on which the strong light of the 
 noontide poured, came before her. The senseless look changed 
 in her eyes ; she wheeled out of her route, and stopped before 
 the man who had thus arrested her. He was leaning idly 
 over the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped his 
 arm before he saw her. 
 
 * You have his face ? ' she muttered. * What are you 
 to him ? ' 
 
 He made no answer ; he was too amazed. 
 
 * You are of his race,' she persisted. * You ar-e brethren 
 by your look. What aifl you to him ? ' 
 
574 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 * To whom ? ' 
 
 * To the man who calls himself Louis Victor? A Chasseur 
 of my army ? ' 
 
 Her eyes were fastened entirely on him ; keen, ruthless, 
 fierce, in this moment, as a hawk's. He grew pale, and 
 murmured an incoherent denial. He sought to shake her off, 
 first gently, then more rudely ; he called her mad, and tried 
 to fling her from him ; but the lithe fingers only wound them- 
 selves closer on his arm. 
 
 * Be still — fool I ' she muttered ; and there was that in 
 the accent that lent a strange force and dignity in that 
 moment to the careless and mischievous plaything of the 
 soldiery — force that overcame him, dignity that overawed 
 him. * You are of his people, you have his eyes, and his 
 look, and his features. He disowns you, or you him. No 
 matter which. He is of your blood ; and he lies under 
 sentence of death, do you know that ? ' 
 
 With a stifled cry, the other recoiled from her ; he never 
 doubted that she spoke the truth, none could who had looked 
 upon her face. 
 
 *Do not lie to me,' she said, curtly. 'It avails you 
 nothing. Read that.* 
 
 She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought ; 
 his hand trembled sorely as he held it ; he believed in that 
 moment that this strange creature, half-soldier, half-woman, 
 half-brigand, half-child, knew all his story and all his shame 
 from his brother : 
 
 ' Shot ! ' he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when 
 he had read on to the end. * Shot I my God I and 
 I ' 
 
 She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess 
 within the bazaar ; he submitted unresistingly ; he was filled 
 with the horror, the remorse, the overwhelming shock of his 
 brother's doom. 
 
 * He will be shot,' she said with a strange calmness. 
 * We shoot down many men in our army. I know him well. 
 He was justified in his act, I do not doubt ; but discipUne 
 will not stay for that ' 
 
 * Silence, for mercy's sake I Is there no hope — no possi- 
 bility ? ' 
 
 Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry hard 
 ■words came through them. ' None. His chief could have 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 575 
 
 cut him down on the instant. It took place in camp. Yon 
 feel this thing ; you are of his race, then 7 * 
 
 * I am his brother 1 ' 
 
 She was silent ; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to 
 her strange that she should thus have met one of his blood 
 in the crowds of Algiers. Bhe was absorbed in the one 
 catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat her very life 
 away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage 
 remained at their keenest and strongest. 
 
 * You are his brother,' she said slowly, so much as an affir- 
 mation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned both 
 their relationship and their history from Cecil. ' You must 
 go to him, then.' 
 
 He shook from head to foot. 
 
 * Yes, yes I But it will be too late I * 
 
 She did not know that the words were cried out in all 
 the contrition of an unavailing remorse ; she gave them 
 only their literal significance, and shuddered as she answered 
 him : 
 
 ' That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I 
 must know more. Tell me his name, his rank.' 
 
 He was silent : coward and egotist though he was, both 
 cowardice and egotism were killed in him under the over- 
 whelming horror with which he felt himself as truly by 
 moral guilt a fratricide as though he had stabbed his elder 
 through the heart. 
 
 * Speak I ' hissed Cigarette through her clenched teeth. ' If 
 you have any kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your 
 blood, who will be shot there like a dog, do not waste a second 
 — answer me, tell me all.' 
 
 He turned his wild terrified glance upon her : he had in 
 that moment no sense but to seize some means of reparation, 
 to declare his brother's rights, to cry out to the very stones of 
 the streets his own wrong and his victim's sacrifice. 
 
 * He is the head of my House 1 ' he answered her, scarce 
 knowing what he answered. ' He should bear the title that 
 I bear now. He is here, in this misery, because he is the 
 most merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of 
 living souls ! If he die, it is not they who have killed him ; 
 it is I ! ' 
 
 She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute 
 oommand which never varied : she neglected all that wonder, 
 
576 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 or curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other 
 time ; she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon tha 
 fate of the condemned. 
 
 * Settle with yourself for that sin,' she said bitterly. • Your 
 remorse will not save him. But do the thing that I bid yon, 
 if that remorse be sincere. Write me out here that title yoa 
 say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, 
 and should be the chief of your house ; then sign it, and give 
 it to me.' 
 
 He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into 
 her face. 
 
 ' Who are you ? What are you ? If you have the power 
 to do it, for the love of God rescue him ! It is I who have 
 murdered him — I — who have let him live on in this hell for 
 my sake ! * 
 
 * For your sake ! ' 
 
 She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the 
 face ; that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable 
 rebuke of the woman-child who would herself have died a 
 thousand deaths rather than have purchased a whole existence 
 by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote him like a 
 blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public 
 chastisement. The courage and the truth of a girl scorned 
 his timorous fear and his hving lie. His head sank, he seemed 
 to shrink under her gaze ; his act had never looked so vile to 
 him as it looked now. 
 
 She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and won- 
 dering disdain that there should be <Ma earth a male life capable 
 of such fear and of such ignominy as these. Then the strong 
 and rapid power in her took its instant ascendency over the 
 weaker nature. 
 
 * Monsieur, I do not know your story ; I do not want. I am 
 not used to men who let others suffer for them. What I want 
 is your written statement of your brother's name and station ; 
 give it me.' 
 
 He made a gesture of consent ; he would have signed away 
 his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized 
 him. She brought him pens and paper from the Turk's store, 
 and dictated what he wrote : 
 
 * I hereby affirm that the j^crson servhig in the Chasseurs 
 d'Afrique under the naiiie of Louis Victor is 7ny elder brother, 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 577 
 
 Bertie Cecil, lawfully^ by inheritance^ the Viscount Boyallicu, 
 Peer of England. I hereby also acknowledge that I have suc- 
 ceeded to and borne the title illegally ^ under the supposition of 
 his death, (Signed) Bekkeley Cecil.* 
 
 He wrote it mechanically, the force of her will and the 
 torture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to 
 undo in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let 
 circumstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve 
 long years. He let her draw the paper from him and fold it 
 away in her belt. He watched her with a curious dreamy 
 sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent 
 of her bidding. 
 
 * What is it you will do ? ' he asked her. 
 
 * The best that shall lie in my power ; do you the same/ 
 
 * Can his life yet be saved ? ' 
 
 ' His honour may — his honour shall.' 
 
 Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke ; though it 
 was stern~and~rrgid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over 
 it. _ She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better 
 than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would 
 choose the vindication of his honour before the rescue of his 
 life. He laid his hand on her as she moved : 
 
 * Stay — stay ! One word ' 
 
 She flung him off her again : 
 
 * This is no time for words. Go to him — coward ! — and let 
 the balls that kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of 
 manhood left in you I ' 
 
 ' Th"en, swiftly as a. swallow darts, she quitted him and flew 
 on her headlong vv ay, down through the pressure of the people, 
 and the throngs of the marts, and the noise, and the colour, 
 and the movement of the streets. 
 
 The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode 
 out of the city, o^-a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift_as the 
 antelope and as wild, with her only equipment some pistols in 
 her iiotsiers, andTa'Fag of rice and a skin of water slung at her 
 saddle-bow. 
 
 They asked her where she went ; she never answered. The 
 hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the 
 people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down 
 through Algiers. Her comrades, used to see her ever with 
 some song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she vvent, 
 
 p p 
 
578 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 ; looked after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and 
 with her face white and stern as though the bright brown love- 
 liness of it had been changed to alabaster, 
 
 • What is it with the Cigarette ? ' they asked each other. 
 None could tell ; the desert horse and his rider flew by them 
 as a swallow flies. The gleam of her Cross and the colourless 
 calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon's 
 on it, were the last they ever saw of Cigarette. 
 
 All her fluent untiring speech was gone — gone with the 
 rose-hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with 
 the child's joyaunce from her heart ; but the brave, staunch, 
 dauntless spirit lived with a soldier's courage, with a martyr's 
 patience. 
 
 And she rode straight through the scorch of the mid- day 
 sun, along the sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would 
 have bhnded most who should have been carried through the 
 dry air and under the burning skies at that breathless and 
 pauseless speed ; but she had ridden half-maddened colts with 
 the skill of Arabs themselves ; she had been tossed on a holster 
 from her earhest years, and had clung with an infant's hands 
 in fearless glee to the mane of rough-riders' chargers. She 
 never swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and 
 on against the hard hot currents of the cleft air with only one 
 sense — that she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every 
 beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few moments of a doomed i 
 life fled away ! 
 
 She had a long route before her ; she had many leagues to 
 travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew 
 well, left to the man who was condemned to death. Four- 
 and-twenty hours left open for appeal — no more — betwixt the 
 delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay was always \ 
 interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the 
 evening of one day to the dawn of the second day following ; 
 and some slight interval might then ensue, according as the 
 general in command ordained. But the twenty-four hours was 
 all of which she could be certain ; and even of them some 
 must have flown by since the caiTier-pigeon had been loosed 
 to her. She could not tell how long he had to live. 
 
 There were fifty miles between her and her goal ; Abd-el- 
 Kader's horse had once covered that space in three hours, so 
 men of the Army of D'Aumale had^told her: she knew what 
 they had done she could do. Onoe only she paused, to let her 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 579 
 
 horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flaked sides, and 
 crop some short sweet grass that grew where a cleft of^ water 
 ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite motionless 
 while he rested ; she was keenly alive to all that could best 
 save his strength and further her travel ; but she watched him 
 during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful 
 look of hunger in her eyes — the worst hunger — that which 
 craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she 
 mounted again, and again went on, on her flight. 
 
 She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, 
 douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, cara- 
 vans of merchandise : nothing arrested her ; she saw nothing 
 that she passed, as she rode over the hard dust-covered shadow- 
 less roads, over the weary sun-scorched monotonous country, 
 over the land without verdure and without foliage, the land 
 that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination ; 
 the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them 
 in it, yet return with so mad an infatuation as her lovers 
 went back across the waters to Circe. 
 
 The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood 
 was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at 
 last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank faint and 
 quivering to the ground. Whither she had come was to a 
 fortress where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of 
 Africa, had arrived that day in his progress of inspection 
 throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round her eagerly 
 beneath the gates, and over the fallen beast, a thousand ques- 
 tions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the 
 animal with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled 
 with cannon with the other. 
 
 * Have a care of him ; and lead me to the chief 1 ' 
 
 She spoke quietly ; but a certain sensation of awe and fear 
 moved those who heard. She was not the Child of the Army 
 whom they knew so well. She was a creature, desperate, 
 hard pressed, mute as death, strong as steel ; above all, hunted 
 by despair. 
 
 They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding. The 
 one whom she sought was great and supreme here as a king ; 
 they dreaded to approach his staff, to ask his audience. 
 
 Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her 
 
 Cross ctnd held it out to an adjutant standing beneath the 
 
 gates. 
 
 p p 2 
 
58o UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Take that to the man who gave it me. Tell him Cigarette 
 waits ; and with each moment that she waits a soldier's life is 
 lost. Go!* 
 
 The adjutant took it, and went. Over and over again she 
 had brought intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a 
 contemplated razzia, warning of an internal revolt, or tidings 
 of an encounter on the plains, that had been of priceless value 
 to the army which she served. It was not lightly that Ci- 
 garette's words were ever received when she spoke as she spoke 
 now ; nor was it impossible that she now brought to them that 
 which would brook neither delay nor trifling. 
 
 She waited patiently; all the iron discipline of military 
 life had never bound her gay and lawless spirit down, but 
 now she was singularly still and mute. Only there gleamed 
 thirstily in her eyes that fearful avarice which begrudges every 
 moment in its flight as never the miser grudged his hoarded 
 gold into the robber's grasp. 
 
 A few minutes and the decoration was brought back to her, 
 
 and her demand granted. She was summoned to the Marshal's 
 
 presence. She was taken within the casemate of the fortress. 
 
 It was the ordnance-room, a long vast silent chamber filled 
 
 , with stands of arms, with all the arts and appliances of war 
 
 i brought to their uttermost perfection, and massed in all the 
 
 resource of a great empire against the sons of the desert, who 
 
 i had nothing to oppose to them save the despair of a peiishing 
 
 nationality and a stifled freedom. 
 
 The Marshal, leaning against a brass field-piece, turned to 
 her with a smile in his keen stern eye^. 
 
 * You, my young decor te. I What bi^ngs you here ? * 
 
 She came up to him with her rapid leopard-like grace, and 
 he started as he saw the change upon her features. She was 
 covered with sand and dust, and with the animal's blood- 
 fle ;ked foam. The beating of her heart from the fury of the 
 gallop had drained every hue from her face ; her voice was 
 scarcely articulate in its breathless haste as she saluted him : 
 
 ' Monseigneur, I have come from Algiers since noon ' 
 
 ' From Algiers I ' He and his officers echoed the name of 
 the city in incredulous amaze ; they knew how far from them 
 down along the sea-Une the white town lay. 
 
 ' Since noon, to rescue a hfe — the life of a great soldier, of 
 a guiltless man. He who saved the honour of France at Zaraila 
 ie to die the death of a mutineer at dawn 1 ' 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 581 
 
 * What ! — your Chasseur ? * 
 
 A dusky scarlet fire burned through the pallor of her face ; 
 but her eyes never quailed, and the torrent of her eloquence 
 returned under the pangs of shame that were beaten back 
 under the noble instincts of her love. 
 
 * Mine ! — since he is a soldier of France ; yours too by that 
 title. I am come here, from Algiers, to speak the truth in his 
 name, and to save him for his own honour and the honour of 
 my Empire. See here ! At noon, I have this paper, sent by 
 a swift pigeon — read it ! You see how he is to die, and why. 
 Well, by my Cross, by my Fla-g, by my France, I swear that 
 not a hair of his head shall be touched, not a drop of blood 
 in his veins shall be shed ! ' 
 
 He looked at her, astonished at the grandeur and the courage 
 which could come on this child of razzias and reveMes, and 
 give to her all the splendour of a fearless command of some 
 young empress. But his face darkened and set sternly as he 
 read the paper ; it was the greatest crime in the sight of a 
 proud soldier, this crime against discipline, of the man for 
 whom she pleaded. 
 
 ' You speak madly,* he said, with cold brevity. ' The 
 offence merits the chastisement. I shall not attempt to 
 interfere.' 
 
 * Wait 1 you will hear, at least, Monseigneur ? * 
 
 ' I will hear you — yes ; but 7 tell yo^^, once for all, I never 
 change sentences that are pronounced by conseils de guerre ; 
 and this crime is the last for which you should attempt to 
 plead for mercy with me.' 
 
 * Hear me, at least ! ' she cried, with passionate ferocity — . 
 the ferocity of a dumb animal wounded by a shot. ' You do 
 not know what this man is — how he has harf to endure ; I do. 
 I have watched him ; I have seen the brutal tyranny of his 
 chief, who hated him because the soldiers loved him. I have 
 seen his patience, his obedience, his long-suffering beneath 
 insults that would have driven any other to revolt and murder. 
 I have seen him — I have told you how — at Zaraila, thinking 
 never of death or of life, only of our Flag, that he has made 
 his own, and under which he has been forced to lead the life 
 of a galley-slave ' 
 
 * The finer soldier he be, the less pardonable his offence.' 
 
 * That I deny I If he were a dolt, a brute, a thing of wood, 
 as many are, he would have no right to vengeance ; as it is, 
 
582 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 he is a gentleman, a hero, a martyr ; may he not forget foi 
 one hour that he is a slave ? Look you ! I have seen him 
 so tried, that I told him — I, who love my army better than 
 any living thing under the sun — that I would forgive him if 
 he forgot duty and dealt with his tyrant as man to man. And 
 he always held his soul in patience. Why ? Not because he 
 feared death — he desired it ; but because he loved his com- 
 rades, and suffered in peace and in silence lest, through him, 
 
 they should be led into evil * 
 
 His eyes softened as he heard her ; but the inflexibility of 
 his voice never altered. 
 
 * It is useless to argue with me,' he said, briefly ; * I never 
 change a sentence.' 
 
 * But I say that you shall I * As the audacious words 
 were flung forth, she looked him full in the eyes, while her 
 voice rang with its old Imperious oratory. * You are a great 
 chief ; you are as a monarch here ; you hold the^gif ts and tlie_ 
 grandeur of the Empire ; but, becauseoT^th&i — Fecause you 
 are aslTrance in my eyes — I swear, by the name of France, 
 that you shall see justice done to him ; after death, if you 
 cannot in life. Do you know who he is — this man whom his 
 comrades will shoot down at sunrise, as they shoot down the 
 murderer and the ravisher in their crimes ? ' 
 
 * He is a rebellious soldier ; it is sufficient.' 
 
 * He is not I He is a man who vindicated a woman's 
 honour ; he is a man who suffers in a brother's place ; he is an 
 aristocrat exiled to a martyrdom ; he is a hero who has never 
 been greater than he will be great in his last hour. Read 
 that ! What you refuse to justice, and mercy, and courage, 
 and guiltlessness, you will grant, may be, to your Order.' 
 
 She forced into his hand the written statement of Cecil's 
 name and station. All the hot blood was back in her cheek, 
 all the fiery passion back in her eyes. She lashed this potent 
 ruler with the scourge of her scorn as she had lashed a 
 drunken horde of plunderers with her whip. She was reck- 
 less of what she said ; she was conscious only of one thing — 
 the despair that consumed her. 
 
 The French Marshal glanced his eye on the fragment, 
 carelessly and coldly. As he saw the words, he started, and 
 read on with wondering eagerness. 
 
 * Royallieu I ' he muttered — * Royallieu I ' 
 ""he name was familiar to him ; he it was who, when he 
 
 rr>\ 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 583 
 
 had murmured, * that man has the seat of the English 
 Guards,' as a Chasseur d'Afrique had passed him, had been 
 ignorant that in that Chasseur he saw one whom he had 
 known in many a scene of Court splendour and Parisian 
 pleasure. The years had been many since Cecil and he had 
 met, but not so many but that the name brought memories of 
 friendship with it, and moved him with a strange emotion. 
 
 He turned with grave anxiety to Cigarette. 
 
 * You speak strangely ; how came this in your hands ? ' 
 
 ' Thus : the day that you gave me the Cross, I saw Ma- 
 dame la Princesse Corona. I hated her, and I went — no 
 matter I From her I learned that he whom we call Louis 
 Victor was of her rank, was of old friendship with her house, ^ 
 was exiled and nameless, but for some reason unknown to ^ 
 her. She needed to see him ; to bid him farewell, so she ^ 
 said. I took the message for her ; I sent him to her.* Her 
 voice grew husky and savage, but she forced her words on 
 with the reckless sacrifice of self that moved her. He went 
 to her tent, alone, at night ; that was, of course, whence he 
 came when Chateauroy met him. I doubt not that Black 
 Hawk had some foul thing to hint of his visit, and that the 
 blow was struck for her — for her ! Well ; in the streets of 
 Algiers I saw a man with a face like his own ; different, but 
 the same race, look you. I spoke to him; I taxed him. 
 When he found that the one whom I spoke of was under sen- 
 tence of death, he grew mad ; he cried out that be was his 
 brother, and had murdered him — that it was for his sake that 
 the cruelty of this exile had been borne — that if his brother 
 perished, he would be his destroyer. Then I bade him write 
 down that paper, since these English names were unknown 
 to me, and I brought it hither to you that you might see 
 under his hand and with your own eyes that I have uttered 
 the truth. And now is that man to be killed like a mad beast 
 whom yon fear ? Is that death the reward France will give 
 for Zaraila ? * 
 
 Her eyes were fixed with a fearful intensity of appeal upoR 
 the stern face bent over her ; her last arrow was sped ; if this 
 failed, all was over. As he heard, he was visibly moved ; he 
 remembered the felon's shame that in years gone by had fallen 
 across the banished name of Bertie Cecil ; the history seemed 
 clear as crystal to him seen beneath the light shed on it from 
 other days. 
 
584 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 His hand fell heavily on the gun-carriage. 
 
 * Mort de Dieu ! it was his brother's sin, not his ! ' 
 There was a long silence ; those present, who knew nothing 
 
 of all that was in his memory, felt instinctively that some 
 dead weight of alien guilt was lifted off a blameless life for 
 ever. 
 
 She drew a deep, long, sighing breath ; she knew that he 
 was safe. Her hands unconsciously locked on the great chief's 
 arms ; her eyes looked up, senselessly in their rapture and 
 their dread, to his. 
 
 ' Quick, quick ! ' she gasped. ' The hours go so fast ; 
 while we speak here he -' 
 
 The words died in her throat. The Marshal swung around 
 with a rapid sign to a staff-officer. 
 
 ' Pens and ink 1 instantly ! My brave child, what can we 
 say to you ; I will send an aide to arrest the execution of the 
 sentence. It must be deferred till we know the whole truth 
 of this ; if it be as it looks now, he shall be saved if the 
 Empire can save him ! * 
 
 She looked up in his eyes with a look that froze his very 
 heart. 
 
 ' His honour ! ' she muttered ; * hij bonotm-r:^! jiat his life ! ' 
 
 He understood her ; he bowed his haughty head low down 
 to hers. 
 
 ' True. We will cleanse that, if all other justice be too 
 lato.' 
 
 The answer was infinitely gentle, infinitely solemn. Then 
 he turned and wrote his hurried order, and bade his aide go 
 with it without a second's loss ; but Cigarette caught it from 
 his hand. 
 
 * To me 1 to me ! No other will go so fast ! ' 
 ' But, my child, you are worn out already.' 
 
 She turned on him her beautiful wild eyes, in which the 
 blinding passionate tears were floating. 
 
 * Do you think I would tarry for that ? Ah 1 I wish that 
 I had let them tell me of God, that I might ask Him now to 
 bless you ! Quick, quick ! Lend me your swiftest horse, 
 one that will not tire. And send a second order by your aide- 
 de-camp ; the Arabs may kill me as I go, and then they will 
 not know.' 
 
 He stooped and touched her little brown, scorched, feverish 
 band with reverence. 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 585 
 
 * My child, Africa has shown me much heroism, but noriQ 
 like yours. If you fall, he shall be safe, and France will 
 know how to avenge its darling's loss.' 
 
 She turned and gave him one look, infinitely sweet, in- 
 finitely eloquent. 
 
 ' Ah, France I ' she said, so softly that the last word was 
 but a sigh of unutterable tenderness. The old imperishable 
 early love was not dethroned; it was there still before all 
 else. France was without rival with her. 
 
 Then, without another second's pause, she flew from them, 
 and vaulting into the saddle of a young horse which stood 
 without in the courtyard, rode once more, at full speed, out 
 into the pitiless blaze of the sun, out to the wasted desolation 
 of the plains. 
 
 The order of release, indeed, was in her bosom : but the 
 chances were as a million to one that she would not reach 
 him with it in time, ere with the rising of the sun his life 
 would have set for ever. 
 
 All the horror of remorse was on her ; to her nature the 
 bitter jealousy in which she had desired vengeance on him 
 seemed to have rendered her a murderess. She loved him 
 — loved him with an exceeding passion ; and only in this 
 extremity, when it was confronted with the imminence of( 
 death, did the fulness and the greatness of that love make! 
 their way out of the petulant pride and the wounded vanity! 
 which bad obscured them. She had been ere now a child and; 
 J, hero ; beneath this blow which struck at him she changed \ 
 — shfiisiiama a wqmjji^aiidLa.J3aa£liyr. ! 
 
 And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had 
 done through the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in 
 the keen instinct of a trooper, her hand always on the butt of 
 her belt pistol. For she knew well what the danger was of 
 these lonely, unguarded, untravelled leagues that yawned in 
 so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs, 
 beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on 
 to those plains with the old guerilla skill, the old marvellous 
 rapidity. She knew that with every second shot or steel 
 might send her reeling from her saddle, that with every 
 moment she might be surrounded by some desperate band 
 who would spare neither her sex nor "Iter youth. Biit'that 
 intdxTcation of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from 
 her infancy, was all which sustained her in that race with 
 
586 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 death. It filled her veins with their old heat, her heart with 
 its old daring, her nerves with their old matchless courage ; 
 but for it she would have dropped, heartsick with terror and 
 despair, ere her errand could be done ; under it she had the 
 coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained^ fprcej and 
 the s_upernatural strengthof some young hunted animah They 
 might slay "her so~tS^at she reTTperforce ber mission unaccom- 
 phshed ; but no dread of such a fate had even an instant's 
 power to appal her or arrest her. While there should be 
 breath in her, she would go on to the end. 
 
 There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the 
 swiftest pace her horse could make ; and she was already 
 worn by the leagues already traversed. Although this was 
 nothing new that she did now, yet as time flew on and she 
 flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim sohtary barren 
 moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart 
 now and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. 
 She shook the weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it 
 of her nature, and succeeded in its banishment. They had 
 put in her hand as she had passed through the fortress gates 
 a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab fashion, so that the 
 light was unseen from before, while it streamed over her 
 herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be 
 veiled by clouds. With that single starry gleam aslant on a 
 level with her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of 
 the half-lit plains, now flooded with lustre as the moon 
 emerged, now engulfed in darkness as the stormy western 
 winds drove the cirri over it. But neither darkness nor light 
 difi'ered to her ; she noted neither : she was like one drunk 
 with strong wine, and she had but one dread — that the power 
 of her horse would give way under the unnatural strain made 
 on it, and that she would reach too late, when the life she 
 went to save would have fallen for ever, silent unto death, as 
 she had seen the life of Marquise /aZZ. 
 
 'Hour on houf,^eague on league, passed away ; she felt the 
 animal quiver under the spur, and she heard the catch in his 
 panting breath as he strained to give his fleetest and best, 
 that told her how, ere long, the racing speed, the extended 
 gallop at which she kept him, would tell, and beat him down 
 despite his desert strain. She had no pity ; she would have 
 killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was 
 giving her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 587 
 
 she did this thing to save even the man condemned to die 
 with the rising of the sun. She did not spare herself ; and ! 
 she would have spared no living thing, to fulfil the mission 
 that she undertook. She loved with the passionate blindness 
 of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern 
 blood? If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, 
 she would have given the word for their destruction without 
 a moment's pause. 
 
 Once from some screen of gaunt and barren rock a shot 
 was fired at her, and flew within a hair's-breadth of her 
 brain ; she never even looked around to see whence it had 
 come ; she knew it was from some Arab prowler of the 
 plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled 
 lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. 
 And as she felt the hours steal on — so fast, so .ludeoiislj 
 fast— with that horrible relentlessness, * ohne hast, ohne 
 fast,' which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for no desire, 
 her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of her 
 mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain. 
 
 What she dreaded came. 
 
 Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew 
 midnight v,;-s passed, the animal strained with harddrawn 
 panting gasps to answer the demand made on him by the 
 spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded 
 onward. In the lantern-light she saw his head stretched out . 
 in the racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered | j\ 
 with foam and blood, his heaving flanks that seem bursting '^ v 
 with every throb that his heart gave ; she knew that, half a ' 
 league more forced from him, he would drop like a dead 
 thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon the 
 poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a 
 shrill wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless 
 plains like the cry of a shot -stricken animal. She saw it all : 
 the breathing of the rosy golden day ; the stillness of the 
 hushed camp ; the tread of the few picked men ; the open 
 coffin by the open grave ; the levelled carbines gleaming in 
 
 the first rays of the sun She had seen it so many 
 
 times — seen it, to the awful end, when the living man fell 
 down in the morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, 
 crushed-out mass. 
 
 That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her 
 gave to the abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that 
 
588 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 seized her. With that one cry from the depths of her 
 breaking heart, the weakness spent itself : she knew that 2 
 action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward « 
 and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught 
 near from which she could get aid. If there were none, the 
 horse must drop down to die, and with his life the other life 
 would perish as surely as the sun would rise. 
 
 Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and 
 there by fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the 
 distance of some yet darker thing, moving rapidly — a large 
 cloud skimming the earth. She let the horse, which had 
 paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck, stand 
 still awhile, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud 
 till, with the marvellous surety of her desert-trained vision, 
 she disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering 
 shadows, and recognised it, as it was, a band of Arabs. 
 
 If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength 
 of her horse wculcl be fully enough to take her into safety 
 from their pursuit, or even from their perception, for they 
 were coming straightly and swiftly across the plain. If she 
 were seen by them she was certain of her fate ; they could 
 only be the desperate remnant of the decimated tribes, the 
 foraging raiders of starving and desperate men, hunted from 
 refuge to refuge, and carrying fire and sword in their ven- 
 geance wherever an unprotected caravan or a defenceless 
 settlement gave them the power of plunder and of slaughter, 
 that spared neither age nor sex. She was known throughout 
 the length and the breadth of the land to the Arabs : she was 
 neither child nor woman to them ; she was but the soldier 
 who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila ; she was 
 but the foe who had seen them defeated, and ridden down 
 with her comrades in their pursuit in tvnce a score of van- 
 quished, bitter, intolerably shameful days. Some among 
 them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful death 2 
 ever they made her captive, forjthey ^^eld her in superstitious 
 awe, and thought the spell of the F'rankTsK^accesses wSiM 
 be broken if she were slain. She knew that ; yet, knowing it, 
 she looked at their advancing band one moment, then turned 
 her horse's head and rode straight towards them. 
 
 * They may kill me, but that may save him,' she thought. 
 'Any other way he is lost.' 
 
 8o (3he rode directly towards them : rode so that she crossed 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 589 
 
 their front, and placed herself in their path, standing quite 
 still, with the cloth torn from the lantern, so that its light 
 fell full about her, as she held it above her head. La an 
 instant they knew her. They were the remnant who had 
 escaped from the carnage of Zaraila ; they knew her with all 
 the rapid unerring surety of hate. They gave the shrill wild 
 war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, 
 mounted figures with their weapons whirling round their 
 heads inclosed her ; a -cloud of kites settled down with 
 their_ black wings and cruel beaks upon one young silverj- 
 plumed gerfalcon. 
 
 She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that 
 flashed above her ; there was no fear upon her face, only a 
 calm resolute proud beauty, very pale, very still in the hght 
 that gleamed on it from the lantern rays. 
 
 * I surrender,' she said briefly ; she had never thought to 
 say these words of submission to her scorned foes ; she would 
 not have been brought to utter them to spare her own 
 existence. Their answer was a yell of furious delight, and 
 their bare blades smote each other with a crash of brutal joy ; 
 they had her, the Frankish child who had brought shame and 
 destruction on them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their 
 steel across the fair youngihroat, to plunge their lances into 
 the bright bare bosom, to tw^lne her hair round their spear- 
 handles, to rend her delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the 
 antelope, to torture, to outrage, to wreak their vengeance on 
 her. Their chief, only, motioned their violence back from 
 her, and bade them leave her untouched. At him she looked, 
 still with the same fixed, serene, scornful resolve ; she had 
 encountered these men so often in battle, she knew so well 
 how rich a prize she was to him. But she had one thought 
 alone with her ; and for it she subdued contempt, and hate, 
 and pride, and every passion in her. 
 
 ' I surrender,* she said, with the same tranquillity. * I 
 have heard that you have sworn by your God and your Prophet 
 to tear me limb from limb because that I — a._child,-and a 
 woman-child — brought you to shame and to grief on the day 
 of Zaraila. Well, I am here ; do it. You can slake your 
 will on me. But that you are brave men, and that I have 
 ever met you in fair fight, let me speak one word with you 
 first.' 
 
 Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the 
 
590 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 yelling of starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear 
 brave tones^reaclied the ear of the chief in the lingua-sabir 
 that she used. He was a young man, and his ear was caught 
 by that tuneful voice, his eyes by that youthful face. He 
 signed upward the swords of his followers, and motioned them 
 back as their arms were stretched to seize her, and their shouts 
 clamoured for her slaughter. 
 
 ' Speak on,' he said, briefly to her. 
 
 * You have sworn to take my body, sawn in two, to Ben- 
 Ihreddin ? ' she pursued, naming the Arab leader whom her 
 Spahis had driven off the field of Zaraila. Well, here it is ; 
 you can take it to him; and you will receive the piastres, 
 and the horse, and the arms that he has promised to who- 
 soever shall slay me. I have surrendered ; I am yours. But 
 you are bold men, and the bold are never mean ; therefore, I 
 will ask one thing of you. There is a man yonder, in my 
 camp, condemned to death with the dawn. He is innocent. I 
 have ridden from Algiers to-day with the order of his release. 
 If it is not there by sunrise, he will be shot ; and he is guilt- 
 less as a child unborn. My horse is worn out ; he could not 
 go another half league. I knew that, since he had failed, my 
 comrade would perish, unless I found a fresh beast or & mes- 
 senger to go in my stead. I saw your band come across the 
 plain. I knew that you would kill me, because of your oath 
 and of your Emir's bribe ; but I thought that you would have 
 greatness enough in you to save this man who is condemned 
 without crime, and who must perish unless you, his foes, have 
 pity on him. Therefore I came. Take the paper that frees 
 him ; send your fleetest and surest with it, under a flag of 
 truce, into our camp by the dawn ; let him tell them there 
 that I, Cigarette, gave it him — he must say no word of what 
 you have done to me, or his white flag will not protect him 
 from the vengeance of my army — and then receive your reward 
 from your chief, Ben-Ihreddin, when you lay my head down 
 for his horse's hoofs to trample into the dust. Answer me — 
 is the compact fair ? Eide on with this paper northward, and 
 then kill me with what torments you choose.' 
 
 She spoke with calm unwavering resolve, meaning that 
 which she uttered to its very uttermost letter. She knew that 
 these men had thirsted for her blood ; she offered it to be shed 
 to gain for him that messenger on whose speed his life was 
 hanging ; she knew that a prico was set upon her head, but 
 
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE 591 
 
 Bhe delivered herself over to the hands of her enemies so that 
 thereby she might purchase his redemption. 
 
 As they heard, silence fell upon the brutal clamorous herd 
 around — the silence of amaze and of respect. The young 
 chief listened gravely ; by the glistening of his keen black 
 eyes, he was surprised and moved, thougli, true to his teaching, 
 he shoTved neither emotion as he answered her : 
 
 ' Who is this Frank for whom you do this thing ? ' 
 
 * He is the warrior to whom you offered hfe on the field of 
 Zaraila because his courage was as the courage of gods.' 
 
 She knew the qualities of the desert character — knew how 
 to appeal to its reverence and to its chivalry. 
 
 * And for what does he perish ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' Because he forgot for once that he was a slave ; and 
 because he has borne the burden of a guilt that was not his 
 own.' 
 
 They were quite still now, closed around her ; tliese fero- 
 cious plunderers, who had been thirsty a moment before to 
 sheathe their weapons in her body, were spellbound by the 
 sympathy of courageous souls, by some vague perception that 
 there was a greatness in this little tigress of France, whom 
 they had sworn to hunt down and slaughter, whicli surpassed 
 all they had known or dreamed. 
 
 ' And you have given yourself up to us that by your death 
 you may purchase a messenger from us for this errand ? ' 
 pursued their leader. He had been reared as a boy in the 
 high tenets and the pure chivalr ies of the school of Abd-el- 
 Kadsr : and they were not lost in him despite the crimes and 
 the desperation of his life. 
 
 She held the paper out to him with a passionate entreaty, 
 breaking through the enforced calm of despair with which 
 she had hitherto spoken. 
 
 * Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save 
 him, as you are brave men — as you are generous foes ! ' 
 
 With a single sign of his hand, their leader waved them 
 back where they crowded around her, and leaped down from 
 his saddle, and led the horse he had dismounted to her. 
 
 ' Majden,' he said, gently, ' we_are Arab3j__biiLwe are jaot 
 brutes. We^wore to avenge ourselves on an enemy ; we are 
 not vile enough to accept a iL-avtyrdom. Take my horse — He 
 is the swiftest of my troop — and go you on your errand ; you 
 are safe from me.' 
 
592 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 She looked at him in stupor ; the sense of his words was 
 not tangible to her ; she had had no hope, no thought, that 
 they would ever deal thus with her ; all she had ever dreamed 
 of was so to touch their hearts and their generosity that they 
 would spare one from among their troop to do the errand of 
 mercy she had begged of them. 
 
 * You play with me ! ' she murmured, while her lips grew 
 whiter and her great eyes larger in the intensity of her emo- 
 tion. * Ah ! for pity's sake, make haste and kill me, so that 
 this only may reach him 1 ' 
 
 The chief, standing by her, lifted her up in his sinewy 
 
 arms, up on to the saddle of his charger. His voice was very 
 
 solemn, his glance was very gentle ; all the nobilitv of the 
 
 I highest Arab nature was aroused in him at the heroism of a 
 
 { child, a girl, an infidel — one, in his sight abandoned and" 
 
 ; shameful among her sex. ~^ 
 
 * Go in peace,' he said simply ; ' it is not with such as thee 
 that we war.' 
 
 Then, and then only, as she felt the fresh reins placed in 
 her hand, and saw the ruthless horde around her fall back and 
 leave her free, did she understand his meaning, did she com- 
 prehend that he gave her back both liberty and life, and, with 
 the surrender of the horse he loved, the noblest and most 
 precious gift that the Arab ever bestows or ever" receives. 
 The unutterable joy seemed to blind her, and gleam upon her 
 face like the blazing Ught of noon, as she turned her burning 
 eyes full on him. 
 1 * Ah ! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally 
 I with Christians ! If I Uve, thou shalt see me back ere 
 \ another night ; if I die, France will know how to thank thee ! ' 
 [ * We do not do the thing that is right for the sake that men 
 may recompense us,' he answered her, gently. * Fly to thy 
 friend, and hereafter do not judge that those who are in arms 
 against thee must needs be as the brutes that seek out whom 
 they shall devour.* 
 
 Then, with one word in his own tongue, he bade the horse 
 bear her southward, and, as swiftly as a spear launched from 
 his hand, the animal obeyed him and fiew across the plains. 
 He looked after her awhile, thrc igh the dim tremulous dark- 
 ness that seemed cleft by the rii h. of the gallop as the clouds 
 are cleft by lightning, while his tribe sat silent on their 
 horses in mood}' unwilling consent, savage in that they had 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 593 
 
 been deprived of prey, moved in that they were sensible of 
 this martyrdom which had been offered to them. 
 
 * Verily the courage of a woman has put the best among 
 us unto shame,' he said, rather to himself than them, as he 
 mounted the stallion brought him from the rear and rode 
 slowly northward, unconscious that the thing he had done 
 was great, because conscious only that it was just. 
 
 And, borne by the fleetness of the desert-bred beast, she 
 went away through the heavy bronze-hued dulness of the 
 night. Her brain had no sense, her hands had no feeling, 
 her eyes had no sight ; the rushing as of waters was loud 
 on her ears, the giddiness of fasting and of fatigue sent the 
 gloom eddying round and round like a whirlpool of shadow. 
 Yet she had remembrance enough left to ride on, and on, and 
 on without once flinching from the agonies that racked her 
 cramped limbs and throbbed in her beating temples ; she had 
 remembrance enough to strain her blind eyes towards the east 
 and murmur, in her terror of that white dawn, that must 
 soon break, the ojaly prayer that had been ever uttered by 
 the lips no mother's kiss had ever touched : 
 
 * God ! hee]) tJie day back / ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIi 
 
 ra THE MIDST OF HEK ARMY 
 
 Thebe was a line of light in the eastern sky. The camp 
 was very still. It was the hour for the mounting of the 
 guard, and, as the light spread higher and higher, whiter and 
 whiter, as the morning came, a score of men advanced slowly 
 and in silence to a broad strip of land screened from the great 
 encampment by the rise and fall of the ground, and stretching 
 far and even, with only here and there a single palm to break 
 its surface, over which the immense arc of the sky bent, grey 
 and serene, with only the one colourless gleam eastward that 
 was changing imperceptibly into the warm red flush of 
 opening day. 
 
 Sunrise and solitude : they were alike chosen lest the 
 army that honoured, the comrades that loved him should rise 
 
 Q Q 
 
594 UNDER TV/O FLAGS 
 
 to his rescue, casting off the yoke of discipline, and remem- 
 bering only that tyranny and that wretchedness under which 
 they had seen him patient and unmoved throughout so many 
 years of servitude. 
 
 He stood tranquil beside the coffin within which his broken 
 limbs and shot-pierced corpse would so soon be laid for ever. 
 There was a deep sadness on his face, but it was perfectly 
 serene. To the words of the priest who approached him he 
 listened with respect, though he gently, declined the services 
 of the Church. He had spoken but very little since his 
 arrest ; he was led out of the camp in silence, and waited in 
 silence now, looking across the plains to where the dawn was 
 growing richer and brighter with every moment that the 
 numbered seconds of his life drifted slowly and surely 
 away. 
 
 When they came near to bind the covering over his eyes, 
 he motioned them away, taking the bandage from their 
 hands and castinc? it far from him. 
 
 * Did I ever fear to look down the depths of my enemies' 
 muskets ? ' 
 
 It was the single outbreak, the single reproach, that 
 escaped from him — the single utterance by which he ever 
 quoted his services to France. Not one who heard him 
 dared again force on him that indignity which would have 
 blinded his sight, as though he had ever dreaded to meet 
 death. 
 
 That one protest having escaped from him, he was once 
 more still and calm as though the vacant grave yawning 
 at his feet had been but a couch of down to rest his tired 
 limbs. Hid eyes watched the dayUght deepen, and widen, 
 and grow into one sheet of glowing roseate warmth ; but 
 there was no regret in the gaze ; there was a fixed fathomless 
 resignation that moved with a vague sense of awe those who 
 had come to slay him, and who had been so used to slaughter 
 that they fired their volley into their comrade's breast as 
 callously as into the ranks of their ajitagonists. 
 
 ' It is best thus,' he thought, ' if only she never 
 knows * 
 
 Over the slope of brown and barren earth that screened thtr 
 camp from view there came, at the very moment that the 
 ramrods were di-awn out with a shrill, sharp ring from the 
 earbine-barrels, a single figure, tall, stalwart, lithe, with the 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 595 
 
 Bpring of the deerstalker in its rapid step, and the sinew 
 of the northern races in its mould. 
 
 Cecil never saw it ; he was looking at the east, at the 
 deepening of the morning flush that was the signal of his 
 slaughter, and his head was turned away. 
 
 The new-comer went straight to the adjutant in command, 
 and addressed him with a brief preface, hurriedly and low. 
 
 * Your prisoner is Victor of the Chasseurs ? — he is to be 
 shot this morning ? ' 
 
 The officer assented; he suffered the interruption, recog- 
 nising the rank of the speaker. 
 
 * I heard of it yesterday ; I rode all night from Oran. I feel 
 great pity for this man, though he is unknown to me,' the 
 stranger pursued, in rapid whispered words. ' His crime 
 was ?' 
 
 ' A blow to his colonel, Monseigneur.' 
 
 ' And there is no possibility of a reprieve ? * 
 
 'None.' 
 
 ' May I speak with him an instant 7 I have heard it 
 thought that he is of my country, and of a rank above his 
 standing in his regiment here.' 
 
 * You may address him, M. ie Duo ; but be brief. Time 
 presses.' 
 
 He thanked the officer for the unusual permission, and 
 turned to approach the prisoner. At that moment Cecil 
 turned also, and their eye^ met. A great shuddering cry 
 broke from them both ; his head sank as though the bullets 
 had already pierced his breast, and the man who believed 
 him dead stood gazing at him, paralysed with horror. 
 
 For a moment there was an awful silence ; then the 
 Seraph's voice rang out with a terror in it that thrilled 
 through the careless, callous hearts of the watching soldiery. 
 
 * Who is that man ? He died — he died so long ago ! And 
 yet- 
 
 Cecil's head was sunk on his chest ; he never spoke, he 
 never moved ; he knew the helpless, hopeless misery that 
 waited for the one who found him living only to find him 
 also standing beside his open grave. He saw nothing ; he 
 only felt the crushing force of his friend's arms flung round 
 him, as though seizing him to learn whether he were a living 
 man or a spectre dreamed of in delirium. 
 
 * Who are you ? Answer me for pity's sake I ' 
 
 Q 2 
 
596 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 As the swift, hoarse, incredulous words poured on his ear, 
 he, not seeking to unloose the other's hold, Ufted his head 
 and looked full in the eyes that had not met his own for 
 twelve long years. In that one look all was uttered; the 
 strained, eager, doubting eyes that read their answer in it 
 needed no other. 
 
 ' You live still ! Oh ! thank God— thank God ! * 
 And as the thanksgiving escaped him, he forgot all save 
 the breathless joy of this resurrection ; forgot that at their 
 feet the yawning grave was open and unfilled. Then, and 
 only then, under that recognition of the friendship that had 
 never failed and never doubted, the courage of the condemned 
 gave way, and his limbs shook with a great shiver of in- 
 tolerable torture ; and at the look that came upon his face, the 
 look of dumb, brute-like anguish, the man who loved him re- 
 membered ail — remembered that he stood there in the morn- 
 ing light only to be shot down like a beast of prey. Holding 
 him there still with that strong pressure of his sinewy hands, 
 he swore a great oath that rolled like thunder down the hard, 
 keen air. 
 
 * You ! perishing here ! If they send their shots through 
 you, they shall reach me first in their passage ! Heaven ! 
 Why have you lived like this ? Why have you been lost to 
 me, if you were dead to all the world beside ? ' 
 
 They were the words that his sister had spoken ; Cecil's 
 white lips quivered as he heard them ; his voice was scarcely 
 audible as it panted through them. 
 
 ' I was accused ' 
 
 * Ay ! But by whom ? Not by me. Never by me ! ' 
 Cecil's eyes filled with slow blinding tears ; tears sweet as 
 
 a woman's in her joy, bitter as a man's in his agony. He 
 knew that in this one heart at least no base suspicion ever 
 had harboured ; he knew that this love, at least, had cleaved 
 to him through all shame and against all evil. 
 
 ' God reward you ! ' he murmured. * You have never 
 doubted?' 
 
 * Doubted ? Was your honour not as my own ? ' 
 
 ' I can die at peace, then ; you know me guiltless ' 
 
 •Great God I Death shall not touch you. As I stand 
 here, not a hair of your head shall be harmed ' 
 
 * Hush 1 Justice must take its course. One thing only— 
 has slie heard ? ' 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 597 
 
 ' Nothing. She has left Africa. But you can be saved ; 
 you shall be saved : they do not know what they do ! ' 
 
 ' Yes ! They but follow the sentence of the law. Do not 
 regret it. It is best thus.' 
 
 ' Best ! — that you should be slaughtered in cold blood 1 * 
 His voice was hoarse with the horror which, despite his words, 
 possessed him. He knew what the demands of discipline 
 exacted, he knew what the inexorable tyranny of the army 
 enforced, he knew that he had found the life lost to him for 
 so long only to stand by and see it struck down like a shot 
 stag's. 
 
 Cecil's eyes looked at him with a regard in which all the 
 sacrifice, all the patience, all the martyrdom of his life spoke. 
 
 ' Best, because a lie I could never speak to you, and the 
 truth I can never tell to you. Do not let her know ; it 
 might give her pain. I have loved her ; that is useless, like 
 all the rest. Give me your hand once more, and then — let 
 them do their duty. Turn your head away ; it will soon be 
 over ! * 
 
 Almost ere he asked it, his friend's hands closed upon both 
 his own, keeping the promise made so long before in the old 
 years gone : great tearless sobs heaved the depths of his 
 broad chest : those gentle weary words had rent his very 
 soul, and he knew that he was powerless here ; he knew 
 that he could no more stay this doom of death than he could 
 stay the rising of the sun up over the eastern heavens. The 
 clear voice of the officer in command rang shrilly through the 
 stillness. 
 
 * Monseigneur, make your farewell. I can wait no 
 longer.' 
 
 The Seraph started, and flung himself round with the 
 grand challenge of a lion, struck by a puny spear ; his face 
 flushed crimson ; his words were choked in his throbbing 
 throat. 
 
 * As I live, you shall not fire ! I forbid you I I swear 
 by my honour and the honour of England that he shall not 
 die hke a do^. HeJs.glmy:-CO!intry ^ he_i_s of my order. I 
 will appeal to your Emperor ; he wiU accord me his life the 
 instant I ask it. Give me only an hour's reprieve — a few 
 moments' space to speak to your chiefs, to seek out your 
 general ' 
 
 ' It is impossible, Monseigneur.' 
 
598 , UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 The curt, calm answer was inflexible ; against the senteno« 
 and its execution there could be no appeal. 
 
 Cecil laid his hand upon his old friend's shoulders. 
 
 * It will be useless,' he murmured. * Let them act ; the 
 quicker the better.* 
 
 * What I you think I can look on, and see you die ? * 
 
 ' Would to Heaven you had never known I lived * 
 
 Tbo officer made a gesture to the guard to separate them.' 
 
 * Monsieur, submit to the execution of the law, or I must 
 arrest you.' 
 
 Lyonesse flung off the detaining hand of the guard, and 
 swung round so that his agonised eyes gazed close into the 
 adjutant's immovable face, which before that gaze lost its 
 coldness and its rigour, and changed to a great pity for this 
 stranger who had found the friend of his youth in the man 
 who stood condemned to perish there. 
 
 * An hour's reprieve I for mercy's sake, grant that I * 
 
 * I have said, it is impossible.' 
 
 * But you do not dream who is ' 
 
 ' It matters not.' 
 
 , * He is an English noble, I tell you * 
 
 * He is a soldier who has broken the law ; that suffices.' 
 
 * Heaven ! have you no humanity ? ' 
 
 * We have justice.' 
 
 i ' Justice I If you have justice, let your chiefs hear hia 
 story; let his name be made known; give me an hour's 
 space to plead for him. Your Emperor would grant me his 
 life, were he here ; yield me an hour — a half-hour — anything 
 that will give me time to serve him ' 
 
 'It is out of the question; I must obey my orders. I 
 regret you should have this pain ; but if you do not cease to 
 interfere, my soldiers must make you.' 
 
 Where the guards held him, Cecil saw and heard. Hia 
 voice rose with all its old strength and sweetness : 
 
 ' My friend, do not plead for me. For the sake of our 
 common country and our old love, let us both meet this with 
 silence and with courage.* 
 
 * You are a madman 1 ' cried the man, whose heart felt 
 breaking under this doom he could neither avert nor share. 
 * You think that they shall kill you before my eyes ? — you 
 think I shall stand by to see you murdered ? What crime 
 have you done? None, I dare swear save being moved, 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARlvrV 599 
 
 under insult, to act as the men of your race ever acted I Ah, 
 God ! why have you hved as you have done ? why not have 
 trusted my faith and my love ? If you had believed in my 
 faith as I believed in your innocence, this misery never had 
 come to us ! ' 
 
 ' Hush ! hush I or you will make me die like a coward.' 
 
 He dreaded lest he should do so ; this ordeal was greater 
 than his power to bear it. With the mere sound of this 
 man's voice a longing, so intense in its despairing desire, 
 came on him for this life which they were about to kill in him 
 for ever. 
 
 The words stung his hearer wellnigh to madness ; he 
 turned on the soldiers with all the fury of his race that 
 slumbered so long, but when it awoke was like the lion's 
 rage. Invective, entreaty, conjuration, command, imploring 
 prayer, an ungoverned passion poured in tumultuous words, 
 in agonised eloquence, from his lips : all answer was a quick 
 sign of the hand ; and, ere he saw them, a dozen soldiers 
 were round him, his arms were seized, his splendid frame 
 was held as powerless as a lassoed buU ; for a moment there 
 was a horrible struggle, then a score of ruthless hands locked 
 him in as in iron gyves, and forced his mouth to silence and 
 his eyes to blindness ; this was all the mercy they could give 
 — to spare him the sight of his friend's slaughter. 
 
 Cecil's eyes strained on him with one last longing look, 
 then he raised his hand and gave the signal for his own 
 death-shot. 
 
 The levelled carbines covered him ; he stood erect with his 
 face full towards the sun ; ere they could fire, a shrill cry 
 pierced the air : 
 
 * Wait I in the name of France.' 
 
 Dismounted, breathless, staggering, with her arms flung 
 upward, and her face bloodless with fear, Cigarette appeared 
 upon the ridge of rising ground. 
 
 The cry of command pealed out upon the silence in the 
 voice that the Army of Africa loved as the voice of their 
 Little One. And the cry came too late ; the volley was fired, 
 the crash of sound thrilled across the words that bade them 
 pause, the heavy smoke rolled out upon the air, the death 
 that was doomed was dealt. 
 
 But beyond the smoke-cloud he staggered slightly, and then 
 stood erect, still almost unharmed, grazed only by some few 
 
6oo UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 of the balls. The flash of fire was not so fleet as the swift- 
 ness of her love ; and on his breast she threw herself, and 
 flung her arms about him, and turned her head backward 
 with her old dauntless sunlit smile as the balls pierced her 
 bosom, and broke her limbs, and were turned away by'ffiat 
 shield of warm young life from him. 
 
 Her arm.s were gliding from about his neck, and her shot 
 limbs were sinking to the earth as he caught her up where 
 she dropped to his feet. 
 
 * God ! my child ! they have killed you ! ' 
 
 He suffered more, as the cry broke from him, than if the 
 bullets had brought him that death which he saw at one 
 glance had stricken down for ever all the glory of her child- 
 hood, all the gladness of her youth. 
 
 She laughed — all the clear, imperious, arch laughter of her 
 sunniest hours unchanged. 
 
 * Chut ! It is the powder and ball of France ! that does 
 not hurt. If it was an Arbico's bullet, now ! But wait ! 
 Here is the Marshal's order. He suspends your sentence ; I 
 have told him all. You are safe ! — do you hear ? — you are 
 safe ! How he looks ! Is he grieved to live ? Mes Franqais I 
 tell him clearer than I can tell — here is the order. The 
 General must have it. No — not out of my hand till the 
 General sees it. Fetch him, some of you — fetch him to me.* 
 
 * Great Heaven ! you have given your life for mine ! ' 
 The words broke from him in an agony as he held her 
 
 upward against his heart, himself so blind, so stunned, with 
 the sudden recall from death to life, and with the sacrifice 
 whereby life was thus brought to him, that he could scarce 
 see her face, scarce hear her voice, but only dimly, incredu- 
 lously, terribly knew, in some vague sense, that she was 
 dying, and dying thus for him. 
 
 She smiled up in his eyes, while even in that moment, 
 when her life was broken down like a wounded bird's, and 
 the shots had pierced through from her shoulder to her bosom, 
 a hot scarlet flush came oyerjher cheeks as she felt his toucli 
 and rested on his heart. 
 
 * A life 1 Tiens ! what is it to give ? We hold it in our 
 hands every hour, we soldiers, and toss it in change for a 
 draught of wine. Lay me down on the ground — at your feet 
 — so ! I shall live longest that way, and I have much to tell. 
 How they crowd around me 1 Mes soldatSy do not make that 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 601 
 
 grief and that rage over me. They are sorry they fired ; that 
 is foolish. They were only doing their duty, and they could 
 not hear me in time.' 
 
 But the brave words could not console those who had killed 
 the Child of the Tricolor ; they flung their carbines away, 
 they beat their breasts, they cursed themselves and the mother 
 who had borne them ; the silent, rigid, motionless phalanx 
 that had stood there in the dawn to see death dealt in the 
 inexorable penalty of the law" was broken up into a tumul- 
 tuous, breathless, heart-stricken, inturiated throng, maddened 
 with remorse, convulsed with sorrow, Turning wild eyes of 
 hate on him as on the cause through which their darling had 
 been stricken. He, laying her down with unspeakable gentle- 
 ness as she had bidden him, hung over her, leaning her head 
 against his arm, and watching in paralysed horror the help- 
 lessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood 
 beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart 
 so soon would beat no more. 
 
 * Oh, my child, my child ! ' he moaned, as the full might 
 and meaning of this devotion which had saved him at such 
 cost rushed on him. * What am I worth that you should 
 perish for me ? Better a thousand times have left me to my 
 fate ! Such nobility, such sacrifice, such love ! ' 
 
 The hot colour flushed her face once more ; she was strong 
 to the last to conceal that passion for which she was still 
 content to perish in her youth. 
 
 * Chut ! We are comrades, and you are a brave man. 
 I would do the same for any of my Spahis. Look you, 
 I never heard of your arrest till I heard, too, of your 
 sentence ' 
 
 She paused a moment, and her features grew white and 
 quivered with pain and with the oppression that seemed to 
 He Uke lead upon her chest. But she forced herself to be 
 stronger than the anguish which assailed her strength ; and 
 she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while her 
 voice still should serve her. 
 
 ' They will tell you how I did it — I have not time. The 
 Marshal gave his word you shall be saved ; there is no fear. 
 That is your friend who bends over me here ? — is it not ? A 
 fair face, a brave face 1 You will go back to your land — you 
 will live among your own people — and she, she jwill lov e you 
 now — now she knows you are of her Order ? ' 
 
6o2 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate 
 quivered through the words, but the purer, nobler nature 
 vanquished it; she smiled up in his eyes, heedless of the 
 tumult round them. 
 
 'You will be happy. That is well. Look you — it is 
 nothing that I did. I would have done it for anyone of my 
 soldiers. And for this ' — she touched the blood flowing from 
 her side with the old, bright, brave smile — * it was an acci- 
 dent ; they must not grieve for it. My men are good to me ; 
 they will feel such regret and remorse ; but do not let them. 
 I am glad to die.' 
 
 The words were unwavering and heroic, but for one moment 
 
 a convulsion went over her face ; the young life was so strong 
 
 in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was 
 
 so new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. 
 
 She loved life : the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation 
 
 of death were horrible to her as the blackness and the solitude 
 
 i of night to a young child. Death, like night, can be welcome 
 
 : only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the earth 
 
 1 that bore her buoyant steps ; the suns, the winds, the delights 
 
 ! of the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own 
 
 laughter, the mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of 
 
 the blue sky above her head, were all so sweet to her. Her 
 
 welcome of her death-shot was th« only untruth that had 
 
 ever soiled her fearless lips. Death was terrible ; yet she was 
 
 content — content to have come to it for his sake. 
 
 There was a ghastly stricken silence round her. The order 
 she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought 
 was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, 
 ihan the martyrdom of her death. 
 
 The colour was fast passing from her lips, and a mortal 
 pallor settling there in the stead of that rich bright hue, once 
 warm as the scarlet heart of the pomegranate. Her head 
 leant back on Cecil's breast, and she felt the great burning 
 tears fall one by one upon her brow as he hung speechless 
 over her: she put her hand upward and touched his eyes 
 softly : 
 
 ' Chut I What is it to die— just to die ? You have lived 
 yoiu* martyrdom ; I could not have done that. Listen, just 
 one moment. You will be rich. Take care of the old man 
 — he will not trouble long — and of Vole- qui- veut and Etoile, 
 and Boule Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you ? 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 603 
 
 They will show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers. I 
 should not like to think that they would starve.' 
 
 She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find 
 voice to utter ; and she thanked him with that old childlike 
 smile that had lost nothing of its light : 
 
 * That is good ; they will be happy with you. And see 
 here ; — that Arab must have back his white horse : he alone 
 saved you. Have heed that they spare him. And make my 
 grave somewhere where my army passes ; where I can hear 
 the trumpets, and the arms, and the passage of the troops — 
 God ! I forgot I I shall not wake when the bugles sound. 
 It will all end now, will it not ? That is horrible, horrible I ' 
 
 A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense 
 that all her glowing, redundant, sunlit, passionate life was 
 crushed out for ever from its place upon the earth forced 
 itself on and overwhelmed her. But she was of too brave a 
 mould to suffer any foe — even the foe that conquers kings — 
 to have power to appal her. She raised herself, and looked [ 
 at the soldiery around her, among them the men whose 
 carbines had killed her,- whose anguisJLJwas like the heart- 
 rending anguish of women. 
 
 ' Mes Fran9ais 1 That was a foolish word of mine. How 
 many of my bravest have fallen in death: and shall I be 
 afraid of what they welcomed? Do not grieve like that. 
 You could not help it; you were doing your duty. If the 
 shots had not come to me, they would have gone to him ; and 
 he has been unhappy so long, and borne wrong so patiently, 
 he has earned the right to live and enjoy. Now I— I have 
 been happy all my days, like a bird, like a kitten, like a 
 foal, just from being young and taking no thought. 1 should 
 have had to suffer if I had lived ; it is much best as it 
 is ' 
 
 Her voice failed her when she had spoken the heroic 
 words ; loss of blood was fast draining all strength from her, 
 and she quivered in a torture she could not wholly conceal : 
 he for whom she perished hung over her in an agony greater 
 far than hers ; it seemed a hideous dream to him that this 
 child lay dymg in his stead. 
 
 * Can nothing save her ? ' he cried, aloud. * God 
 that you had fired one moment sooner I ' 
 
 She heard ; and looked up at him with a look in which all 
 the passionate, hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted 
 
i:^ 
 
 604 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 and concealed so long spoke with an intensity she nevei 
 dreamed. 
 
 * She is content,' she whispered softly. * You did not 
 understand her rightly ; that was all.* 
 
 ' All I God, how I have wronged you ! ' 
 The full strength, and nobility, and devotion of this passion 
 1 he had disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met 
 her eyes ; for the first time he saw her as she was, for the 
 first time he saw all of which the splendid heroism of this 
 I untrained nature would have been capable under a different 
 j fate. And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a blow ; 
 I it filled him with a passion of remorse. 
 > * My darling! — my darling ! what have I done to be 
 ^j> worthy of such love ? * he murmured, while the tears fell 
 ^ from his blinded eyes, and his head drooped until his lips 
 met hers. At the first utterance of that word between them, 
 at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the 
 ^ anguish of a farewell in them, the colour suddenly flushed all 
 ^"^ over her blanched face ; she trembled in his arms; and a 
 great shivering sigh ran through her. It came too late, this 
 warmth of love. She learned what its sweetness might have 
 been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes sightless 
 and her heart without pulse, and her senses without con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 ' Hush I ' she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. 
 'Keep those kisses for Miladi. She will have the right to 
 love you ; she is of your * aristocrates ; * she is not * unsexed.' 
 As for me — I am only a little trooper who has saved my 
 comrade ! My soldiers, come round me one instant ; I shall 
 not long find words.' 
 
 Her eyes closed as she spoke ; a deadly faintness and 
 coldness passed over her ; and she gasped for breath. A 
 moment, and the resolute courage in her conquered : her eyes 
 opened and rested on the war-worn faces of her * children ' 
 — rested in a long-lost look of unspeakable wistfulness and 
 tenderness. 
 
 *I cannot ^peak as I would,' she said at length, while 
 her voice grew vefy^^ntT" * But I have loved you. A ll ia 
 said ! ' 
 
 All was uttered in those four brief words. ' She had 
 loved them.' The whole story of her young life was told in 
 the single phrase. And the gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous 
 
IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY 605 
 
 ruthless veterans of Africa who heard her could have turned 
 their weapons against their own breasts, and sheathed them 
 there, rather than have looked on to see their darling die. 
 
 * I have been too quick in anger sometimes — forgive it,* 
 she said gently. * And do not fight and curse among your- 
 selves ; it is bad amid brethren. Bury my Cross with me, if 
 they will let you ; and let the colours be over my grave, if you 
 can. Think of me when you go into battle ; and tell them 
 in France * 
 
 For the first time her own eyes filled with great tears as 
 the name of her beloved land paused upon her lips ; she 
 stretched her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, Hke 
 a lost child that vainly seeks its mother. 
 
 ' If I could only see France once more ! France ' 
 
 It was the last word upon her utterance ; her eyes met 
 Cecil's in one fleeting upward glance of unutterable tender- 
 ness ; then with her hands still stretched out westward to 
 where her country was, and with the dauntless heroism of her 
 smile upon her face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a 
 child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her Army of 
 
 Africa the Little One lay dead. 
 
 * * ^ ^^ mt ^ 
 
 In the shadow of his tent, at midnight, he whom she had 
 rescued stood looking down at a bowed, stricken form before 
 him with an exceeding yearning pity in his gaze. 
 
 The words had at length been spoken that had lifted from 
 him the burden of another's guilt ; the hour at last had come 
 in which his eyes had met the eyes of his friend, without a 
 hidden thought between them. The sacrifice was ended, the 
 martyrdom was over ; henceforth this doom of exile and of 
 WTetchedness would be but as a hideous dream ; henceforth 
 his name would be stainless among men, and the desire of 
 his heart would be given him. And in this hour of release 
 the strongest feeling in him was the sadness of an infinite 
 compassion ; and where his brother was stretched prostrate in 
 shame before him, Cecil stooped and raised him tenderly. 
 
 * Say no more,' he murmured. * It has been well for 
 me thajt I have sufi'ered these things. For yourself — if you 
 do indeed repent, and feel that you owe me any debt, atone 
 for it, and pay it, by letting your own life be strong in truth 
 and fair in honour.* 
 
 And it seemed to him that he himself had done no great 
 
6o8 UNDER TWO FLAGS 
 
 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 own love had grown, it looked to her unproven 
 and without desert, beside that which had chosen 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. I 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 towards 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 battahons 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 honoured, 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 db l'abm]6e, soldat de la feanch.* 
 
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