Part 44 (1/2)
Beneath a canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his own hands, was flung the torso of one of the splendid peasants of the Sables d'Olonne; one steeped so long in blood and wine and alcohol that he had forgotten the blue, bright waves that broke on the western sh.o.r.es of his boyhood's home, save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of the cool sea, as he was muttering now. Next him, curled, dog-like, with its round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which every muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned black as jet under twenty years of African sun. The midnight streets of Paris had seen its birth, the thieves' quarter had been its nest; it had no history, it had almost no humanity; it was a perfect machine for slaughter, no more--who had ever tried to make it more?
Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a child's, whose uncovered chest was delicate as a girl's, and through whose long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were stealing as his rosy mouth murmured, ”Mere! Mere! Pauvre mere!” He was a young conscript taken from the glad vine-country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in the rock beside the sunny, br.i.m.m.i.n.g river, and half-buried under its grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the palace to its heir. There were many others beside these; and Cecil looked at them with those weary, speculative, meditative fancies which, very alien to his temperament, stole on him occasionally in the privations and loneliness of his existence here--loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most painful of all solitude.
Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaigning, in the excitement of warfare; there were times even when it yielded him absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests more genuine and vivid than any he had known in his former world. But, in the monotony and the confinement of the barrack routine, his days were often intolerable to him. Morning after morning he rose to the same weary round of duty, the same series of petty irritations, of physical privations, of irksome repet.i.tions, to take a toss of black, rough coffee, and begin the day knowing it would bring with it endless annoyances without one gleam of hope. Rose to spend hours on the exercise-ground in the glare of a burning sun, railed at if a trooper's accouterments were awry, or an insubordinate scoundrel had p.a.w.ned his regulation s.h.i.+rt; to be incessantly witness of tyrannies and cruelties he was powerless to prevent, and which he continually saw undo all he had done, and render men desperate whom he had spent months in endeavoring to make contented; to have as the only diversions for his few instants of leisure loathsome pleasures that disgusted the senses they were meant to indulge, and that brought him to scenes of low debauchery from which all the old, fastidious instincts of his delicate, luxurious taste recoiled. With such a life as this, he often wondered regretfully why, out of the many Arab swords that had crossed his own, none had gone straight to his heart; why, out of the many wounds that had kept him hovering on the confines of the grave, none had ever brought him the end and the oblivion of death.
Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hards.h.i.+ps of his present career, but had only owned the power to command, to pardon, to lead, and to direct, as Alan Bertie before him had done with his Irregular Cavalry in the Indian plains,--such a thought would never have crossed him; he was far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not only satisfied, but happy. What made his life in the barracks of Algiers so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled obedience to a bidding that he knew often capricious and unjust as it was cruel; which were so unendurable to his natural pride, yet to which he had hitherto rendered undeviating adhesion and submission, less for his own sake than for that of the men around him, who, he knew, would back him in revolt to the death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in the fas.h.i.+on that the vivandiere's words had pictured with such terrible force and truth.
”Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be the wiser way to draw my own saber across my throat?” he thought, as the brutalized companions.h.i.+p in which his life was spent struck on him all the more darkly because, the night before, a woman's voice and a woman's face had recalled memories buried for twelve long years.
But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a victory over the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium-sleep from the world that had grown so dark to him, it was not in him to give under now. In his own way he had found a duty to do here, though he would have laughed at anyone who should have used the word ”duty” in connection with him.
In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have been blown from the guns' mouths to serve him, he had made good the ”Coeur vaillant se fait Royaume” of his House. And he was, moreover, by this time, a French soldier at heart and in habit, in almost all things--though the English gentleman was not dead in him under the harness of a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique.
This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that kindly gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach their liking; went through the customary routine of his past with that exact.i.tude 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 cha.s.ses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long string of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, without such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne off by some predatory tribe; and returned, jaded, weary, parched with thirst, scorched through with heat, and covered with white dust, to be kept waiting in his saddle, by his Colonel's orders, outside the barrack for three-quarters of an hour, whether to receive a command or a censure he was left in ignorance.
When the three-quarters had pa.s.sed, he was told M. le Commandant had gone long ago, and did not require him!
Cecil said nothing.
Yet he reeled slightly as he threw himself out of saddle; a nausea and a giddiness had come on him. To have pa.s.sed nigh an hour motionless in his stirrups, with the skies like bra.s.s above him, while he was already worn with riding from sunrise well-nigh to sunset, with little to appease hunger and less to slake thirst, made him, despite himself, stagger dizzily under a certain sense of blindness and exhaustion as he dismounted.
The Cha.s.seur who had brought him the message caught his arm eagerly.
”Are you hurt, mon Caporal?”
Cecil shook his head. The speaker was one known in the regiment as Pet.i.t Picpon, who had begun life as a gamin of Paris, and now bade fair to make one of the most brilliant of the soldiers of Africa. Pet.i.t Picpon had but one drawback to this military career--he was always in insubordination; the old gamin dare-devilry was not dead in him, and never would die; and Pet.i.t Picpon accordingly was perpetually a hero in the field and a ragam.u.f.fin in the times of peace. Of course he was always arrayed against authority, and now--being fond of his galonne with that curious doglike, deathless attachment that these natures, all reckless, wanton, destructive, and mischievous though they may be, so commonly bestow--he muttered a terrible curse under his fiercely curled mustaches.
”If the Black Hawk were nailed up in the sun like a kite on a barn-door, I would drive twenty nails through his throat!”
Cecil turned rapidly on him.
”Silence, sir! or I must report you. Another speech like that, and you shall have a turn at Beylick.”
It went to his heart to rebuke the poor fellow for an outburst of indignation which had its root in regard for himself, but he knew that to encourage it by so much even as by an expression of grat.i.tude for the affection borne him, would be to sow further and deeper the poison-seeds of that inclination to mutiny and that rebellious hatred against their chief already only planted too strongly in the squadrons under Chateauroy's command.
Pet.i.t Picpon looked as crestfallen as one of his fraternity could; he knew well enough that what he had said could get him twenty blows of the stick, if his corporal chose to give him up to judgment; but he had too much of the Parisian in him still not to have his say, though he should be shot for it.
”Send me to Beylick, if you like, Corporal,” he said st.u.r.dily; ”I was in wrath for you--not for myself.”
Cecil was infinitely more touched than he dared, for the sake of discipline, for sake of the speaker himself, to show; but his glance dwelt on Pet.i.t 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 Pet.i.t 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 un.o.bserved by those in command over him, with hands and heels in the dexterous somersaults of his early days.
Now he went along without any unprofessional antics, biting the tip of a smoked-out cigar, which he had picked up off the pavement in sheer instinct, retained from the old times when he had used to rush in, the foremost of la queue, into the forsaken theaters of Bouffes or of Varietes in search for those odds and ends which the departed audience might have left behind them--one of the favorite modes of seeking a livelihood with the Parisian night-birds.
”Dame! I will give it up then,” resolved Picpon, half aloud, valorously.
Now Picpon had come forth on evil thoughts intent.
His officer--a careless and extravagant man, the richest man in the regiment--had given him a rather small velvet bag, sealed, with directions to take it to a certain notorious beauty of Algiers, whose handsome Moresco eyes smiled--or, at least, he believed so--exclusively for the time on the sender. Picpon was very quick, intelligent, and much liked by his superiors, so that he was often employed on errands; and the tricks he played in the execution thereof were so adroitly done that they were never detected. Picpon had chuckled to himself over this mission. It was but the work of an instant for the lithe, nimble fingers of the ex-gamin to undo the bag without touching the seal; to see that it contained a hundred Napoleons with a note; to slip the gold into the folds of his ceinturon; to fill up the sack with date-stones; to make it a.s.sume its original form so that none could have imagined it had been touched, and to proceed with it thus to the Moorish lionne's dwelling.