Part 72 (2/2)

As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door of the As de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in salute, with her saucy, wayward laugh. He was the impersonation of that vast, silent, awful, irresponsible 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 sand choking their mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that might be present. She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of your thorough inborn democrat, all the gay, insouciant indifference to station of the really free and untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without a word or a moan, was greater than all the Marshals glittering in their stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, with rank--pooh! You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause in their floating pa.s.sage 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!” she would have said, ”what did that mean in '15? A chorus of magpies chattering over one stricken eagle!”

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 barrack-gate. He was nothing to her: it was her army that crowned her.

Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart beat fast under its gold-laced packet 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 recognized that she had done greatly. There was a group before her, large and brilliant, but at them Cigarette never looked; what she saw were the 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 skilled to such work, echoed to the farthest end of the long lines of troops, ”I have the honor to discharge to-day the happiest duty of my life. In conveying to you the expression of the Emperor's approval of your n.o.ble conduct in the present campaign, I express the sentiments of the whole Army. Your action on the day of Zaraila was as brilliant in conception as it was great in execution; and the courage you displayed was only equaled by your patriotism. May the soldiers of many wars remember 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 Honor.”

As the brief and soldierly words rolled down the ranks of the listening regiments, he stooped forward from the saddle and fastened the red ribbon on her breast; while from the whole gathered ma.s.s, 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 upward in fierce, tumultuous, idolatrous love to those cruel, cloudless 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. Honor to her was honor 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.

”Francais!”

That was all she said; in that one word of their common nationality she spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and to the conscript of the ranks. ”Francais!” That one t.i.tle made them all equal in her sight; whoever claimed it was honored 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 was 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 hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face that for once 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 splendor. In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born of a people's love and of the impossible 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 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 springtime 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.

”M. le Marshal, 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--not while 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 color had flushed back, bright and radiant, to her cheeks; her eyes glanced with their old daring; her contemptuous, 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, ha! And how?--by scampering fast on my mare, and asking for 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 Cha.s.seur d'Afrique, I tell you. What did he do? Why, 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 scorch 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 Arabs 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 f.a.g-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 honors 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, ha! Napoleon Premier would not have left his Marshals to ask that! 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 dangerous 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.”

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