Part 81 (1/2)
She was 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 scattered like frightened sheep from her path. There was something 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 are brethren by your look.
What are you to him?”
”To whom?”
”To the man who calls himself Louis Victor! A Cha.s.seur 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 themselves closer on his arm.
”Be still--fool!” 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; nor could any 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 hoa.r.s.ely, as she had done, when he had read on to the end. ”Shot! Oh, my G.o.d! and I----”
She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the bazaar, he submitting 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 knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not doubt; but discipline will not stay for that--”
”Silence, for mercy's sake! Is there no hope--no possibility?”
Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came through them. ”None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant.
It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?”
”I am his brother!”
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.
She 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 affirmation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relations.h.i.+p and their history from Cecil. ”You must go to him, then.”
He shook from head to foot.
”Yes, yes! But it will be too late!”