Part 84 (1/2)

They were quite still now, closed around her; these ferocious 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, which surpa.s.sed 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 chivalries of the school of Abd-el-Kader; 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 pa.s.sionate 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.

”Maiden,” he said gently, ”we are Arabs, but we are not brutes. We swore to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are not vile enough to accept a martyrdom. Take my horse--he is the swiftest of my troop--and go you on your errand. You are safe from me.”

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 emotion. ”Ah! for pity's sake, make haste and kill me, so that this only may reach him!”

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 n.o.bility of the 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 s.e.x.

”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 comprehend that he gave her back both liberty and life, and, with the surrender of the horse he loved, the n.o.blest 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 light of noon, as she turned her burning eyes full on him.

”Ah! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally with Christians!

If I live, 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 flew across the plains. He looked after a while, through the dim, tremulous darkness that seemed cleft by the rush of the gallop as the clouds are cleft by lightning, while his tribe sat silent on their horses in moody, unwilling consent; savage in that they had 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 dullness of the night. Her brain had no sense, her hands had no feeling, her eyes had no sight; the rus.h.i.+ng 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 toward the east and murmur, in her terror of that white dawn, that must soon break, the only prayer that had been ever uttered by the lips no mother's kiss had ever touched:

”O G.o.d! keep the day back!”

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY.

There 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, gray and serene, with only the one colorless 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 honored, the comrades that loved him, should rise to his rescue; casting off the yoke of discipline, and remembering 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 forever. 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 casting it far from him.