Under Two Flags Part 32

Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha Road was a circle of Arab tents; the circle was irregularly kept, and the Krumas 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 beit el shar of the Sheik, with his standard stuck into the earth in front 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 n.o.ble 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 couscousson, the Bedouins 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 figures of their brethren, with the folds of their sweeping burnous floating in the gloom. It was a picture, Rembrandt in color, Oriental in composition; with the darkness surrounding 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 cus.h.i.+ons, rich enough for a seraglio, while the rest squatted on the morocco carpet that covered the bare ground, and that was strewn with round bra.s.s 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 cus.h.i.+ons facing the open front of the tent, was a guest whom the Khalifa delighted to honor. Only a Corporal of Cha.s.seurs, 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 honors of the desert.

The story of their friends.h.i.+p ran thus:

The tribe was now allied with France, 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 Khalifa and the Cha.s.seur 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.

In these, through four or five seasons of warfare, the Sheik and the Cha.s.seur had encountered each other, till each had grown to look for the other's face as soon as the standards of the Bedouins flashed in the suns.h.i.+ne 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 succ.u.mbed to death.

At last it came to pa.s.s that, after a lengthened term of this chivalrous antagonism, the tribe were sorely pressed by the French troops, and could no longer ma.s.s its fearless front to face them, but had to flee southward to the desert, and enc.u.mbered 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 honor 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 to look, and whom he guarded in his tent as the chief pearl of all his treasures; herds, flocks, arms, even his horses, all save the honor of his tribe, he would have surrendered rather than surrender Djelma. It was a pa.s.sion with him; a pa.s.sion that not even the iron of his temper and the dignity of his austere calm could abate or conceal; and the rumor 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 favorite speculation round the picket fires at night, and in the scorching noons, when the men lay stripped to their waist--panting like tired dogs under the hot withering breath that stole to them, sweeping over the yellow seas of sands.

Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great Djied as something beyond all that her s.e.x had ever given them, and to snare her in some unwary moment was the chief thought of Zephyr and Spahi 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 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.

Re-enforcements 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 forever, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 endless charge; the chief in command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, swore heavily as he saw many of his best men dropping off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two hundred napoleons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik's head or the living beauty of Djelma.

One day the Cha.s.seurs had pitched their camp where 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 Chateauroy, though his frame was like an Arab's, and knit into Arab endurance, was 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 rigor, but he was a fine soldier, and never spared himself any of the hards.h.i.+ps 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 hors.e.m.e.n were seen looming nearer and nearer with every moment; they were some Spahis who had been out sweeping the country for food. The mighty frame of Chateauroy, almost as unclothed as an athlete's, started from its slumberous, panting rest; his eyes lightened hungrily; he muttered a fiery oath; "Mort de Dieu!--they have the woman!"

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 foe, and the Colonel's face flushed darkly with an eager, l.u.s.tful warmth, as he looked upon his captive. Rumor had not outboasted the Arab girl's beauty; it was l.u.s.trous 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 Djelma was as innocent as the gazelle, whose grace she resembled, and 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 Khalifa, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt--Chateauroy treated his squadrons with much the same sans-facon familiarity and brutality that a chief of filibusters uses in his.

"So! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of water to a drummer, they say?"

The Cha.s.seur gave the salute with a calm deference. A faint flush pa.s.sed over the sun-bronze of his forehead. He had thought the Sidney-like sacrifice had been un.o.bserved.

"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 those showy fooleries. You bribe your comrades for their favoritism too openly. Ventre bleu! I forbid it--do you hear?"

"I hear, mon Colonel."

The a.s.sent 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!" 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 stick 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, ma.s.sive form of Chateauroy started from the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion started 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 G.o.d! I have a mind to have you shot like a dog!"

The Cha.s.seur 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, sardonic 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 Cha.s.seur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy grace that camp life 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 pa.s.sed from the French camp in the full burning tide of noon.

"If the Arabs kill him," he thought, "I will forgive Ilderim five seasons of rebellion."

The Cha.s.seur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein across the scorching plateau. He rode to what he knew was like 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 hors.e.m.e.n returning from a foraging quest, and in ignorance as yet of the abduction 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 n.o.blest type 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 piercing luminance of his eyes had a grand and kingly majesty.

A glance of recognition 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 shepherd'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' mistress, and abandoned later to the army. The only terms on which he could have her restored were instant submission to the Imperial rule, and personal homage of himself and all his Djouad to the Marquis as the representatives of France--homage in which they should confess themselves dogs and the sons of dogs.

So ran the message of peace.

The Cha.s.seur 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 pa.s.sion and what agony could be--things unknown in the world where the chief portion of his life had pa.s.sed. 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 defenseless women were torn from their rest by the unsparing hands of pitiless soldiers. But the torture which shook for a second the steel-knit frame of this Arab pa.s.sed 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 sabers above their heads, and rushed down on the bearer of this shame to their chief and their tribe. The Cha.s.seur 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: