Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 54

She laughed--all the clear, imperious, arch laughter of her sunniest hours unchanged.

"Chut! It is the powder and ball of France! _that_ does not hurt. If it were an Arbico's bullet now! But wait! Here is the Marshal's order. He suspends your sentence; I have told him all. You are safe!--do you hear?--you are safe! How he looks! Is he grieved to live? _Mes Francais!_ tell him clearer than I can tell--here is the order. The General must have it. No--not out of my hand till the General sees it.

Fetch him, some of you--fetch him to me."

"Great Heaven! you have given your life for mine!"

The words broke from him in an agony as he held her upward against his heart, himself so blind, so stunned, with the sudden recall from death to life, and with the sacrifice whereby life was thus brought to him, that he could scarce see her face, scarce hear her voice, but only dimly, incredulously, terribly knew, in some vague sense, that she was dying, and dying thus for him.

She smiled up in his eyes, while even in that moment, when her life was broken down like a wounded bird's, and the shots had pierced through from her shoulder to her bosom, a hot scarlet flush came over her cheeks as she felt his touch and rested on his heart.

"A life! _Tiens!_ what is it to give? We hold it in our hands every hour, we soldiers, and toss it in change for a draught of wine. Lay me down on the ground--at your feet--so! I shall live longest that way, and I have much to tell. How they crowd around me! _Mes soldats_, do not make that grief and that rage over me. They are sorry they fired; that is foolish. They were only doing their duty, and they could not hear me in time."

But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of the Tricolour; they flung their carbines away, they beat their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, they cursed themselves and the mother who had borne them; the silent, rigid, motionless phalanx that had stood there in the dawn to see death dealt in the inexorable penalty of the law was broken up into a tumultuous, breathless, heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with remorse, convulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on the cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, laying her down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden him, hung over her, leaning her head against his arm, and watching in paralysed horror the helplessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart so soon would beat no more.

"Oh, my child, my child!" he moaned, as the full might and meaning of this devotion which had saved him at such cost rushed on him. "What am I worth that you should perish for me? Better a thousand times have left me to my fate! Such n.o.bility, such sacrifice, such love!"

The hot colour flushed her face once more; she was strong to the last to conceal that pa.s.sion for which she was still content to perish in her youth.

"Chut! we are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would do the same for any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard of your arrest till I heard too of your sentence"----

She paused a moment, and her features grew white, and quivered with pain and with the oppression that seemed to lie like lead upon her chest. But she forced herself to be stronger than the anguish which a.s.sailed her strength; and she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while her voice still should serve her.

"They will tell you how I did it--I have not time. The Marshal gave his word you shall be saved; there is no fear. That is your friend who bends over me here?--is it not? A fair face, a brave face! You will go back to your land--you will live among your own people--and _she_, she will love you now--now she knows you are of her Order!"

Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate quivered through the words, but the purer, n.o.bler nature vanquished it; she smiled up in his eyes, heedless of the tumult round them.

"You will be happy. That is well. Look you--it is nothing that I did. I would have done it for any one of my soldiers. And for this"--she touched the blood flowing from her side with the old, bright, brave smile--"it was an accident; they must not grieve for it. My men are good to me; they will feel such regret and remorse; but do not let them. I am glad to die."

The words were unwavering and heroic, but for one moment a convulsion went over her face; the young life was so strong in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. She loved life: the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation of death were horrible to her as the blackness and the solitude of night to a young child. Death, like night, can be welcome only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the earth that bore her buoyant steps; the suns, the winds, the delights of the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own laughter, the mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of the blue sky above her head, were all so sweet to her. Her welcome of her death-shot was the only untruth that had ever soiled her fearless lips. Death was terrible; yet she was content--content to have come to it for his sake.

There was a ghastly stricken silence round her. The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than the martyrdom of her death.

The colour was fast pa.s.sing from her lips, and a mortal pallor settling there in the stead of that rich bright hue, once warm as the scarlet heart of the pomegranate. Her head leant back on Cecil's breast, and she felt the great burning tears fall one by one upon her brow as he hung speechless over her; she put her hand upward and touched his eyes softly.

"Chut! What is it to die--just to die? You have _lived_ your martyrdom; I could not have done that. Listen, just one moment. You will be rich.

Take care of the old man--he will not trouble long--and of Vole-qui-veut and Etoile, and Boule Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you?

They will show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers. I should not like to think that they would starve."

She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find voice to utter; and she thanked him with that old child-like smile that had lost nothing of its light.

"That is good; they will be happy with you. And see here;--that Arab must have back his white horse: he alone saved you. Have heed that they spare him. And make my grave somewhere where my Army pa.s.ses; where I can hear the trumpets, and the arms, and the pa.s.sage of the troops--O G.o.d! I forgot! I shall not wake when the bugles sound. It will all _end_ now, will it not? That is horrible, horrible!"

A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense that all her glowing, redundant, sunlit, pa.s.sionate life was crushed out for ever from its place upon the earth forced itself on and overwhelmed her. But she was of too brave a mould to suffer any foe--even the foe that conquers kings--to have power to appal her. She raised herself, and looked at the soldiery around her, among them the men whose carbines had killed her, whose anguish was like the heartrending anguish of women.

"Mes Francais! That was a foolish word of mine. How many of my bravest have fallen in death; and shall I be afraid of what they welcomed? Do not grieve like that. You could not help it; you were doing your duty.

If the shots had not come to me, they would have gone to him; and he has been unhappy so long, and borne wrong so patiently, he has earned the right to live and enjoy. Now I--I have been happy all my days, like a bird, like a kitten, like a foal, just from being young and taking no thought. I should have had to suffer if I had lived; it is much best as it is"----

Her voice failed her when she had spoken the heroic words; loss of blood was fast draining all strength from her, and she quivered in a torture she could not wholly conceal; he for whom she perished hung over her in an agony greater far than hers; it seemed a hideous dream to him that this child lay dying in his stead.

"Can nothing save her?" he cried aloud. "O G.o.d! that you had fired one moment sooner!"

She heard; and looked up at him with a look in which all the pa.s.sionate, hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted and concealed so long spoke with an intensity she never dreamed.

"She is content," she whispered softly. "You did not understand her rightly; that was all."

"_All!_ O G.o.d! how I have wronged you!"

The full strength, and n.o.bility, and devotion of this pa.s.sion he had disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met her eyes; for the first time he saw her as she was, for the first time he saw all of which the splendid heroism of this untrained nature would have been capable under a different fate. And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a blow; it filled him with a pa.s.sion of remorse.

"My darling!--my darling! what have I done to be worthy of such love?"

he murmured, while the tears fell from his blinded eyes, and his head drooped until his lips met hers. At the first utterance of that word between them, at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the anguish of a farewell in them, the colour suddenly flushed all over her blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great s.h.i.+vering sigh ran through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what its sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses without consciousness.

"Hus.h.!.+" she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. "Keep those kisses for Miladi. She will have the right to love you; she is of your '_aristocrates_,' she is not 'uns.e.xed.' As for me,--I am only a little trooper who has saved my comrade! My soldiers, come round me one instant; I shall not long find words."

Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and coldness pa.s.sed over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, and the resolute courage in her conquered: her eyes opened and rested on the war-worn faces of her "children"--rested in a long-lost look of unspeakable wistfulness and tenderness.

"I cannot speak as I would," she said at length, while her voice grew very faint. "But I have loved you. All is said!"

All was uttered in those four brief words. "She had loved them." The whole story of her young life was told in the single phrase. And the gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless veterans of Africa who heard her could have turned their weapons against their own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and sheathed them there, rather than have looked on to see their darling die.

"I have been too quick in anger sometimes--forgive it," she said gently.

"And do not fight and curse among yourselves; it is bad amid brethren.

Bury my Cross with me, if they will let you; and let the colours be over my grave, if you can. Think of me when you go into battle; and tell them in France"----

For the first time her own eyes filled with great tears as the name of her beloved land paused upon her lips; she stretched her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child that vainly seeks its mother.

"If I could only see France once more! France"----

It was the last word upon her utterance; her eyes met Cecil's in one fleeting upward glance of unutterable tenderness; then with her hands still stretched out westward to where her country was, and with the dauntless heroism of her smile upon her face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her Army of Africa the Little One lay dead.

_STRATHMORE._

The sun was setting, sinking downward beyond purple bars of cloud, and leaving a long golden trail behind it in its track--sinking slowly and solemnly towards the west as the day declined, without rest, yet without haste, as though to give to all the sons of earth warning and time to leave no evil rooted, no bitterness unhealed, no feud to ripen, and no crime to bring forth seed, when the day should have pa.s.sed away to be numbered with hours irrevocable, and the night should cast its pall over the dark deeds done, and seal their graves never to be unclosed. The sun was setting, and shedding its rich and yellow light over the green earth, on the winding waters, and the blue hills afar off, and down the thousand leafy aisles close by; but to one place that warm radiance wandered not, in one spot the rays did not play, the glory did not enter. That place was the deer-pond of the old Bois, where the dark plants brooding on the fetid waters, which only stirred with noisome things, had washed against the floating hair of lifeless women, and the sombre branches of the crowding trees had been dragged earthward by the lifeless weight of the self-slain, till the air seemed to be poisonous with death, and the gra.s.ses, as they moved, to whisper to the winds dread secrets of the Past. And here the light of the summer evening did not come, but only through the leafless boughs of one seared tree, which broke and parted the dark barrier of forest growth, they saw the west, and the sun declining slowly in its haze of golden air, sinking downward past the bars of cloud.

All was quiet, save the dull sounds of the parting waters, when some loathsome reptiles stirred among its brakes, or the hot breeze moved its pestilential plants; and in the silence they stood fronting each other; in this silence they had met, in it they would part. And there, on their right hand, through the break in the dank wall of leaves, shone the sun, looking earthward, luminous, and blinding human sight like the gaze of G.o.d.

The light from the west fell upon Erroll, touching the fair locks of his silken hair, and s.h.i.+ning in his azure eyes as they looked up at the sunny skies, where a bird was soaring and circling in s.p.a.ce, happy through its mere sense and joy of life; and on Strathmore's face the deep shadows slanted, leaving it as though cast in bronze, chill and tranquil as that of an Eastern Kabyl, each feature set into the merciless repose of one immovable purpose. Their faces were strangely contrasted, for the serenity of the one was that of a man who fearlessly awaits an inevitable doom, the serenity of the other that of a man who mercilessly deals out an implacable fate; and while in the one those present saw but the calmness of courage and of custom, in the other they vaguely shrank from a new and an awful meaning. For beneath the suave smile of the Duellist they read the intent of the Murderer.

The night was nigh at hand, and soon the day had to be gathered to the past, such harvest garnered with it as men's hands had sown throughout its brief twelve hours, which are so short in span, yet are so long in sin. "LET NOT THE SUN GO DOWN UPON YOUR WRATH." There, across the west, in letters of flame, the warning of the Hebrew scroll was written on the purple skies; but he who should have read them stood immutable yet insatiate, with the gleam of a tiger's l.u.s.t burning in his eyes--the l.u.s.t when it scents blood; the l.u.s.t that only slakes its thirst in life.

They fronted one another, those who had lived as brothers; while at their feet babbled the poisonous waters, and on their right hand shone the evening splendour of the sun.

"One!"