The Chasseur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, consideration and courtesy had been things long unshown to him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentleman. Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference in rank and station between them flashed on his memory, he was raising it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate to his superior, when Chanrellon's grasp closed on it readily. The victim of Coeur d'Acier was of as gallant a temper as ever blent the reckless condottiere with the thoroughbred noble.
The Chasseur colored slightly, as he remembered that he had forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations.
“I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte,” he said simply, as he gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and passed onward rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have forgotten the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been guilty.
“Dieu!” muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the glasses shook. “I would give a year's pay to know that fine fellow's history. He is a gentleman—every inch of him.”
“And a good soldier, which is better,” growled the General of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow over the heavy tillage of Alsace.
“A private of Chateauroy's?” asked the Tirailleur, lifting his eye-glass to watch the Chasseur as he went.
“Pardieu—yes—more's the pity,” said Chanrellon, who spoke his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. “The Black Hawk hates him—God knows why—and he is kept down in consequence, as if he were the idlest lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at what he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finer Roumi in Africa—not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, there has not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that he has not had his share in. There has not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila that he had not gone out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouin steel. He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant's own hands. He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs' center, and gave us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred more like stories of him—every one of them true as my saber—and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!”
“Superb!” said the General, with a grim significance. “Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then”—and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy—“but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders.”
“The Black Hawk can read, too,” said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the “petit nom,” that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. “No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons—pong!—till the thing drops dead—even where he strikes a bird of his own brood.”
“That is bad,” said the old General sententiously. “There are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship's skipper, and a military chief.”