He forgot that he was not as he once had been. He forgot that he stood but as a private of the French army before an aristocrat whose name he had never heard.
She turned and looked at him, which she had never done before, so absorbed had she been in the chessmen, and so little did a Chasseur of the ranks pass into her thoughts. There was an extreme of surprise, there was something of offense, and there was still more of coldness in her glance; a proud languid, astonished coldness of regard, though it softened slightly as she saw that he had spoken in all courtesy of intent.
She bent her graceful, regal head.
“I thank you. Your very clever work can, of course, only be mine by purchase.”
And with that she laid aside the White King among his little troop of ivory Arabs and floated onward with her friends. Cecil's face paled slightly under the mellow tint left there by the desert sun and the desert wind; he swept the chessmen into their walnut case and thrust them out of sight under his knapsack. Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, with the great leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, casting a gloom that the gold points on his harness could scarcely break in its heavy shadow, and never moved till the echo of the voices, and the cloud of draperies, and the fragrance of perfumed laces, and the brilliancy of the staff officers' uniforms had passed away, and left the soldiers alone in their Chambre. Those careless cold words from a woman's lips had cut him deeper than the stick could have cut him, though it had bruised his loins and lashed his breast; they showed all he had lost.
“What a fool I am still!” he thought, as he made his way out of the barrack room. “I might have fairly forgotten by this time that I ever had the rights of a gentleman.”
So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen pang that day; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung him, by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he had shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket-fires, beneath the shade of wild fig trees, and in the stir and color of Bedouin encampments.
“I must ask to be ordered out of the city,” he thought, as he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians. “Here I get bitter, restless, impatient; here the past is always touching me on the shoulder; here I shall soon grow to regret, and to chafe, and to look back like any pining woman. Out yonder there, with no cares to think of but my horse and my troop, I am a soldier—and nothing else; so best. I shall be nothing else as long as I live. Pardieu, though! I don't know what one wants better; it is a good life, as life goes. One must not turn compliments to great ladies, that is all—not much of a deprivation there. The chessmen are the better for that; her Maltese dog would have broken them all the first time it upset their table!”
He laughed a little as he went on smoking; the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose. Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of insouciance remained; and there were times when there was not a more reckless or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than “Bel-a-faire-peur.” Under his gentleness there was “wild blood” in him still, and the wildness was not tamed by the fiery champagne-draught of the perilous, adventurous years he spent.
“I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he may strike his beak in once too far?” he pondered, with a sudden darker, graver touch of musing; and involuntarily he stretched his arm out, and looked at the wrist, supple as Damascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced beneath the skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy as any athlete's. He doubted his countenance then, fast rein as he held all rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him against his own passions in the breastplate of a soldier's first duty—obedience.