Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power to gauge.
Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian's, could detect the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior's soul and her democrat's impatience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, dark head toward the patrician on whom her instinct had fastened her hatred.
“You expressed your wish to see my Corporal's little sculptures again, madame,” he was murmuring now, as Cigarette got close enough under her flower shadows to catch the sense of the words. “To hear was to obey with me. He waits your commands yonder.”
Cecil obeyed the lackey who crossed the lawn, passed up the stairs, and stood before his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acacias still fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glow of a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the belt of flowers and trees. Cigarette gave a sharp, deep-drawn breath, and lay as mute and motionless as she had done before then, among the rushes of some dried brook's bed, scanning a hostile camp, when the fate of a handful of French troops had rested on her surety and her caution.
Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, turning to his Corporal.
“Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toys again. Spread them out.”
The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of his guest's presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that made Cigarette murmur to herself:
“If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!”
Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson that this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. He saluted his chief again, set the chessbox down upon the ledge of the marble balustrade, and stood silent, without once glancing at the fair and haughty face that was more brilliant still in the African starlight than it had been in the noon sun of the Chasseurs' Chambree. Courtesy was forbidden him as insult from a corporal to a nobly born beauty; he no more quarreled with the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevitable degradations, that followed on his entrance as a private under the French flag. He had been used to the impassable demarcations of Caste; he did not dispute them more now that he was without, than he had done when within, their magic pale.
The carvings were passed from hand to hand as the Marquis' six or eight guests, listless willing to be amused in the warmth of the evening after their dinner, occupied themselves with the ivory chess armies, cut with a skill and a finish worthy a Roman studio. Praise enough was awarded to the art, but none of them remembered the artist, who stood apart, grave, calm, with a certain serene dignity that could not be degraded because others chose to treat him as the station he filled gave them fit right to do.