Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with her brass heel.
“All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat; eh, Pere Matou?” she said curtly. She was half impatient of her own momentary lapse into enthusiasm, and she knew the temper of her “children” as accurately as a bugler knows the notes of the reveille—knew that they loved to laugh even with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts half breaking over a comrade's corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, “Ah, the good fellow! He's swallowed his own cartouche!”
“Paradise!” growled Pere Matou. “Ouf! Who wants that? If one had a few bidons of brandy, now——”
“Brandy? Oh, ha! you are to be much more of aristocrats now than that!” cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire curling on her rosy piquant lips. “The Silver Pheasants have taken to patronize you. If I were you, I would not touch a glass, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you have the spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of her table—pardieu! That is not for soldiers of France!”
“What dost thou say?” growled Miou-Matou, peering up under his gray, shaggy brows.
“Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That is all. Sapristi! How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan with two words to one's maitre d'hotel, and a rouleau of gold that one never misses! The rich they can buy all things, you see, even heaven, so cheap!” With which withering satire Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that he must be already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk of champagne to him; and flitting down between the long rows of beds with the old disabled veterans who tended them, skimmed her way, like a bird as she was, into another great chamber, filled, like the first, with suffering in all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript, tossing in African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundred wounds.
Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through the entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy to the invalid soldiers—a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would brighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse might be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was a silver pheasant—bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats—when they were of the sex feminine. “An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle,” she would say, “but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock.” Which was the reason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence imaginable, but took the part of “Marquise,” of “Bel-a-faire-peur,” and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here and a touch there,—tender, soft, and bright,—since, however ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the narrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to visit—a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form of a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god.
The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tight clinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning misery that gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and again by the matador, and yet cannot die.
She bent over him softly.
“Tiens, M. Leon! I have brought you some ice.”