Rather unconsciously than by premeditation his steps turned through the streets that led to his old familiar haunt, the As de Pique; and dropping down on a bench under the awning, he asked for a draught of water. It was brought him at once; the hostess, a quick, brown little woman from Paris, whom the lovers of Eugene Sue called Rogolette, adding of her own accord a lump of ice and a slice or two of lemon, for which she vivaciously refused payment, though generosity was by no means her cardinal virtue.
“Bel-a-faire-peur” awakened general interest through Algiers; he brought so fiery and so daring a reputation with him from the wars and raids of the interior, yet he was so calm, so grave, so gentle, so listless. It was known that he had made himself the terror of Kabyle and Bedouin, yet here in the city he thanked the negro boy who took him a glass of lemonade at an estaminet, and sharply rebuked one of his men for knocking down an old colon with a burden of gourds and of melons; such a Roumi as this the good people of the Franco-African capital held as a perfect gift of the gods, and not understanding one whit, nevertheless fully appreciated.
He did not look at the newspapers she offered him; but sat gazing out from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Neapolitan felucca, down the checkered shadows and the many-colored masses of the little, crooked, rambling, semi-barbaric alley. He was thinking of the Napoleons in his sash and of the promise he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would keep it he was resolved. The few impressive, vivid words of the young vivandiere had painted before him like a picture the horrors of mutiny and its hopelessness; rather than that, through him, these should befall the men who had become his brethren-in-arms, he felt ready to let the Black Hawk do his worst on his own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness, he had never known in the excitement of active service came on him, brought by this sting of insult brought from the fair hand of an aristocrate.
There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The uttermost that could ever come to him would be a grade something higher in the army that now enrolled him; the gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau. Algerine warfare was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy or the Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with unerring omniscience a leader's genius under the kepi of a common trooper. Though he should show the qualities of a Massena or a Kleber, the chances were a million to one that he would never get even as much as a lieutenancy; and the raids on the decimated tribes, the obscure skirmishes of the interior, though terrible in slaughter and venturesome enough, were not the fields on which great military successes were won and great military honors acquired. The French fought for a barren strip of brown plateau that, gained, would be of little use or profit to them; he thought that he did much the same, that his future was much like those arid sand-plains, these thirsty, verdureless stretches of burned earth—very little worth the reaching.
The heavy folds of a Bedouin's haick, brushing the papers off the bench, broke the thread of his musings. As he stooped for them, he saw that one was an English journal some weeks old. His own name caught his eye—the name buried so utterly, whose utterance in the Sheik's tent had struck him like a dagger's thrust. The flickering light and darkness, as the awning waved to and fro, made the lines move dizzily upward and downward as he read—read the short paragraph touching the fortunes of the race that had disowned him:
“The Royallieu Succession.—We regret to learn that the Rt. Hon. Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to the family title on his father's death, has expired at Mentone, whither his health had induced him to go some months previous. The late Lord was unmarried. His next brother was, it will be remembered, many years ago, killed on a southern railway. The title, therefore, now falls to the third and only remaining son, the Hon. Berkeley Cecil, who, having lately inherited considerable properties from a distant relative, will, we believe, revive all the old glories of this Peerage, which have, from a variety of causes, lost somewhat of their ancient brilliancy.”
Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the record of his father's death, when Cigarette had rallied him with her gay challenge among the Moresco ruins. His face flushed hotly under the warm, golden hue of the desert bronze, then lost all its color as suddenly, till it was as pale as any of the ivory he carved. The letters of the paper reeled and wavered, and grew misty before his eyes; he lost all sense of the noisy, changing, polyglot crowd thronging past him; he, a common soldier in the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every law of birthright, he was now a Peer of England.
His first thought was for the dead man. True, there had been little amity, little intimacy, between them; a negligent friendliness, whenever they had met, had been all that they had ever reached. But in their childhood they had been carelessly kind to one another, and the memory of the boy who had once played beside him down the old galleries and under the old forests, of the man who had now died yonder where the southern sea-board lay across the warm, blue Mediterranean, was alone on him for the moment. His thoughts had gone back, with a pang, almost ere he had read the opening lines, to autumn mornings in his youngest years when the leaves had been flushed with their earliest red, and the brown, still pools had been alive with water-birds, and the dogs had dropped down charging among the flags and rushes, and his brother's boyish face had laughed on him from the wilderness of willows, and his brother's boyish hands had taught him to handle his first cartridge and to fire his first shot. The many years of indifference and estrangement were forgotten, the few years of childhood's confidence and comradeship alone remembered, as he saw the words that brought him in his exile the story of his brethren's fate and of his race's fortunes. His head sank, his face was still colorless, he sat motionless with the printed sheet in his hand. Once his eyes flashed, his breath came fast and uneven; he rose with a sudden impulse, with a proud, bold instinct of birth and freedom. Let him stand here in what grade he would, with the badge of a Corporal of the Army of Africa on his arm, this inheritance that had come to him was his; he bore the name and the title of his house as surely as any had ever borne it since the first of the Norman owners of Royallieu had followed the Bastard's banner.
The vagabond throngs—Moorish, Frank, Negro, Colon—paused as they pushed their way over the uneven road, and stared at him vacantly where he stood. There was something in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing none of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited fire in his eyes, that arrested all—from the dullest muleteer, plodding on with his string of patient beasts, to the most volatile French girl laughing on her way with a group of fantassins. He did not note them, hear them, think of them; the whole of the Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no place before him; he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier of the Empire; he saw nothing but the green wealth of the old home woods far away in England; he remembered nothing save that he, and he alone, was the rightful Lord of Royallieu.
The hand of a broad-chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on his shoulder, and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust toward him with the proffered drink. It startled him and recalled him to the consciousness of where he was. He stared one moment absently in the trooper's amazed face, and then shook him off with a suddenness that tossed back the cup to the ground; and, holding the journal clinched close in his hand, went swiftly through the masses of the people—out and away, he little noted where—till he had forced his road beyond the gates, beyond the town, beyond all reach of its dust and its babble and its discord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, where to the north the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships riding at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with the conical houses of hair, and desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there to lay them waste.