Reaching the heights he stood still involuntarily, and looked down once more on the words that told him of his birthright; in the blinding, intense light of the African day they seemed to stand out as though carved in stone; and as he read them once more a great darkness passed over his face—this heritage was his, and he could never take it up; this thing had come to him, and he must never claim it. He was Viscount Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and he was dead forever in the world's belief; he must live, and grow old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his name and his rights buried, and his years passed as a private soldier of France.
The momentary glow which had come to him, with the sudden resurrection of hope and of pride, faded utterly as he slowly read and re-read the lines of the journal on the broken terraces of the hill-side, where the great fig trees spread their fantastic shadows, and through a rocky channel a russet stream of shallow waters threaded its downward path under the reeds, and no living thing was near him save some quiet browsing herds far off, and their Arab shepherd-lad that an artist might have sketched as Ishmael. What his future might have been rose before his thoughts; what it must be rose also, bitterly, blackly, drearily in contrast. A noble without even a name; a chief of his race without even the power to claim kinship with that race; owner by law of three thousand broad English acres, yet an exile without freedom to set foot on his native land; by heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by circumstances, now and forever, till an Arab bullet should cut in twain his thread of life, a soldier of the African legions, bound to obey the commonest and coarsest boor that had risen to a rank above him: this was what he knew himself to be, and knew that he must continue to be without one appeal against it, without once stretching out his hand toward his right of birth and station.
There was a passionate revolt, a bitter heart-sickness on him; all the old freedom and peace and luxury and pleasure of the life he had left so long allured him with a terrible temptation; the honors of the rank that he should now have filled were not what he remembered. What he longed for with an agonized desire was to stand once more stainless among his equals; to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life; to return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored memory, as one whom violent death had well snatched from the shame of a criminal career.
“But who would believe me now?” he thought. “Besides, this makes no difference. If three words spoken would reinstate me, I could not speak them at that cost. The beginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer justice sake there is no drawing back now. Let him enjoy it; God knows I do not grudge him it.”
Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no evil lay in his heart against the younger brother to whose lot had fallen all good gifts of men and fate, there was almost unbearable anguish on him in this hour in which he learned the inheritance that had come to him, and remembered that he could never take again even so much of it as lay in the name of his fathers. When he had given his memory up to slander and oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame; when he had let his life die out from the world that had known him, and buried it beneath the rough, weather-stained, blood-soaked cloth of a private soldier's uniform, he had not counted the cost then, nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had fallen on him very heavily now.
Where he stood under some sheltered columns of a long-ruined mosque whose shafts were bound together by a thousand withes and wreaths of the rich, fantastic Sahel foliage, an exceeding weariness of longing was upon him—longing for all that he had forfeited, for all that was his own, yet never could be claimed as his.
The day was intensely still; there was not a sound except when, here and there, the movement of a lizard under the dry grasses gave a low, crackling rustle. He wondered almost which was the dream and which the truth: that old life that he had once led, and that looked now so far away and so unreal; or this which had been about him for so many years in the camps and the bivouacs, the barracks and the battlefields. He wondered almost which he himself was—an English Peer on whom the title of his line had fallen, or a Corporal of Chasseurs who must take his chief's insults as patiently as a cur takes the blows of its master; that he was both seemed to him, as he stood there with the glisten of the sea before and the swelling slopes of the hillside above, a vague, distorted nightmare.
Hours might have passed, or only moments—he could not have told; his eyes looked blankly out at the sun-glow, his hand instinctively clinched on the journal whose stray lines had told him in an Algerine trattoria that he had inherited what he never could enjoy.
“Are they content, I wonder?” he thought, gazing down that fiery blaze of shadowless light. “Do they ever remember?”
He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what he was.