“All right, sir,” said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself, “Leave you alone with them demons? Damn me if I will!”
And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds.
Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the champagnes.
Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety, like a kitten's play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and one who might never return.
It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear—she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him—a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!
She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he—he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known—he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.
Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.
Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.
“What is your name?” she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.
“Well—some call me Seraph.”