And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his narrow camp pallet, tired with a long day in saddle under the hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this unknown French trooper.
But Cigarette remained wakeful.
She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante, with her head on the beast's glossy flank and her hand among his mane. She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks, the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.
To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake—wide-awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with wrath. The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken—of that aristocrat whose name had been on Cecil's lips when he had been delirious. She had kept his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some unknown French soldier. She could not tell what the history was, but she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother's ring as the sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were lying in his coffin. No matter what the precise reason was—women, or debt, or accident, or ruin—these two, who had been familiar comrades, were now as strangers to each other; the one slumbered in ignorance near her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes of his friend recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled her, it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even now—this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of the night chase one another along the dreary plains—a shot might have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and country; even now all might be over!
And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before, at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth.
Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her own kiss would have touched the rose-bud, waxen petals of a cluster of oleander-blossoms; and she cared for him still!
While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the French camp around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette watched afar off the dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they circled slowly round at their outpost duty—eight leagues off, through a vast desert of shadow and silence, the two horsemen swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds obscured the skies. Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.
Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frowning ledge of rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of leveled, waiting muskets.
Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts. And causing thus to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had nothing to lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They might be driven into the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now far and wide over the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them; they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy, they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique must cover ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and sprung.
They had reached the center of the plain when the sound they had long looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, breathless stillness of the night. It was the Allah-il-Allah of their foes, the war-cry of the Moslem. Out of the gloom—whether from long pursuit or some near hiding-place they could not tell—there broke suddenly upon them the fury of an Arab onslaught. In the darkness all they could see were the flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snorting nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas—whether two, or twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not know—they never did know. All of which they were conscious was that in an instant, from the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked space, they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing, horrible entanglement of conflict, without the power to perceive or to number their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts of attack and of defense. All they were sensible of was one of those confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and din—an eternity in semblance, a second in duration—that can never be traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis of Gaul.