Under Two Flags

by Ouida

And she went to that vicinity, now that the daylight had just changed to evening, and the ruddy torch-glare was glowing everywhere from great pine boughs thrust in the ground, with their resinous branches steeped in oil and flaring alight. There was not a man that night in camp who would have dared oppose the steps of the young heroine of the Cross wherever they might choose, in their fantastic flight, to wander. The sentinels passing up and down the great space before the marquees challenged her, indeed, but she was quick to give the answering password, and they let her go by them, their eyes turning after the little picturesque form that every soldier of the Corps of Africa loved almost like the flag beneath which he fought. Once in the magic circle, she paused a while; the desire that urged her on, and the hate that impelled her backward, keeping her rooted there in the dusky shadow which the flapping standards threw.

To creep covertly into her rival's presence, to hide herself like a spy to see what she wished, to show fear, or hesitation, or deference, were not in the least what she contemplated. What she intended was to confront this fair, strange, cold, cruel thing, and see if she were of flesh and blood like other living beings, and do the best that could be done to outrage, to scourge, to challenge, to deride her with all the insolent artillery of camp ribaldry, and show her how a child of the people could laugh at her rank, and affront her purity, and scorn her power. Definite idea there was none to her; she had come on impulse. But a vague longing in some way to break down that proud serenity which galled her so sharply, and bring hot blood of shame into that delicate face, and cast indignity on that imperious and unassailable pride, consumed her.

She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old Invalide had done in the '89—a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his own Order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like, scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid luster of sweet, contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her wrong in silence—she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the ax fall down on the proud, snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips had kissed,—a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out,—and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make their feast. She stood and laughed by the side of the gray, angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed.

That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, had seen the entry of the Marseillais to Paris. She knew what the woman of the people had felt when she had bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters that fair and fallen head.

“I could do it—I could do it,” she thought, with the savage instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost only its ferocity—the same ferocity as had moved the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head of her rival. The school in which the child-soldier had been reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave in their inborn, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the human shares with the animal nature. There had been no more to teach her that these were criminal or forbidden than there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves.

Now, she acted on her impulse; her impulse of open scorn of rank, of reckless vindication of her right to do just whatsoever pleasured her; and she went boldly forward and dashed aside, with no gentle hand, the folds that hung before the entrance of the tent, and stood there with the gleam of the starry night and the glow of the torches behind her, so that her picturesque and brightly colored form looked painted on a dusky, lurid background of shadow and of flame.

The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made them both look up; they were Venetia Corona and a Levantine woman, who was her favorite and most devoted attendant, and had been about her from her birth. The tent was the first of three set aside for her occupancy, and had been adorned with as much luxury as was procurable, and with many of the rich and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so far as they could be hastily collected by the skill and quickness of the French intendance. Cigarette stood silently looking at the scene on which she had thus broken without leave or question; she saw nothing of it except one head lifted in surprise at her entrance—just such a head, just so proudly carried, just so crowned with gleaming hair as that which the Marseillaise had dragged through the dust of the streets and cast out into the lust of the sharks. Venetia hesitated a moment in astonished wonder; then, with the grace and the courtesy of her race, rose and approached the entrance of her tent, in which that fierce—half a soldier, half a child—was standing, with the fitful, reddened light behind. She recognized whose it was.

“Is it you, ma petite?” she said kindly. “Come within. Do not be afraid——”

She spoke with the gentle consideration of a great lady to one whom she admired for her heroism, compassionated for her position, and thought naturally in need of such encouragement. She had liked the frank, fearless, ardent brunette face of the Little Friend of the Flag; she had liked her fiery and indomitable defense of the soldier of Zaraila; she felt an interest in her as deep as her pity, and she was above the scruples which many women of her rank might have had as to the fitness of entering into conversation with this child of the army. She was gentle to her as to a young bird, a young kitten, a young colt; what her brother had said of the vivandiere's love for one whom the girl only knew as a trooper of Chasseurs filled with an indefinable compassion the woman who knew him as her own equal and of her own Order.