Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, though a rare and galling sense of intense inferiority, of intense mortification, was upon her; though she would almost have given the Cross which was on her breast that she had never come into this woman's sight.
“Oh, ah!” she answered recklessly, with the red blood flushing her face again at the only evasion of truth of which the little desperado, with all her sins, had ever been guilty. “I hate you, Milady, because of your Order—because of your nation—because of your fine, dainty ways—because of your aristocrat's insolence—because you treat my soldiers like paupers—because you are one of those who do no more to have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun, and who oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it never has carried a twig or a moss!”
Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and of surprise that bitterly discomfited the speaker. To Venetia Corona the girl-soldier seemed mad; but it was a madness that interested her, and she knew at a glance that this child of the army was of no common nature and no common mind.
“I do not wish to discuss democracy with you,” she answered, with a tone that sounded strangely tranquil to Cigarette after the scathing acrimony of her own. “I should probably convince you as little as you would convince me; and I never waste words. But I heard you to-day claim a certain virtue—justice. How do you reconcile with that your very hasty condemnation of a stranger of whose motives, actions, and modes of life it is impossible you can have any accurate knowledge?”
Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her heart was hot with rage. She had come prepared to upbraid and to outrage this patrician with every jibe and grossness camp usage could supply her with, and—she stood dumb before her! She could only feel an all-absorbing sense of being ridiculous, and contemptible, and puerile in her sight.
“You bring two charges against me,” said Venetia, when she had vainly awaited answer. “That I treat your comrades like paupers, and that I rob the people—my own people, I imagine you to mean—of their dues. In the first, how will you prove it?—in the second, how can you know it?”
“Pardieu, Milady!” swore Cigarette recklessly, seeking only to hold her own against the new sense of inferiority and of inability that oppressed her. “I was in the hospital when your fruits and your wines came; and as for your people, I don't speak of them,—they are all slaves, they say, in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can turn any gold in the furrows—I speak of the people. Of the toiling, weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes who labor on, and on, and on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sunlight and take your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered poor! What right have you to have your path strewn with roses, and every pain spared from you; only to lift your voice and say, 'Let that be done,' to see it done?—to find life one long, sweet summer day of gladness and abundance, while they die out in agony by thousands, ague-stricken, famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want only of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn to dawn like gold upon your head?”
Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her hearer's face grew very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke, those luminous, earnest eyes, whose power even the young democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers.
“Ah, child! Do you think we never think of that? You wrong me—you wrong my Order. There are many besides myself who turn over that terrible problem as despairingly as you can ever do. As far as in us lies, we strive to remedy its evil; the uttermost effort can do but little, but that little is only lessened—fearfully lessened—whenever Class is arrayed against Class by that blind antagonism which animates yourself.”
Cigarette's intelligence was too rapid not to grasp the truths conveyed by these words; but she was in no mood to acknowledge them.