“Do you think I would tarry for that? Ah! I wish that I had let them tell me of God, that I might ask Him now to bless you! Quick, quick! Lend me your swiftest horse! One that will not tire. And send a second order by your aid-de-camp; the Arabs may kill me as I go, and then, they will not know!”
He stooped and touched her little, brown, scorched, feverish hand with reverence.
“My child, Africa has shown me much heroism, but none like yours. If you fall, he shall be safe, and France will know how to avenge its darling's loss.”
She turned and gave him one look, infinitely sweet, infinitely eloquent.
“Ah, France!” she said, so softly that the last word was but a sign of unutterable tenderness. The old, imperishable early love was not dethroned; it was there, still before all else. France was without rival with her.
Then, without another second's pause, she flew from them, and vaulting into the saddle of a young horse which stood without in the court-yard, rode once more, at full speed out into the pitiless blaze of the sun, out to the wasted desolation of the plains.
The order of release, indeed, was in her bosom; but the chances were as a million to one that she would reach him with it in time, ere with the rising of the sun his life would have set forever.
All the horror of remorse was on her; to her nature the bitter jealousy in which she had desired vengeance on him seemed to have rendered her a murderess. She loved him—loved him with an exceeding passion; and only in this extremity, when it was confronted with the imminence of death, did the fullness and the greatness of that love make their way out of the petulant pride and the wounded vanity which had obscured them. She had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck at him she changed—she became a woman and a martyr.
And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had done through the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the keen instinct of a trooper, her hand always on the butt of her belt pistol. For she knew well what the danger was of these lonely, unguarded, untraveled leagues that yawned in so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs, beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those plains with the old guerrilla skill, the old marvelous rapidity. She knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reeling from her saddle; that with every moment she might be surrounded by some desperate band who would spare neither her sex nor her youth. But that intoxication of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from her infancy, was all which sustained her in that race with death. It filled her veins with their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with their old matchless courage; but for it she would have dropped, heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done; under it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained force, and the supernatural strength of some young hunted animal. They might slay her, so that she left perforce her mission unaccomplished; but no dread of such a fate had even an instant's power to appall her or arrest her. While there should be breath in her, she would go on to the end.
There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swiftest pace her horse could make; and she was already worn by the leagues already traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim, solitary, barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand, as she had passed through the fortress gates, a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed over herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be veiled by clouds. With that single, starry gleam aslant on a level with her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains; now flooded with luster as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as the stormy western winds drove the cirrhi over it. But neither darkness nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk with strong wine, and she had but one dread—that the power of her horse would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she would reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen forever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise fall.