And she dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off at the height of her speed into camp—a very city of canvas, buzzing with the hum of life, regulated with the marvellous skill and precision of French warfare, yet with the carelessness and the picturesqueness of the desert-life pervading it.
Like wave rushing on wave of some tempestuous ocean, the men swept out to meet her in one great surging tide of life, impetuous, passionate, idolatrous, exultant, with all the vivid ardour, all the uncontrolled emotion, of natures south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away from their mid-day rest as from their military toil, moved as by one swift breath of fire, and flung themselves out to meet her, the chorus of a thousand voices ringing in deafening vivas to the skies. She was enveloped in that vast sea of eager, furious lives, in that dizzy tumult of vociferous cries, and stretching hands, and upturned faces. As her soldiers had done the night before, so these did now—kissing her hands, her dress, her feet, sending her name in thunder through the sunlit air, lifting her from off her horse, and bearing her, in a score of stalwart arms, triumphant in their midst.
She was theirs—their own—the Child of the Army, the Little One whose voice above their dying brethren had the sweetness of an angel's song, and whose feet, in their hours of revelry, flew like the swift and dazzling flight of gold-winged orioles. And she had saved the honour of their Eagles; she had given to them and to France their god of Victory. They loved her—O God, how they loved her!—with that intense, breathless, intoxicating love of a multitude which, though it may stone to-morrow what it adores to-day, has yet for those on whom it has once been given thus a power no other love can know—a passion unutterably sad, deliriously strong.
That passion moved her strangely.
As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man breathed among that tumultuous mass but would have died that moment at her word; not one mouth moved among that countless host but breathed her name in pride, and love, and honour.
She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc. The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and unnumbered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn, as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the crowded soldiery.
"It was nothing," she answered them; "it was nothing. It was for France."
For France! They shouted back the beloved word with tenfold joy; and the great sea of life beneath her tossed to and fro in stormy triumph, in frantic paradise of victory, ringing her name with that of France upon the air, in thunder-shouts like spears of steel smiting on shields of bronze.
But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.