"Though I starve or go mad, I cannot eat nor sleep till I have spat on his dead face," were the only words she answered to Olga's entreaty that she would take food. But she busied herself about her daily tasks with pinched white face, pinched white lips, and cavernous black brooding eyes.
"Rivoli's next meal here will be his last," thought Olga Kyrilovitch, and shuddered.
Terrible and unfathomable as was Carmelita's agony of mind, she insisted on carrying out the programme for the escape of the two Russians fixed for that day, and Olga salved a feeling of selfishness by assuring herself that anything which took the girl's thoughts from her own tragedy was for her good.
That afternoon, Feodor Kyrilovitch made his unobtrusive exit from the Legion and was admitted by his sister at the back door of the Café. In his pocket was a letter enclosed in a blank envelope. On an inner envelope was the following name and address: "Lady Huntingten, Elham Old Hall, Elham, Kent, England."
By the five-thirty train two flighty females--one blonde, the other brunette--were seen off from the little Sidi-bel-Abbès station of the Western Algerian Railway, which runs from Tlemcen to Oran, by Mademoiselle Carmelita of the Café de la Légion. Their conversation and playful badinage with the guard of Légionnaires, which is always on duty at the platform gate, were frivolous and unedifying. Sergeant Boulanger, as gallant to women as he was ferocious to men, vowed to his admired Carmelita that it broke his heart to announce that he feared he could not allow her two friends to proceed on their journey until--Carmelita's white face seemed to go a little whiter--they had both given him a chaste salute. On hearing this, one of the girls fled squealing to the train, while the other, with very real blushes and unfeigned reluctance, submitted her face to partial burial beneath the vast moustache of the amorous Sergeant.... As the ramshackle little train crawled out of the station, this girl said to the one who had fled: "You were a sneak to bolt like that, Feodor," and received the somewhat cryptic reply--
"My dear Olga, and where should we both be now if his lips had felt the bristles around mine? ... You don't suppose that a double shave, twice over, makes a man's face like a girl's, do you?..."
These two young females found Lady Huntingten all, and more than all, her son had prophesied. When Feodor and Olga Kyrilovitch left the hospitable roof of Elham Old Hall, she parried their protestations of gratitude with the statement that she was fully repaid and over-paid, for anything she had been able to do for them, by the pleasure of talking with friends of her son, friends who had actually been with him but a few days before, and who so fully bore out the statements contained in his letter to the effect that he was in splendid health and having a splendid time.
On returning to her Café, Carmelita found the Bucking Bronco, John Bull, Reginald Rupert, 'Erbiggins, and several other Légionnaires awaiting admittance. Having opened her bar and mechanically ministered to her customers' needs, the unsmiling, broken-looking Carmelita, all of whose vitality and energy seemed concentrated in her burning eyes beckoned to the American and led him into her room Gripping his wrist with her cold hand, and almost shaking him in her too-long suppressed frenzy:
"Have you told Jean Boule?" she asked. "When will he kill him? Where? Quick, tell me! I must be there. I must see him do it.... Oh! He will die too quickly.... It is too good a death for such a reptile.... It is no punishment.... Why should he not suffer some thousandth part of what I suffer?"
"Look at hyar, Carmelita, honey," interrupted the American, putting his arm round the little heaving shoulders as he mentally translated what he must first say in his own tongue. "Thet's jest whar the swine would git the bulge on yew. Why shouldn't he git a glimpse o' sufferin', sech as I had ter sit an' see yew git, las' night? ... An' I gits it in the think-box las' night, right hyar. Listen, ma honey. I'm gwine ter beat him up, right naow, right hyar, in yure Caffy--an' before yure very eyes. In front of all his bullies an' all the guys he's beat up, I'll hev' him on his knees a-blubberin' an' a-prayin' fer mercy.... Then he shall lick yure boots, little gel, same as he makes recruits lick his. Then he shall grovel on the ground an' beg an' pray yew to marry him, and at that insult yew shall ask me to put him across my knee and irritate his pants with my belt--an' then throw him neck and crop, tail over tip, in the gutter! Termorrer John Bull smacks his face on the barrack-square an' tells him he was only playin' with him about lettin' him off that dool."