“Monsieur, I was recalled from Blidah to join the 999th of the Line barely a month ago. And since then I have been absent on leave in England. I had the honor of meeting Madame de Roux for the first time to-night. She interests me indescribably. Pray tell me what you know of her....”
Hugo said: “Have a care! She wears the Violet in her bosom and the Bee upon her lips. And in the perfume of the flower there is delirium—in the honey of the insect a sting.”
Dunoisse said, hardly knowing that he spoke the words aloud:
“Divine madness, exquisite pain!...”
Hugo returned with a sphinx-like smile and a curious intonation:
“You have the intrepidity of youth, with its rashness. Be it so! We must all live and learn. And so you are but newly from Algeria!—that explains why you have the coloring, though not why you should possess the shape and features of an Arab of the Beni-Raten—reared in one of the hawk’s-nest fort-villages of Kabylia—nourished on mountain air. Ah!—so you have ridden down the wild partridge on the plains at the foot of Atlas, and felt on your eyes the kiss of the breeze of the Desert, and paused to breathe and rest beneath the thatch of some native hut shadowed by date-palms or sycamores, built beside streams that flow through hollowed trunks of trees. And women as black as roasted coffee-berries have brought you whey and millet-cakes, and platters of dried figs, and ripe mulberries in their dark hands decked with gold and ivory rings.”
So vivid was the picture evoked that Dunoisse knew the yearning of home-sickness, wished himself back again in the little house at Blidah, even to be bored by the trivial gossip of the garrison ladies, even to be teased by the persistent drub and tinkle of gazelle-eyed Adjmeh’s tambur. And the magician’s voice went on:
“You have asked of Madame de Roux.... Her father was a grandee of Spain and famous general of guerillas. He was killed during the counter-Revolutionary operations in Catalonia in 1822.... My father knew him and his lovely wife, who died of grief within a few years of the death of her brave husband.... She was a Miss Norah Murphy, an Irishwoman. And when you say that you say all. For that wet green island of the mystic threefold leaf and the deep echoing sea-caves, and the haunting melodies, is the spot of earth whereon the rebellious Angels of both sexes were doomed by the Divine Decree to dwell until the Judgment Day. They are the Tuatha da Danaan—the Fairy Race of whom one must not speak unless as ‘the good people’; whose slender, handsome, green-clad men woo earthly women and lure them away. Madame de Roux possesses a strain of that blood. It is to be traced in the daughters of a family for centuries—I say nothing of the sons.... And its gifts are the voice of music, the touch that thrills; the eyes that weep and laugh together, the smile that charms and maddens, and the kiss that enthralls and beguiles....”
“They are hers?” came from Dunoisse, as if in interrogation, and then repeating the words with an accent of conviction: “They are hers!” he said, a rush of new sensations crowding in upon him, with the perfume streaming from the tiny knot of purple blossoms fading in his hand.
“They are hers,” Hugo answered. “They were hers when M. de Roux met and married her: they were hers when as a bride of seventeen she found herself established as lady-paramount and reigning Queen of his regiment, in garrison at Ham. Life is dull in a military fortress, you will agree, to anyone but a gambler. For distraction one turns naturally to games of risk and chance....”