The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.
“Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny.”
“No, sir,” said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice. “You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again–”
He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.
The other moved with a certain impatience.
“How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France?—forget as I have forgotten it!”
The audacious, irrepressible “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel.
“I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how his lordship’s death—”
“No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death that some day an Arbico’s lunge will give me; and that is a long time coming.”
“Ah, for God’s sake, Mr. Cecil, don’t talk like this!”
The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if a bullet had struck him.
“Never say that again!”
Rake, Algerian-christened “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” stammered a contrite apology.
“I never have done, sir—not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me like—you talking of wanting death in that way–”
“Oh, I don’t want death!” laughed the other, with a low, indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while. “I am of our friends the Spahis’ opinion—that life is very pleasant with a handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one’s saddle. Unhappily harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household—specially when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals at the core, or we should never find such an infinite zest in the death grapple. Good-night!”
He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the skins that made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the pipe still in his mouth, and its amber bowl resting on the carpet which the friendship and honor of Sidi-Ilderim had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the hills around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab of rock, or with the knowledge that at every instant the alarm might be given, the drums roll out over the night, and the enemy be down like lightning on the bivouac. But now a name—long unspoken to him—had recalled years he had buried far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi d’ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among its wild and brilliant soldiers.
Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light in the single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and died away, the Chasseur d’Afrique lay wakeful; looking outward through the folds of the tent at the dark and silent camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory drift backward to a time that had grown to be to him as a dream—a time when another world than the world of Africa had known him as Bertie Cecil.
CHAPTER XVIII
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE
“Oh! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings of Europe,” said Claude de Chanrellon, dashing some vermouth off his golden mustaches, where he lay full-length on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Place du Gouvernement, where the lamps were just lit, and shining through the burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored, many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were all fluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored moths.
“Hein! Diamonds are found in the rag-picker’s sweepings,” growled a General of Division, who was the most terrible martinet in the whole of the French service, but who loved “my children of hell,” as he was wont to term his men, with a great love, and who would never hear another disparage them, however he might order them blows of the stick, or exile them to Beylick himself.
“You are poetic, mon General,” said Claude de Chanrellon; “but you are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal.”
“But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that the devil made them if the drill have molded them!” urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes.
Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar.
“Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in this world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge of life, but devilry is its champagne!”
“Ventre bleu!” growled the General. “We have a right to praise the blackguards; without them our conscripts would be very poor trash. The conscript fights because he has to fight; the blackguard fights because he loves to fight. A great difference that.”
The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale effeminate, dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger than a hot-house flower, yet who, as many an African chronicle could tell, was swift as fire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard’s leap, untiring as an Indian on trail, once in the field with his Indigenes.
“In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, mon General,” he murmured; “what the catalogue of your crimes must be!”
The tough old campaigner laughed grimly; he took it as a high compliment.
“Sapristi! The cardinal virtues don’t send anybody, I guess, into African service. And yet, pardieu, I don’t know. What fellows I have known! I have had men among my Zephyrs—and they were the wildest insubordinates too—that would have ruled the world! I have had more wit, more address, more genius, more devotion, in some headlong scamp of a loustic than all the courts and cabinets would furnish. Such lives, such lives, too, morbleu!”
And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.
“Faith!” laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General’s observation, “if we all published our memoirs, the world would have a droll book. Dumas and Terrail would be beat out of the field. The real recruiting sergeants that send us to the ranks would be soon found to be—”
“Women!” growled the General.
“Cards,” sighed the Colonel.
“Absinthe,” muttered another.
“A comedy that was hissed.”
“The spleen.”
“The dice.”
“The roulette.”
“The natural desire of humanity to kill or to get killed!”
“Morbleu!” cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, “all those mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure enough; but the General named the worst. Look at that little Cora; the Minister of War should give her the Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Conscription does. Five fine fellows—of the vieille roche too—joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, and they have nothing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora.”
“And there is not much to look at in her either,” objected a captain, who commanded Turcos. “I saw her when our detachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as a cherub—a soft voice—a shape that looks as slight and as breakable as the stem of my glass—there is the end!”
The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; he had been a great lion of the fashionable world before he came out to his Indigenes.
“The end of Cora! The end of her is—My good Alcide—that ‘baby face’ has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet, so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad too, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands, and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!”
“Why do you let her do it?” growled the vieille moustache, who had served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda.
“Ah, bah!” said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; “it is the thing to be ruined by Cora.”
Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it. “It was Coeur d’Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up—that woman—in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was uncut emeralds just then. Well uncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d’Acier was a wonderful woman!—and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as ugly as sin.”
“Ugly!”
“Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month.”
“Like Loto,” chimed in the Tirailleur. “Loto has not a shred of beauty. She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice and a villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order of nobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day. She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret.”
“Audacity, my friend! Always that!” said Chanrellon, with a twist of his superb mustaches. “It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win. Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, you fell, too, among the Lotos and the Coeurs d’Acier once, I will warrant.”
The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, as he saluted.
“Coeurs d’Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, monsieur, I fancy!”
“Bah! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you out here?”
“No, monsieur—only chance.”
“A fig for your chance! Women are the mischief that casts us adrift to chance.”
“Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes.”
“Dieu de Dieu! I doubt that. We should go straight enough if it were not for them.”
The Chasseur smiled again.
“M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, for the key to every black story, we ask, ‘Who was she?’”
“Of course I do. Well! who was she? We are all quoting our tempters to-night. Give us your story, mon brave!”
“Monsieur, you have it in the folios, as well as my sword could write it.”
“Good, good!” muttered the listening General. The soldier-like answer pleased him, and he looked attentively at the giver of it.
Chanrellon’s brown eyes flashed a bright response.
“And your sword writes in a brave man’s fashion—writes what France loves to read. But before you wore your sword here? Tell us of that. It was a romance—wasn’t it?”
“If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur.”
“Open it then! Come—what brought you out among us? Out with it!”
“Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier’s duty; but I never heard that inquisitive annoyance was an officer’s privilege.”
These words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little haughty. The manner of old habit, the instinct of buried pride spoke in them, and disregarded the barrier between a private of Chasseurs who was but a sous-officier, and a Colonel Commandant who was also a noble of France.
Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little table, outside the cafe, turned and looked at him. The boldness of speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity upon him.
Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an instant’s passion gleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his three chairs down with a crash, as he shook his mighty frame like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a campaigner’s frankness.
“A right rebuke!—fairly given, and well deserved. I thank you for the lesson.”
The Chasseur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, consideration and courtesy had been things long unshown to him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentleman. Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference in rank and station between them flashed on his memory, he was raising it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate to his superior, when Chanrellon’s grasp closed on it readily. The victim of Coeur d’Acier was of as gallant a temper as ever blent the reckless condottiere with the thoroughbred noble.
The Chasseur colored slightly, as he remembered that he had forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations.
“I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte,” he said simply, as he gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and passed onward rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have forgotten the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been guilty.
“Dieu!” muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the glasses shook. “I would give a year’s pay to know that fine fellow’s history. He is a gentleman—every inch of him.”
“And a good soldier, which is better,” growled the General of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow over the heavy tillage of Alsace.
“A private of Chateauroy’s?” asked the Tirailleur, lifting his eye-glass to watch the Chasseur as he went.
“Pardieu—yes—more’s the pity,” said Chanrellon, who spoke his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. “The Black Hawk hates him—God knows why—and he is kept down in consequence, as if he were the idlest lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at what he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finer Roumi in Africa—not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, there has not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that he has not had his share in. There has not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila that he had not gone out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouin steel. He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant’s own hands. He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs’ center, and gave us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred more like stories of him—every one of them true as my saber—and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!”
“Superb!” said the General, with a grim significance. “Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then”—and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy—“but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders.”
“The Black Hawk can read, too,” said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the “petit nom,” that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. “No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons—pong!—till the thing drops dead—even where he strikes a bird of his own brood.”
“That is bad,” said the old General sententiously. “There are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship’s skipper, and a military chief.”
With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert.
Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cosmopolitan groups of the great square. A little farther onward, laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen—a yachting party, whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment; and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiar words. As he bent his head, no one saw the shadow of pain that passed over his face.
But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. “The deuce,” he murmured to the man nearest him, “who the dickens is it that French soldier’s like?”
The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city—uneasy lest he should be recognized by any passer-by or tourist.
“I need not fear that, though,” he thought with a smile. “Ten years!—why, in that world, we used to forget the blackest ruin in ten days, and the best life among us ten hours after its grave was closed. Besides, I am safe enough. I am dead!”
And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the cigar under the chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black eyes of veiled women flashed lovingly on his tall, lithe form, with the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as a woman’s still, despite the tawny glow of the African sun that had been on it for so long.
He was “dead”; therein had lain all his security; thereby had “Beauty of the Brigades” been buried beyond all discovery in “Bel-a-faire-peur” of the 2nd Chasseurs d’Afrique. When, on the Marseilles rails, the maceration and slaughter of as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rushing through the midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left himself and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by little less than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen from discovery or pursuit.
Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the debris, he had struck across the country with Rake for the few leagues that still lay between them and the city, and had entered Marseilles as weary foot travelers, before half the ruin on the rails had been seen by the full noon sun.
As it chanced a trading yawl was loading in the port, to run across to Algiers that very day. The skipper was short of men, and afraid of the Lascars, who were the only sailors that he seemed likely to find to fill up the vacant places in his small crew.
Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the passage. He had only a very few gold pieces on his person, and he was willing to work his way across, if he could.
“But you’re a gentleman,” said the skipper, doubtfully eyeing him, and his velvet dress, and his black sombrero with its eagle’s plume. “I want a rare, rough, able seaman, for there’ll like to be foul weather. She looks too fair to last,” he concluded, with a glance upward at the sky.
He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself in far seas, with a likely run before her.
“You’re a swell, that’s what you are,” emphasized the skipper. “You bean’t no sort of use to me.”
“Wait a second,” answered Cecil. “Did you ever chance to hear of a schooner called ‘Regina’?”
The skipper’s face lighted in a moment.
“Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years? Her as drove through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swallow, when everything was splitting and foundering, and shipping seas around her? Her as was the first to bear down to the great ‘Wrestler,’ a-lying there hull over in water, and took aboard all as ever she could hold o’ the passengers; a-pitching out her own beautiful cabin fittings to have as much room for the poor wretches as ever she could? Be you a-meaning her?”
Cecil nodded assent.
“She was my yacht, that’s all; and I was without a captain through that storm. Will you think me a good enough sailor now?”
The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.
“Good enough! Blast my timbers! There aren’t one will beat you in any waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks. I never did think as how one of your yachting-nobs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me, if the Club make such sailors as you it’s a rare ‘un! Lord a mercy! Why, my wife was in the ‘Wrestler.’ I’ve heard her tell scores of times as how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more passengers, and fed ‘em, and gave ‘em champagne all around, and treated ‘em like a prince, till he ran ‘em straight into Brest Harbor. But, damn me! that ever a swell like you should—”
“Let’s weigh anchor,” said Bertie quietly.
And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidings went that the mutilated form, crushed between iron and wood, on the Marseilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rushing trains had met, as meet the thunder-clouds. The world thought him dead; as such the journals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to make the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered at Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt:—and he, leaving them in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of his Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound—Louis Victor—and laid aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil.
He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in any of the larger towns since he had joined. His only danger of recognition, had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African troops.
Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards’ distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against “les ordonnances” in all the glittering squadrons; and swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands—a unit in the mighty aggregate of the “raw material” of war.
The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, “Why don’t they all ride like that man? He has the seat of the English Guards.” But that it was in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own, who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader never dreamed.
From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every sense was gratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured. He had led the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been used to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarse black bread of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies’ ears; he came where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He had known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement, refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.
A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man’s endurance. No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, more staunchly than did the “dandy of the Household.”
The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him. Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant’s jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace. Misery, when hunger and thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the half-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood, which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the dreary dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of petty tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy duty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and the weary night fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blasphemy and befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even the peace and oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchedness oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who had followed him into his exile. But, however wretched, they never wrung a single regret or lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life; he took it as it was. As, having lost the title to command, the high breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience which was the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the altered fortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparent content and more absolute fortitude than did the man who had used to think it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to Wormwood Scrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load his own gun any shooting season, or to draw off his own coat any evening. He suffered acutely many times; suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he never sought to escape the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Rake ever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity.
Moreover, the war-fire woke in him.
In one shape or another active service was almost always his lot, and hot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to military life in Algeria. The latent instinct in him—the instinct that had flashed out during his lazy, fashionable calm in all moments of danger, in all days of keen sport; the instinct that had made him fling himself into the duello with the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, “Kill me if you like, but don’t fail me!”—was the instinct of the born soldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush of the charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near presence of death, and in the chase of a foe through a hot African night when both were armed to the teeth, and one or both must fall when the grapple came—in all these that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him content; made him think that the life which brought them was worth the living.
There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which had slept under the serene, effeminate insouciance of his careless temper and his pampered habits. It had full rein now, and made him, as the army affirmed, one of the most intrepid, victorious, and chivalrous lascars of its fiery ranks. Fate had flung him off his couch of down into the tempest of war; into the sternness of life spent ever on the border of the grave; ruled over by an iron code, requiring at every step self-negation, fortitude, submission, courage, patience; the self-control which should take the uttermost provocation from those in command without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous recklessness which should meet death and deal death; which should be as the eagle to swoop, as the lion to rend. And he was not found wanting in it.
He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority that fortune no longer conferred on him; to seek to obtain a deference that he had no longer the position to demand. He was too quiet, too courteous, too calmly listless; he had too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too many gentleman habits, for them. But when they found that he could fight like a Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot-wounds or desert-thirst as though he were of bronze, it grew a delight to them to see of what granite and steel this dainty patrician was made; and they loved him with a rough, ardent, dog-like love, when they found that his last crust, in a long march, would always be divided: that the most desperate service of danger was always volunteered for by him; that no severity of personal chastisement ever made him clear himself of a false charge at a comrade’s expense; and that all his pay went in giving a veteran a stoup of wine, or a sick conscript a tempting meal, or a prisoner of Beylick some food through the grating, scaled too at risk of life and limb.
He had never before been called on to exert either thought or action; the necessity for both called many latent qualities in him into play. The same nature, which had made him wish to be killed over the Grand Military course, rather than live to lose the race, made him now bear privation as calmly, and risk death as recklessly, as the heartiest and most fiery loustic of the African regiments.
On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life more utterly thrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a gentleman, a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts—had he ever chosen to make anything of them—buried in the ranks of the Franco-African army; risking a nameless grave in the sand with almost every hour, associated with the roughest riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by the slash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years’ splendid service by the distinctive badge of a corporal.