It
was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of his
lawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and made
them forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habit
of solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a
fraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and the
sentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.
One of those moods was on him now.
He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had
laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them
at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and
the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in
while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the
fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of
the casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his
teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and
clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.
The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow
leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven
stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the
dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,
stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry
sky above its four high walls.
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