She bent over him softly.
"Tiens, M. Leon! I have brought you some ice."
His weary eyes turned on her gratefully; he sought to speak, but the
effort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh; it shook him with horrible
violence from head to foot, and the foam on his auburn beard was red
with blood.
There was no one by to watch him; he was sure to die; a week sooner or
later--what mattered it! He was useless as a soldier; good only to be
thrown into a pit, with some quicklime to hasten destruction and do the
work of the slower earthworms.
Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves a
cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness and
freshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled the convulsion; his
eyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted,
but relieved; and she--thoughtfully for her--slid herself down on the
floor, and began singing low and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on the
raft of a water-lily leaf. She sung quadriales, to be sure,
Beranger's songs and odes of the camp; for she knew of no hymn but the
"Marseillaise," and her chants were all chants like the "Laus Veneris."
But the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush in
the spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet that it
soothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the pain-tortured
spirits.
"Ah, that is sweet," murmured the dying man.
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