But she never moved. She knew that in
the general gala these sick-beds would be left more deserted and less
soothed than ever. She knew, too, that it was for the sake of this man,
lying dying here from the lunge of a Bedouin lance through his lungs,
that the ivory wreaths and crosses and statuettes had been sold.
And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a time for her
"children."
The day stole on; Leon Ramon lay very quiet; the ice for his chest
and the song for his ear gave him that semi-oblivion, dreamy and
comparatively painless, which was the only mercy which could come to
him. All the chamber was unusually still; on three of the beds the sheet
had been drawn over the face of the sleepers, who had sunk to a last
sleep since the morning rose. The shadows lengthened, the hours followed
one another; Cigarette sang on to herself with few pauses; whenever she
did so pause to lay soaked linen on the soldier's hot forehead, or to
tend him gently in those paroxysms that wrenched the clotted blood from
off his lungs, there was a light on her face that did not come from the
golden heat of the African sun.
Such a light those who know well the Children of France may have seen,
in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful upon the young face of a
conscript or a boy-insurgent as he lifted a dying comrade, or pushed to
the front to be slain in another's stead; the face that a moment before
had been keen for the slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklessly
gay as the saucy refrain the lips caroled.
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