Yonder, in the deadroom, there lay a broken, useless mass of flesh and
bone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was only a worn-out machine
that had paid its due toll to the wars of the Second Empire, and was now
valueless; only fit to be cast in to rot, unmourned, in the devouring
African soil. But to him that lifeless, useless mass was dear still; was
the wreck of the bravest, tenderest, and best-loved friend that he had
found in his adversity.
In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, and who had loved
him. They had suffered much, and much endured together; their very
dissimilarities had seemed to draw them nearer to each other. The
gentle impassiveness of the Englishman had been like rest to the ardent
impetuosity of the French soldier; the passionate and poetic temperament
of the artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand views of thought
and of feeling which had never before then dawned on him. And now that
the one lay dead, a heavy, weary sense of loneliness rested on the
other. They died around him every day; the fearless, fiery blood of
France watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields of
northern Africa. Death was so common that the fall of a comrade was no
more noted by them than the fall of a loose stone that their horse's
foot shook down a precipice. Yet this death was very bitter to him. He
wondered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet,
no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thralls
asunder.
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