And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange,
longing murmur went--the buzz of the voices which, but that discipline
suppressed them, would have broken out in worshiping acclamations.
As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door of the As
de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the
impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in salute, with her
saucy, wayward laugh. He was the impersonation of that vast, silent,
awful, irresponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire,
stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of
France down into nameless graves, with the desert sand choking their
mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that
might be present. She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of
your thorough inborn democrat, all the gay, insouciant indifference to
station of the really free and untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a
dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without
a word or a moan, was greater than all the Marshals glittering in their
stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, with
rank--pooh! You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause in their
floating passage because they came between royalty and the sun. All the
sovereigns of Europe would have awed Cigarette not one whit more than a
gathering of muleteers. "Allied sovereigns--bah!" she would have said,
"what did that mean in '15? A chorus of magpies chattering over one
stricken eagle!"
So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the few great
personages whom Algeria could bring around them, as indifferently as she
had many a time reined up before a knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a
barrack-gate.
Pages:
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735