"Look you, Milady," said Cigarette, half sullenly, half passionately,
for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her
in their utterance, "that man suffers; his life here is a hell upon
earth--I don't mean for the danger, he is bon soldat; but for the
indignity, the subordination, the license, the brutality, the tyranny.
He is as if he were chained to the galleys. He never says anything.
Oh, no! he is of your kind you know! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu! he
suffers. Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him? Can you
ransom him in no way? Can you go away out of Africa and leave him in
this living death to get killed and thrust into the sand, like his
comrade the other day?"
Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; they cut her
to the soul. It was not for the first time that the awful desolation of
his future had been present before her; but it was the first time that
the fate to which she would pass away and leave him had been so directly
in words before her. Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her
better nature, and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity
with which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed her
rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid skill. She
was pleading against herself; no matter. In that instant she was capable
of crucifying herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent.
"I have heard," she went on vehemently, for the utterance to which she
forced herself was very cruel to her, "that you of the Noblesse are
stanch as steel to your own people.
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