"And for what does he perish?" he asked.
"Because he forgot for once that he was a slave, and because he has
borne the burden of guilt that was not his own."
They were quite still now, closed around her; these ferocious
plunderers, who had been thirsty a moment before to sheathe their
weapons in her body, were spellbound by the sympathy of courageous
souls, by some vague perception that there was a greatness in this
little tigress of France, whom they had sworn to hunt down and
slaughter, which surpassed all they had known or dreamed.
"And you have given yourself up to us that, by your death, you may
purchase a messenger from us for this errand?" pursued their leader. He
had been reared as a boy in the high tenets and the pure chivalries of
the school of Abd-el-Kader; and they were not lost in him, despite the
crimes and the desperation of his life.
She held the paper out to him, with a passionate entreaty breaking
through the enforced calm of despair with which she had hitherto spoken.
"Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save him, as you
are brave men, as you are generous foes!"
With a single sign of his hand their leader waved them back where they
crowded around her, and leaped down from his saddle, and led the horse
he had dismounted to her.
"Maiden," he said gently, "we are Arabs, but we are not brutes. We swore
to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are not vile enough to accept a
martyrdom.
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