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Updated: June 2, 2025
Cigarette's eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her flushed cheeks grew scarlet. Since her infancy it had been her dream to have the Cross, to have the Grande Croix to lie above her little lion's heart; it had been the one longing, the one ambition, the only undying desire of her soul; and lo! she touched its realization!
She was just that was the one virtue in Cigarette's creed without which you were poltroon, or liar, or both.
I was still inwardly fuming, when up came a pair of young fellows, who imagined I was the Cigarette's servant, on a comparison, I suppose, of my bare jersey with the other's mackintosh, and asked me many questions about my place and my master's character. I said he was a good enough fellow, but had this absurd voyage on the head.
"Quite right; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen his carvings wished to serve him, if it were possible; and " "Ho! That is Milady, is suppose!" Cigarette's eyes flashed fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. "What did she tell you about him?" "I am ignorant of whom you speak?" he answered, with something of surprise and annoyance. "Are you?" said Cigarette, in derision. "I doubt that.
He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, "a woman's face" a long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel.
"Go to the grandams and the children!" she would say, with a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries.
"Ah, bah! you deserve to be shot," she said to herself afresh. "One would think you were a Silver Pheasant you grow such a little fool!" Love was all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had always reckoned; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to flavor an idle moment.
As he sat with his head bent down and his forehead leaning on his arm, while the hard biscuit that served for a plate stood unnoticed beside him, with the food that the soldiers had placed on it, he did not hear Cigarette's step till she touched him on the arm. Then he looked up; her eyes were looking on him with a tender, earnest pity. "Hark! I have done it," she said gently.
In that unconsciousness, in that abandonment, he seemed wholly her own; passion which she could not have analyzed made her bend above him with a half-fierce, half-dreamy delight in that solitary possession of his beauty, of his life. The restless movements of little Flick-Flack detached a piece of twine passed round his favorite's throat; the glitter of gold arrested Cigarette's eyes.
The fingers loosened their grip, tightened again, then, as if reluctantly relaxed once more. The blood flowed back. "Your cigarette's out." Ginger started violently. Her voice, coming suddenly out of the silence, had struck him like a blow. "Oh, thanks!" He forced himself to light another match. It sputtered noisily in the stillness. He blew it out, and the uncanny quiet fell again.
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