Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hardships of his present career, but had only owned the power to command, to pardon, to lead, and to direct, as Alan Bertie before him had done with his Irregular Cavalry in the Indian plains,—­such a thought would never have crossed him; he was far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not only satisfied, but happy.  What made his life in the barracks of Algiers so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled obedience to a bidding that he knew often capricious and unjust as it was cruel; which were so unendurable to his natural pride, yet to which he had hitherto rendered undeviating adhesion and submission, less for his own sake than for that of the men around him, who, he knew, would back him in revolt to the death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in the fashion that the vivandiere’s words had pictured with such terrible force and truth.

“Is it worth while to go on with it?  Would it not be the wiser way to draw my own saber across my throat?” he thought, as the brutalized companionship in which his life was spent struck on him all the more darkly because, the night before, a woman’s voice and a woman’s face had recalled memories buried for twelve long years.

But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a victory over the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium-sleep from the world that had grown so dark to him, it was not in him to give under now.  In his own way he had found a duty to do here, though he would have laughed at anyone who should have used the word “duty” in connection with him.  In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have been blown from the guns’ mouths to serve him, he had made good the “Coeur vaillant se fait Royaume” of his House.  And he was, moreover, by this time, a French soldier at heart and in habit, in almost all things—­though the English gentleman was not dead in him under the harness of a Chasseur d’Afrique.

This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that kindly gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach their liking; went through the customary routine of his past with that exactitude and punctuality of which he was always careful to set the example; made his breakfast off some wretched onion-soup and a roll of black bread; rode fifty miles in the blazing heat of the African day at the head of a score of his chasses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long string of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, without such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne off by some predatory tribe; and returned, jaded, weary, parched with thirst, scorched through with heat, and covered with white dust, to be kept waiting in his saddle, by his Colonel’s orders, outside the barrack for three-quarters of an hour, whether to receive a command or a censure he was left in ignorance.

When the three-quarters had passed, he was told M. le Commandant had gone long ago, and did not require him!