Cecil advanced, and fronted him.
"Mine is the blame, mon Commandant!" He spoke simply, gently, boldly; standing with the ceremony that he never forgot to show to their chief, where the glow of African sunlight through the casement of the barracks fell full across his face, and his eyes met the dark glance of the "Black Hawk" unflinchingly.

He never heeded that there was a gay, varied, numerous group behind Chateauroy; visitors who were looking over the barrack; he only heeded that his soldiers were unjustly attacked and menaced.
The Marquis gave a grim, significant smile, that cut like so much cord of the scourge.
"Wherever there is insubordination in the regiment, the blame is very certain to be yours! Corporal Victor, if you allow your Chambre to be turned into the riot of a public fair, you will soon find yourself degraded from the rank you so signally contrive to disgrace." The words were far less than the tone they were spoken in, that gave them all the insolence of so many blows, as he swung on his heel and bent to the ladies of the party he escorted.

Cecil stood mute; bearing the rebuke as it became a Corporal to bear his Commander's anger; a very keen observer might have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun tan of his face, and that his teeth clinched under his beard; but he let no other sign escape him.
The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would have been the first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had any been attempted.
"Back to your place, sir!" he said, with a wave of his hand, as he might have waved back a cur.

"Teach your men the first formula of obedience, at any rate!" Cecil fell back in silence.

With a swift, warning glance at Rake,--whose mouth was working, and whose forehead was hot as fire, where he clinched his lion-skin, and longed to be once free, to pull his chief down as lions pull in the death spring,--he went to his place at the farther end of the chamber and stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, lest the control which was so bitter to retain should be broken if he looked on at the man who had been the curse and the antagonist of his whole life in Algeria.
He saw nothing and heard almost as little of all that went on around him; there had been a flutter of cloud-like color in his sight, a faint, dreamy fragrance on the air, a sound of murmuring voices and of low laughter; he had known that some guests or friends of the Marquis' had come to view the barracks, but he never even glanced to see who or what they were.