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Under Two Flags

by Ouida · English · Gutenberg #3465 · 1,359,565 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Under Two Flags

Author: Ouida


        
Release date: April 6, 2006 [eBook #3465]
                Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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Credits: Dagny, John Bickers and David Widger (revised by Laura Natal). Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER TWO FLAGS ***

UNDER TWO FLAGS

by Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]


TO COLONEL POULETT CAMERON whose family has given so many brilliant
soldiers to the armies of France and England and made the battle-fields
of Europe ring with “The War-Cry of Lochiel” this story of a soldier's
life is dedicated in sincere friendship.




AVIS AU LECTEUR.

This Story was originally written for a military periodical. It has been
fortunate enough to receive much commendation from military men, and
for them it is now specially issued in its present form. For the general
public it may be as well to add that, where translations are appended to
the French phrases, those translations usually follow the idiomatic and
particular meaning attached to these expressions in the argot of the
Army of Algeria, and not the correct or literal one given to such words
or sentences in ordinary grammatical parlance.

OUIDA.





UNDER TWO FLAGS.



CHAPTER I.

“BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.”

“I don't say but what he's difficult to please with his Tops,” said Mr.
Rake, factotum to the Hon. Bertie Cecil, of the 1st Life Guards, with
that article of hunting toggery suspended in his right hand as
he paused, before going upstairs, to deliver his opinions with
characteristic weight and vivacity to the stud-groom, “he is uncommon
particular about 'em; and if his leathers aint as white as snow he'll
never touch 'em, tho' as soon as the pack come nigh him at Royallieu,
the leathers might just as well never have been cleaned, them hounds
jump about him so; old Champion's at his saddle before you can say
Davy Jones. Tops are trials, I aint denying that, specially when you've
jacks, and moccasins, and moor boots, and Russia-leather crickets, and
turf backs, and Hythe boots, and waterproofs, and all manner of varnish
things for dress, that none of the boys will do right unless you look
after 'em yourself. But is it likely that he should know what a worry a
Top's complexion is, and how hard it is to come right with all the Fast
Brown polishing in the world? How should he guess what a piece of work
it is to get 'em all of a color, and how like they are to come mottled,
and how a'most sure they'll ten to one go off dark just as they're
growing yellow, and put you to shame, let you do what you will to make
'em cut a shine over the country? How should he know? I don't complain
of that; bless you, he never thinks. It's 'do this, Rake,' 'do that';
and he never remembers 'tisn't done by magic. But he's a true gentleman,
Mr. Cecil; never grudge a guinea, or a fiver to you; never out of temper
either, always have a kind word for you if you want, thoro'bred every
inch of him; see him bring down a rocketer, or lift his horse over the
Broad Water! He's a gentleman--not like your snobs that have nothing
sound about 'em but their cash, and swept out their shops before they
bought their fine feathers!--and I'll be d----d if I care what I do for
him.”

With which peroration to his born enemy the stud-groom, with whom he
waged a perpetual and most lively feud, Rake flourished the tops that
had been under discussion, and triumphant, as he invariably was, ran
up the back stairs of his master's lodgings in Piccadilly, opposite the
Green Park, and with a rap on the panels entered his master's bedroom.

A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, rather more luxuriously
accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie Cecil was never behind his
fellows in anything; besides, he was one of the cracks of the Household,
and women sent him pretty things enough to fill the Palais Royal. The
dressing-table was littered with Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered
bottles, and all the perfumes of Araby represented by Breidenback and
Rimmel. The dressing-case was of silver, with the name studded on the
lid in turquoises; the brushes, bootjack, boot-trees, whip-stands, were
of ivory and tortoiseshell; a couple of tiger skins were on the
hearth with a retriever and blue greyhound in possession; above the
mantel-piece were crossed swords in all the varieties of gilt, gold,
silver, ivory, aluminum, chiseled and embossed hilts; and on the walls
were a few perfect French pictures, with the portraits of a greyhound
drawn by Landseer, of a steeple-chaser by Harry Hall, one or two of
Herring's hunters, and two or three fair women in crayons. The hangings
of the room were silken and rose-colored, and a delicious confusion
prevailed through it pell-mell; box-spurs, hunting-stirrups, cartridge
cases, curb-chains, muzzle-loaders, hunting flasks, and white gauntlets,
being mixed up with Paris novels, pink notes, point-lace ties,
bracelets, and bouquets to be dispatched to various destinations, and
velvet and silk bags for banknotes, cigars, or vesuvians, embroidered by
feminine fingers and as useless as those pretty fingers themselves.
On the softest of sofas, half dressed, and having half an hour before
splashed like a waterdog out of the bath, as big as a small pond, in
the dressing-chamber beyond was the Hon. Bertie himself, second son of
Viscount Royallieu, known generally in the Brigades as “Beauty.” The
appellative, gained at Eton, was in no way undeserved; when the smoke
cleared away that was circling round him out of a great meerschaum
bowl, it showed a face of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman's;
handsome, thoroughbred, languid, nonchalant, with a certain latent
recklessness under the impressive calm of habit, and a singular softness
given to the large, dark hazel eyes by the unusual length of the lashes
over them. His features were exceedingly fair--fair as the fairest
girl's; his hair was of the softest, silkiest, brightest chestnut; his
mouth very beautifully shaped; on the whole, with a certain gentle,
mournful love-me look that his eyes had with them, it was no wonder that
great ladies and gay lionnes alike gave him the palm as the handsomest
man in all the Household Regiments--not even excepting that splendid
golden-haired Colossus, his oldest friend and closest comrade, known as
“the Seraph.”

He looked at the new tops that Rake swung in his hand, and shook his
head.

“Better, Rake; but not right yet. Can't you get that tawny color in the
tiger's skin there? You go so much to brown.”

Rake shook his head in turn, as he set down the incorrigible tops beside
six pairs of their fellows, and six times six of every other sort of
boots that the covert side, the heather, the flat, or the sweet shady
side of “Pall Mall” ever knew.

“Do my best, sir; but Polish don't come nigh Nature, Mr. Cecil.”

“Goes beyond it, the ladies say; and to do them justice they favor
it much the most,” laughed Cecil to himself, floating fresh clouds of
Turkish about him. “Willon up?”

“Yes, sir. Come in this minute for orders.”

“How'd Forest King stand the train?”

“Bright as a bird, sir; he never mind nothing. Mother o' Pearl she
worreted a little, he says; she always do, along of the engine noise,
but the King walked in and out just as if the station were his own
stable-yard.”

“He gave them gruel and chilled water after the shaking before he let
them go to their corn?”

“He says he did, sir.”

Rake would by no means take upon himself to warrant the veracity of
his sworn foe, the stud-groom; unremitting feud was between them; Rake
considered that he knew more about horses than any other man living, and
the other functionary proportionately resented back his knowledge and
his interference, as utterly out of place in a body-servant.

“Tell him I'll look in at the stable after duty and see the screws are
all right; and that he's to be ready to go down with them by my train
to-morrow--noon, you know. Send that note there, and the bracelets, to
St. John's Wood: and that white bouquet to Mrs. Delamaine. Bid Willon
get some Banbury bits; I prefer the revolving mouths, and some of Wood's
double mouths and Nelson gags; we want new ones. Mind that lever-snap
breech-loader comes home in time. Look in at the Commission stables,
and if you see a likely black charger as good as Black Douglas, tell me.
Write about the stud fox-terrier, and buy the blue Dandy Dinmont; Lady
Guinevere wants him. I'll take him down with me, but first put me into
harness, Rake; it's getting late.”

Murmuring which multiplicity of directions, for Rake to catch as he
could, in the softest and sleepiest of tones, Bertie Cecil drank a
glass of Curacoa, put his tall, lithe limbs indolently off his sofa, and
surrendered himself to the martyrdom of cuirass and gorget, standing six
feet one without his spurred jacks, but light-built and full of grace as
a deer, or his weight would not have been what it was in gentleman-rider
races from the Hunt steeple-chase at La Marche to the Grand National in
the Shires.

“As if Parliament couldn't meet without dragging us through the dust!
The idiots write about 'the swells in the Guards,' as if we had all fun
and no work, and knew nothing of the rough of the Service. I should like
to learn what they call sitting motionless in your saddle through half
a day, while a London mob goes mad round you, and lost dogs snap at your
charger's nose, and dirty little beggars squeeze against your legs, and
the sun broils you, or the fog soaks you, and you sit sentinel over a
gingerbread coach till you're deaf with the noise, and blind with the
dust, and sick with the crowd, and half dead for want of sodas and
brandies, and from going a whole morning without one cigarette! Not
to mention the inevitable apple-woman who invariably entangles herself
between your horse's legs, and the certainty of your riding down
somebody and having a summons about it the next day! If all that isn't
the rough of the Service, I should like to know what is. Why the hottest
day in the batteries, or the sharpest rush into Ghoorkhas or Bhoteahs,
would be light work, compared!” murmured Cecil with the most plaintive
pity for the hardships of life in the Household, while Rake, with the
rapid proficiency of long habit, braced, and buckled and buttoned,
knotted the sash with the knack of professional genius, girt on the
brightest of all glittering polished silver steel “Cut-and-Thrusts,”
 with its rich gild mountings, and contemplated with flattering
self-complacency leathers white as snow, jacks brilliant as black
varnish could make them, and silver spurs of glittering radiance, until
his master stood full harnessed, at length, as gallant a Life Guardsman
as ever did duty at the Palace by making love to the handsomest
lady-in-waiting.

“To sit wedged in with one's troop for five hours, and in a drizzle too!
Houses oughtn't to meet until the day's fine; I'm sure they are in
no hurry,” said Cecil to himself, as he pocketed a dainty, filmy
handkerchief, all perfume, point, and embroidery, with the interlaced B.
C., and the crest on the corner, while he looked hopelessly out of the
window. He was perfectly happy, drenched to the skin on the moors after
a royal, or in a fast thing with the Melton men from Thorpe Trussels
to Ranksborough; but three drops of rain when on duty were a totally
different matter, to be resented with any amount of dandy's lamentations
and epicurean diatribes.

“Ah, young one, how are you? Is the day very bad?” he asked with languid
wistfulness as the door opened.

But indifferent and weary--on account of the weather--as the tone was,
his eyes rested with a kindly, cordial light on the newcomer, a young
fellow of scarcely twenty, like himself in feature, though much smaller
and slighter in build; a graceful boy enough, with no fault in his face,
except a certain weakness in the mouth, just shadowed only, as yet, with
down.

A celebrity, the Zu-Zu, the last coryphee whom Bertie had translated
from a sphere of garret bread-and-cheese to a sphere of villa champagne
and chicken (and who, of course, in proportion to the previous scarcity
of her bread-and-cheese, grew immediately intolerant of any wine less
than 90s the dozen), said the Cecil cared for nothing longer than a
fortnight, unless it was his horse, Forest King. It was very ungrateful
in the Zu-Zu, since he cared for her at the least a whole quarter,
paying for his fidelity at the tune of a hundred a month; and, also,
it was not true, for, besides Forest King, he loved his young brother
Berkeley--which, however, she neither knew nor guessed.

“Beastly!” replied the young gentleman, in reference to the weather,
which was indeed pretty tolerable for an English morning in February. “I
say, Bertie--are you in a hurry?”

“The very deuce of a hurry, little one; why?” Bertie never was in a
hurry, however, and he said this as lazily as possible, shaking the
white horsehair over his helmet, and drawing in deep draughts of Turkish
Latakia previous to parting with his pipe for the whole of four or five
hours.

“Because I am in a hole--no end of a hole--and I thought you'd help me,”
 murmured the boy, half penitently, half caressingly; he was very girlish
in his face and his ways. On which confession Rake retired into the
bathroom; he could hear just as well there, and a sense of decorum made
him withdraw, though his presence would have been wholly forgotten by
them. In something the same spirit as the French countess accounted for
her employing her valet to bring her her chocolate in bed--“Est ce que
vous appelez cette chose-la un homme?”--Bertie had, on occasion, so
wholly regarded servants as necessary furniture that he had gone
through a love scene, with that handsome coquette Lady Regalia,
totally oblivious of the presence of the groom of the chambers, and
the possibility of that person's appearance in the witness-box of the
Divorce Court. It was in no way his passion that blinded him--he did
not put the steam on like that, and never went in for any disturbing
emotion--it was simply habit, and forgetfulness that those functionaries
were not born mute, deaf, and sightless.

He tossed some essence over his hands, and drew on his gauntlets.

“What's up Berk?”

The boy hung his head, and played a little uneasily with an ormolu
terrier-pot, upsetting half the tobacco in it; he was trained to his
brother's nonchalant, impenetrable school, and used to his brother's
set; a cool, listless, reckless, thoroughbred, and impassive set, whose
first canon was that you must lose your last thousand in the world
without giving a sign that you winced, and must win half a million
without showing that you were gratified; but he had something of girlish
weakness in his nature, and a reserve in his temperament that was with
difficulty conquered.

Bertie looked at him, and laid his hand gently on the young one's
shoulder.

“Come, my boy; out with it! It's nothing very bad, I'll be bound!”

“I want some more money; a couple of ponies,” said the boy a little
huskily; he did not meet his brother's eyes that were looking straight
down on him.

Cecil gave a long, low whistle, and drew a meditative whiff from his
meerschaum.

“Tres cher, you're always wanting money. So am I. So is everybody. The
normal state of man is to want money. Two ponies. What's it for?”

“I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it me, and I
told him I would send it him in the morning. The ponies were gone before
I thought of it, Bertie, and I haven't a notion where to get them to pay
him again.”

“Heavy stakes, young one, for you,” murmured Cecil, while his hand
dropped from the boy's shoulder, and a shadow of gravity passed over his
face; money was very scarce with himself. Berkeley gave him a hurried,
appealing glance. He was used to shift all his anxieties on to his
elder brother, and to be helped by him under any difficulty. Cecil never
allotted two seconds' thought to his own embarrassments, but he would
multiply them tenfold by taking other people's on him as well, with an
unremitting and thoughtless good nature.

“I couldn't help it,” pleaded the lad, with coaxing and almost piteous
apology. “I backed Grosvenor's play, and you know he's always the most
wonderful luck in the world. I couldn't tell he'd go a crowner and have
such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, Bertie? I daren't
ask the governor; and besides I told Poulteney he should have it this
morning. What do you think if I sold the mare? But then I couldn't sell
her in a minute----”

Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lad's young,
fair, womanish face, were very gentle under the long shade of their
lashes.

“Sell the mare! Nonsense! How should anybody live without a hack? I
can pull you through, I dare say. Ah! by George, there's the quarters
chiming. I shall be too late, as I live.”

Not hurried still, however; even by that near prospect, he sauntered to
his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet and gold-filigreed
absurdities, and shook out all the banknotes there were in it. There
were fives and tens enough to count up 45 pounds. He reached over
and caught up a five from a little heap lying loose on a novel of Du
Terrail's, and tossed the whole across the room to the boy.

“There you are, young one! But don't borrow of any but your own people
again, Berk. We don't do that. No, no!--no thanks! Shut up all that. If
ever you get in a hole, I'll take you out if I can. Good-by--will you
go to the Lords? Better not--nothing to see, and still less to hear. All
stale. That's the only comfort for us--we are outside!” he said, with
something that almost approached hurry in the utterance; so great was
his terror of anything approaching a scene, and so eager was he to
escape his brother's gratitude. The boy had taken the notes with
delighted thanks indeed, but with that tranquil and unprotesting
readiness with which spoiled childishness or unhesitating selfishness
accepts gifts and sacrifices from another's generosity, which have
been so general that they have ceased to have magnitude. As his brother
passed him, however, he caught his hand a second, and looked up with a
mist before his eyes, and a flush half of shame, half of gratitude, on
his face.

“What a trump you are!--how good you are, Bertie!”

Cecil laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“First time I ever heard it, my dear boy,” he answered, as he lounged
down the staircase, his chains clashing and jingling; while, pressing
his helmet on to his forehead and pulling the chin scale over his
mustaches, he sauntered out into the street where his charger was
waiting.

“The deuce!” he thought, as he settled himself in his stirrups, while
the raw morning wind tossed his white plume hither and thither. “I
never remembered!--I don't believe I've left myself money enough to
take Willon and Rake and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I
shouldn't have kept enough to take my own ticket with!--that would be
no end of a sell. On my word I don't know how much there's left on the
dressing-table. Well! I can't help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I can't
have Berk's name show in anything that looks shady.”

The 50 pounds had been the last remnant of a bill, done under great
difficulties with a sagacious Jew, and Cecil had no more certainty of
possessing any more money until next pay-day should come round than he
had of possessing the moon; lack of ready money, moreover, is a serious
inconvenience when you belong to clubs where “pounds and fives” are the
lowest points, and live with men who take the odds on most events in
thousands; but the thing was done; he would not have undone it at the
boy's loss, if he could; and Cecil, who never was worried by the loss of
the most stupendous “crusher,” and who made it a rule never to think of
disagreeable inevitabilities two minutes together, shook his charger's
bridle and cantered down Piccadilly toward the barracks, while Black
Douglas reared, curveted, made as if he would kick, and finally ended by
“passaging” down half the length of the road, to the imminent peril of
all passers-by, and looking eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and
foam-flecked, while he thus expressed his disapprobation of forming part
of the escort from Palace to Parliament.

“Home Secretary should see about it; it's abominable! If we must come
among them, they ought to be made a little odoriferous first. A couple
of fire-engines now, playing on them continuously with rose-water and
bouquet d'Ess for an hour before we come up, might do a little good.
I'll get some men to speak about it in the house; call it 'Bill for
the Purifying of the Unwashed, and Prevention of their Suffocating Her
Majesty's Brigades,'” murmured Cecil to the Earl of Broceliande, next
him, as they sat down in their saddles with the rest of the “First
Life,” in front of St. Stephen's, with a hazy fog steaming round them,
and a London mob crushing against their chargers' flanks, while Black
Douglas stood like a rock, though a butcher's tray was pressed against
his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable
apple-woman, of Cecil's prophetic horror, was wildly plunging between
his legs, as the hydra-headed rushed down in insane, headlong haste to
stare at, and crush on to, that superb body of Guards.

“I would give a kingdom for a soda and brandy. Bah! ye gods! What a
smell of fish and fustian,” signed Bertie, with a yawn of utter famine
for want of something to drink and something to smoke, were it only a
glass of brown sherry and a little papelito, while he glanced down
at the snow-white and jet-black masterpieces of Rake's genius, all
smirched, and splashed, and smeared.

He had given fifty pounds away, and scarcely knew whether he should have
enough to take his ticket next day into the Shires, and he owed fifty
hundred without having the slightest grounds for supposing he should
ever be able to pay it, and he cared no more about either of these
things than he cared about the Zu-Zu's throwing the half-guinea
peaches into the river after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit
dragon-flies with them; but to be half a day without a cigarette, and to
have a disagreeable odor of apples and corduroys wafted up to him, was a
calamity that made him insupportably depressed and unhappy.

Well, why not? It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all.
Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a
ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunter's spine broken over the
double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just
when you wanted to rally the pack; it's the whip who carries you off
to a division just when you've sat down to your turbot; it's the ten
seconds by which you miss the train; it's the dust that gets in your
eyes as you go down to Epsom; it's the pretty little rose note that went
by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from
madame; it's the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it's the
cook who always will season the white soup wrong--it is these that are
the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.

An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having lost heavy sums
through a swindler, with as placid an indifference as if he had lost a
toothpick; but he swore like a trooper because a thief had stolen the
steel-mounted hoof of a dead pet hunter.

“Insufferable!” murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn behind his gauntlet;
“the Line's nothing half so bad as this; one day in a London mob beats
a year's campaigning; what's charging a pah to charging an oyster-stall,
or a parapet of fascines to a bristling row of umbrellas?”

Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms was a
question of military interest never answered, as Cecil scattered the
umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the Houses of Parliament
full trot with the rest of the escort on the return to the Palace; the
afternoon sun breaking out with a brightened gleam from the clouds,
and flashing off the drawn swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering
breastplates, the gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers.

But a mere sun-gleam just when the thing was over, and the escort was
pacing back to Hyde Park barracks, could not console Cecil for fog,
wind, mud, oyster-vendors, bad odors, and the uproar and riff-raff of
the streets; specially when his throat was as dry as a lime-kiln,
and his longing for the sight of a cheroot approaching desperation.
Unlimited sodas, three pipes smoked silently over Delphine Demirep's
last novel, a bath well dashed with eau de cologne, and some glasses of
Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him a little;
but he was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever
through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy,
and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the Duchess of
Lydiard-Tregoze, where the prettiest French Countess of her time asked
him if anything was the matter.

“Yes!” said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melancholy in what the
woman called his handsome Spanish eyes, “I have had a great misfortune;
we have been on duty all day!”

He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though his temper
was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition of a villa, prescribed Crème
de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession, with a considerable amount
of pine-apple ice at three o'clock in the morning, which restorative
prescription succeeded.

Indeed, it took something as tremendous as divorce from all forms of
smoking for five hours to make an impression on Bertie. He had the most
serene insouciance that ever a man was blessed with; in worry he did not
believe--he never let it come near him; and beyond a little difficulty
sometimes in separating too many entangled rose-chins caught round him
at the same time, and the annoyance of a miscalculation on the flat, or
the ridge-and-furrow, when a Maldon or Danebury favorite came nowhere,
or his book was wrong for the Grand National, Cecil had no cares of any
sort or description.

True, the Royallieu Peerage, one of the most ancient and almost one of
the most impoverished in the kingdom, could ill afford to maintain its
sons in the expensive career on which it had launched them, and
the chief there was to spare usually went between the eldest son, a
Secretary of Legation in that costly and charming City of Vienna, and
the young one, Berkeley, through the old Viscount's partiality; so that,
had Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position, he would
have probably confessed that it was, to say the least, awkward; but then
he never did this, certainly never did it thoroughly. Sometimes he
felt himself near the wind when settling-day came, or the Jews appeared
utterly impracticable; but, as a rule, things had always trimmed
somehow, and though his debts were considerable, and he was literally as
penniless as a man can be to stay in the Guards at all, he had never in
any shape realized the want of money. He might not be able to raise a
guinea to go toward that long-standing account, his army tailor's bill,
and post obits had long ago forestalled the few hundred a year that,
under his mother's settlements, would come to him at the Viscount's
death; but Cecil had never known in his life what it was not to have a
first-rate stud, not to live as luxuriously as a duke, not to order the
costliest dinners at the clubs, and be among the first to lead all the
splendid entertainments and extravagances of the Household; he had never
been without his Highland shooting, his Baden gaming, his prize-winning
schooner among the R. V. Y. Squadron, his September battues, his
Pytchley hunting, his pretty expensive Zu-Zus and other toys, his drag
for Epsom and his trap and hack for the Park, his crowd of engagements
through the season, and his bevy of fair leaders of the fashion to
smile on him, and shower their invitation-cards on him, like a rain of
rose-leaves, as one of the “best men.”

“Best,” that is, in the sense of fashion, flirting, waltzing, and
general social distinction; in no other sense, for the newest of
debutantes knew well that “Beauty,” though the most perfect of flirts,
would never be “serious,” and had nothing to be serious with; on
which understanding he was allowed by the sex to have the run of their
boudoirs and drawing-rooms, much as if he were a little lion-dog; they
counted him quite “safe.” He made love to the married women, to be
sure; but he was quite certain not to run away with the marriageable
daughters.

Hence, Bertie had never felt the want of all that is bought by and
represents money, and imbibed a vague, indistinct impression that
all these things that made life pleasant came by Nature, and were
the natural inheritance and concomitants of anybody born in a decent
station, and endowed with a tolerable tact; such a matter-of-fact
difficulty as not having gold enough to pay for his own and his stud's
transit to the Shires had very rarely stared him in the face, and
when it did he trusted to chance to lift him safely over such a social
“yawner,” and rarely trusted in vain.

According to all the canons of his Order he was never excited, never
disappointed, never exhilarated, never disturbed; and also, of course,
never by any chance embarrassed. “Votre imperturbabilite,” as the Prince
de Ligne used to designate La Grande Catherine, would have been an
admirable designation for Cecil; he was imperturbable under everything;
even when an heiress, with feet as colossal as her fortune, made him a
proposal of marriage, and he had to retreat from all the offered honors
and threatened horrors, he courteously, but steadily declined them. Nor
in more interesting adventures was he less happy in his coolness.
When my Lord Regalia, who never knew when he was not wanted, came in
inopportunely in a very tender scene of the young Guardsman's (then
but a Cornet) with his handsome Countess, Cecil lifted his long lashes
lazily, turning to him a face of the most plait-il? and innocent
demureness--or consummate impudence, whichever you like. “We're playing
Solitaire. Interesting game. Queer fix, though, the ball's in that's
left all alone in the middle, don't you think?” Lord Regalia felt his
own similarity to the “ball in a fix” too keenly to appreciate the
interesting character of the amusement, or the coolness of the chief
performer in it; but “Beauty's Solitaire” became a synonym thenceforth
among the Household to typify any very tender passages “sotto quartr'
occhi.”

This made his reputation on the town; the ladies called it very wicked,
but were charmed by the Richelieu-like impudence all the same, and
petted the sinner; and from then till now he had held his own with them;
dashing through life very fast, as became the first riding man in the
Brigades, but enjoying it very fully, smoothly, and softly; liking the
world and being liked by it.

To be sure, in the background there was always that ogre of money, and
the beast had a knack of growing bigger and darker every year; but
then, on the other hand, Cecil never looked at him--never thought about
him--knew, too, that he stood just as much behind the chairs of men whom
the world accredited as millionaires, and whenever the ogre gave him a
cold grip, that there was for the moment no escaping, washed away the
touch of it in a warm, fresh draft of pleasure.



CHAPTER II.

THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE.

“How long before the French can come up?” asked Wellington, hearing of
the pursuit that was thundering close on his rear in the most critical
hours of the short, sultry Spanish night. “Half an hour, at least,” was
the answer. “Very well, then I will turn in and get some sleep,” said
the Commander-in-Chief, rolling himself in a cloak, and lying down in
a ditch to rest as soundly for the single half hour as any tired
drummer-boy.

Serenely as Wellington, another hero slept profoundly, on the eve of a
great event--of a great contest to be met when the day should break--of
a critical victory, depending on him alone to save the Guards of
England from defeat and shame; their honor and their hopes rested on his
solitary head; by him they would be lost or saved; but, unharassed by
the magnitude of the stake at issue, unhaunted by the past, unfretted by
the future, he slumbered the slumber of the just.

Not Sir Tristram, Sir Caledore, Sir Launcelot--no, nor Arthur
himself--was ever truer knight, was ever gentler, braver, bolder, more
stanch of heart, more loyal of soul, than he to whom the glory of the
Brigades was trusted now; never was there spirit more dauntless and
fiery in the field; never temper kindlier and more generous with friends
and foes. Miles of the ridge and furrow, stiff fences of terrible
blackthorn, double posts and rails, yawners and croppers both, tough as
Shire and Stewards could make them, awaited him on the morrow; on his
beautiful lean head capfuls of money were piled by the Service and
the Talent; and in his stride all the fame of the Household would
be centered on the morrow; but he took his rest like the cracker he
was--standing as though he were on guard, and steady as a rock, a hero
every inch of him. For he was Forest King, the great steeple-chaser,
on whom the Guards had laid all their money for the Grand Military--the
Soldiers' Blue Ribbon.

His quarters were a loose box; his camp-bed a litter of straw fresh
shaken down; his clothing a very handsome rug, hood, and quarter-piece
buckled on and marked “B. C.”; above the manger and the door was
lettered his own name in gold. “Forest King”; and in the panels of the
latter were miniatures of his sire and of his dam: Lord of the Isles,
one of the greatest hunters that the grass countries ever saw sent
across them; and Bayadere, a wild-pigeon-blue mare of Circassia. How,
furthermore, he stretched up his long line of ancestry by the Sovereign,
out of Queen of Roses; by Belted Earl, out of Fallen Star; by Marmion,
out of Court Coquette, and straight up to the White Cockade blood, etc.,
etc., etc.--is it not written in the mighty and immortal chronicle,
previous as the Koran, patrician as the Peerage, known and beloved to
mortals as the “Stud Book”?

Not an immensely large, or unusually powerful horse, but with race in
every line of him; steel-gray in color, darkening well at all points,
shining and soft as satin, with the firm muscles quivering beneath
at the first touch of excitement to the high mettle and finely-strung
organization; the head small, lean, racer-like, “blood” all over;
with the delicate taper ears, almost transparent in full light; well
ribbed-up, fine shoulders, admirable girth and loins; legs clean,
slender, firm, promising splendid knee action; sixteen hands high, and
up to thirteen stone; clever enough for anything, trained to close and
open country, a perfect brook jumper, a clipper at fencing; taking a
great deal of riding, as anyone could tell by the set-on of his neck,
but docile as a child to a well-known hand--such was Forest King with
his English and Eastern strains, winner at Chertsey, Croydon, the
National, the Granby, the Belvoir Castle, the Curragh, and all the
gentleman-rider steeple-chases and military sweepstakes in the kingdom,
and entered now, with tremendous bets on him, for the Gilt Vase.

It was a crisp, cold night outside; starry, wintry, but open weather,
and clear; the ground would be just right on the morrow, neither hard
as the slate of a billiard-table, nor wet as the slush of a quagmire.
Forest King slept steadily on in his warm and spacious box, dreaming
doubtless of days of victory, cub-hunting in the reedy October woods and
pastures, of the ringing notes of the horn, and the sweet music of
the pack, and the glorious quick burst up-wind, breasting the icy cold
water, and showing the way over fence and bullfinch. Dozing and dreaming
pleasantly; but alert for all that; for he awoke suddenly, shook
himself, had a hilarious roll in the straw, and stood “at attention.”

Awake only, could you tell the generous and gallant promise of his
perfect temper; for there are no eyes that speak more truly, none on
earth that are so beautiful, as the eyes of a horse. Forest King's were
dark as a gazelle's, soft as a woman's, brilliant as stars, a little
dreamy and mournful, and as infinitely caressing when he looked at what
he loved, as they could blaze full of light and fire when danger was
near and rivalry against him. How loyally such eyes have looked at me
over the paddock fence, as a wild, happy gallop was suddenly broken for
a gentle head to be softly pushed against my hand with the gentlest of
welcomes! They sadly put to shame the million human eyes that so fast
learn the lie of the world, and utter it as falsely as the lips.

The steeple-chaser stood alert, every fiber of his body strung to
pleasurable excitation; the door opened, a hand held him some sugar, and
the voice he loved best said fondly, “All right, old boy?”

Forest King devoured the beloved dainty with true equine unction, rubbed
his forehead against his master's shoulder, and pushed his nose into the
nearest pocket in search for more of his sweetmeat.

“You'd eat a sugar-loaf, you dear old rascal. Put the gas up, George,”
 said his owner, while he turned up the body clothing to feel the firm,
cool skin, loosened one of the bandages, passed his hand from thigh to
fetlock, and glanced round the box to be sure the horse had been well
suppered and littered down.

“Think we shall win, Rake?”

Rake, with a stable lantern in his hand and a forage cap on one side of
his head, standing a little in advance of a group of grooms and helpers,
took a bit of straw out of his mouth, and smiled a smile of sublime
scorn and security. “Win, sir? I should be glad to know as when was that
ere King ever beat yet; or you either, sir, for that matter?”

Bertie Cecil laughed a little languidly.

“Well, we take a good deal of beating, I think, and there are not very
many who can give it us; are there, old fellow?” he said to the horse,
as he passed his palm over the withers; “but there are some crushers in
the lot to-morrow; you'll have to do all you know.”

Forest King caught the manger with his teeth, and kicked in a bit of
play and ate some more sugar, with much licking of his lips to express
the nonchalance with which he viewed his share in the contest, and his
tranquil certainty of being first past the flags. His master looked at
him once more and sauntered out of the box.

“He's in first-rate form, Rake, and right as a trivet.”

“Course he is, sir; nobody ever laid leg over such cattle as all that
White Cockade blood, and he's the very best of the strain,” said Rake,
as he held up his lantern across the stable-yard, that looked doubly
dark in the February night after the bright gas glare of the box.

“So he need be,” thought Cecil, as a bull terrier, three or four Gordon
setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyes dashed at their chains,
giving tongue in frantic delight at the sound of his step, while the
hounds echoed the welcome from their more distant kennels, and he went
slowly across the great stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot
glimmering through the gloom. “So he need be, to pull me through. The
Ducal and the October let me in for it enough; I never was closer in
my life. The deuce! If I don't do the distance to-morrow I shan't have
sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night! I don't know what a
man's to do; if he's put into this life, he must go the pace of it. Why
did Royal send me into the Guards, if he meant to keep the screw on in
this way? He'd better have drafted me into a marching regiment at once,
if he wanted me to live upon nothing.”

Nothing meant anything under 60,000 pounds a year with Cecil, as the
minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look of genuine
annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was on his face, the picture
of carelessness and gentle indifference habitually, though shadowed
now as he crossed the courtyard after his after-midnight visit to his
steeple-chaser. He had backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or
lose a cracker on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found
sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough lying on
his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to pay his groom's
book, or a notion where to get more, if the King should find his match
over the ridge and furrow in the morning!

It was not pleasant: a cynical, savage, world-disgusted Timon derives on
the whole a good amount of satisfaction from his break-down in the fine
philippics against his contemporaries that it is certain to afford, and
the magnificent grievances with which it furnishes him; but when life is
very pleasant to a man, and the world very fond of him; when existence
is perfectly smooth,--bar that single pressure of money,--and is an
incessantly changing kaleidoscope of London seasons, Paris winters,
ducal houses in the hunting months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs,
dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproachable everywhere;
cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the R. V. Y. Club, Derby handicaps
at Hornsey, pretty chorus-singers set up in Bijou villas, dashing
rosieres taken over to Baden, warm corners in Belvoir, Savernake, and
Longeat battues, and all the rest of the general programme, with no
drawback to it, except the duties at the Palace, the heat of a review,
or the extravagance of a pampered lionne--then to be pulled up in that
easy, swinging gallop for sheer want of a golden shoe, as one may say,
is abominably bitter, and requires far more philosophy to endure than
Timon would ever manage to master. It is a bore, an unmitigated bore;
a harsh, hateful, unrelieved martyrdom that the world does not see, and
that the world would not pity if it did.

“Never mind! Things will come right. Forest King never failed me yet; he
is as full of running as a Derby winner, and he'll go over the yawners
like a bird,” thought Cecil, who never confronted his troubles with
more than sixty seconds' thought, and who was of that light, impassible,
half-levity, half-languor of temperament that both throws off worry
easily and shirks it persistently. “Sufficient for the day,” etc., was
the essence of his creed; and if he had enough to lay a fiver at night
on the rubber, he was quite able to forget for the time that he wanted
five hundred for settling-day in the morning, and had not an idea how
to get it. There was not a trace of anxiety on him when he opened a low
arched door, passed down a corridor, and entered the warm, full light of
that chamber of liberty, that sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple
of refuge, thrice blessed in all its forms throughout the land,
that consecrated Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the
meerschaum, and the paradise of the nargile--the smoking-room.

A spacious, easy chamber, too; lined with the laziest of divans, seen
just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly a score of men
in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and with faces as well known
in the Park at six o'clock in May, and on the Heath in October; in Paris
in January, and on the Solent in August; in Pratt's of a summer's night,
and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features that
came round as regularly as the “July” or the Waterloo Cup. Some were
puffing away in calm, meditative comfort, in silence that they would not
have broken for any earthly consideration; others were talking hard
and fast, and through the air heavily weighted with the varieties of
tobacco, from tiny cigarettes to giant cheroots, from rough bowls full
of cavendish to sybaritic rose-water hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose
together: “Gave him too much riding, the idiot.” “Take the field, bar
one.” “Nothing so good for the mare as a little niter and antimony in
her mash.” “Not at all! The Regent and Rake cross in the old strain,
always was black-tan with a white frill.” “The Earl's as good a fellow
as Lady Flora; always give you a mount.” “Nothing like a Kate Terry
though, on a bright day, for salmon.” “Faster thing I never knew; found
at twenty minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown Water
at ten to twelve.” All these various phrases were rushing in among each
other, and tossed across the eddies of smoke in the conflicting tongues
loosened in the tabagie and made eloquent, though slightly inarticulate,
by pipe-stems; while a tall, fair man, with the limbs of a Hercules, the
chest of a prize-fighter, and the face of a Raphael Angel, known in the
Household as Seraph, was in the full blood of a story of whist played
under difficulties in the Doncaster express.

“I wanted a monkey; I wanted monkeys awfully,” he was stating as Forest
King's owner came into the smoking-room.

“Did you, Seraph? The 'Zoo' or the Clubs could supply you with apes
fully developed to any amount,” said Bertie, as he threw himself down.

“You be hanged!” laughed the Seraph, known to the rest of the world
as the Marquis of Rockingham, son of the Duke of Lyonnesse. “I wished
monkeys, but the others wished ponies and hundreds, so I gave in;
Vandebur and I won two rubbers, and we'd just begun the third when the
train stopped with a crash; none of us dropped the cards though, but
the tricks and the scores all went down with the shaking. 'Can't play in
that row,' said Charlie, for the women were shrieking like mad, and the
engine was roaring like my mare Philippa--I'm afraid she'll never be
cured, poor thing!--so I put my head out and asked what was up? We'd run
into a cattle train. Anybody hurt? No, nobody hurt; but we were to get
out. 'I'll be shot if I get out,' I told 'em, 'till I've finished the
rubber.' 'But you must get out,' said the guard; 'carriages must be
moved.' 'Nobody says “must” to him,' said Van (he'd drank more Perles du
Rhin than was good for him in Doncaster); 'don't you know the Seraph?'
Man stared. 'Yes, sir; know the Seraph, sir; leastways, did, sir, afore
he died; see him once at Moulsey Mill, sir; his “one two” was amazin'.
Waters soon threw up the sponge.' We were all dying with laughter, and
I tossed him a tenner. 'There, my good fellow,' said I, 'shunt the
carriage and let us finish the game. If another train comes up, give it
Lord Rockingham's compliments and say he'll thank it to stop, because
collisions shake his trumps together.' Man thought us mad; took tenner
though, shunted us to one side out of the noise, and we played two
rubbers more before they'd repaired the damage and sent us on to town.”

And the Seraph took a long-drawn whiff from his silver meerschaum, and
then a deep draught of soda and brandy to refresh himself after the
narrative--biggest, best-tempered, and wildest of men in or out of the
Service, despite the angelic character of his fair-haired head, and blue
eyes that looked as clear and as innocent as those of a six-year-old
child.

“Not the first time by a good many that you've 'shunted off the
straight,' Seraph?” laughed Cecil, substituting an amber mouth-piece for
his half-finished cheroot. “I've been having a good-night look at the
King. He'll stay.”

“Of course he will,” chorused half a dozen voices.

“With all our pots on him,” added the Seraph. “He's too much of a
gentleman to put us all up a tree; he knows he carries the honor of the
Household.”

“There are some good mounts, there's no denying that,” said Chesterfield
of the Blues (who was called Tom for no other reason than that it was
entirely unlike his real name of Adolphus), where he was curled up
almost invisible, except for the movement of the jasmine stick of his
chibouque. “That brute, Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook
jumper, it would be heard to best Wild Geranium, though her shoulders
are not quite what they ought to be. Montacute, too, can ride a good
thing, and he's got one in Pas de Charge.”

“I'm not much afraid of Monti, he makes too wild a burst first; he never
saves on atom,” yawned Cecil, with the coils of his hookah bubbling
among the rose-water; “the man I'm afraid of is that fellow from the
Tenth; he's as light as a feather and as hard as steel. I watched him
yesterday going over the water, and the horse he'll ride for Trelawney
is good enough to beat even the King if he's properly piloted.”

“You haven't kept yourself in condition, Beauty,” growled “Tom,” with
the chibouque in his mouth, “else nothing could give you the go-by. It's
tempting Providence to go in for the Gilt Vase after such a December and
January as you spent in Paris. Even the week you've been in the Shires
you haven't trained a bit; you've been waltzing or playing baccarat till
five in the morning, and taking no end of sodas after to bring you right
for the meet at nine. If a man will drink champagnes and burgundies as
you do, and spend his time after women, I should like to know how he's
to be in hard riding condition, unless he expects a miracle.”

With which Chesterfield, who weighed fourteen stone himself, and was,
therefore, out of all but welter-races, and wanted a weight-carrier
of tremendous power even for them, subsided under a heap of velvet and
cashmere, and Cecil laughed; lying on a divan just under one of the gas
branches, the light fell full on his handsome face, with its fair hue
and its gentle languor on which there was not a single trace of the
outrecuidance attributed to him. Both he and the Seraph could lead the
wildest life of any men in Europe without looking one shadow more worn
than the brightest beauty of the season, and could hold wassail in
riotous rivalry till the sun rose, and then throw themselves into saddle
as fresh as if they had been sound asleep all night; to keep up with the
pack the whole day in a fast burst or on a cold scent, or in whatever
sport Fortune and the coverts gave them, till their second horses wound
their way homeward through muddy, leafless lanes, when the stars had
risen.

“Beauty don't believe in training. No more do I. Never would train for
anything,” said the Seraph now, pulling the long blond mustaches that
were not altogether in character with his seraphic cognomen. “If a
man can ride, let him. If he's born to the pigskin he'll be in at the
distance safe enough, whether he smokes or don't smoke, drink or don't
drink. As for training on raw chops, giving up wine, living like the
very deuce and all, as if you were in a monastery, and changing yourself
into a mere bag of bones--it's utter bosh. You might as well be in
purgatory; besides, it's no more credit to win then than if you were a
professional.”

“But you must have trained at Christ Church, Rock, for the Eight?” asked
another Guardsman, Sir Vere Bellingham; “Severe,” as he was christened,
chiefly because he was the easiest-going giant in existence.

“Did I! men came to me; wanted me to join the Eight; coxswain came,
awful strict little fellow, docked his men of all their fun--took plenty
himself though! Coxswain said I must begin to train, do as all his
crew did. I threw up my sleeve and showed him my arm;” and the Seraph
stretched out an arm magnificent enough for a statue of Milo. “I said,
'there, sir, I'll help you thrash Cambridge, if you like, but train I
won't for you or for all the University. I've been Captain of the
Eton Eight; but I didn't keep my crew on tea and toast. I fattened 'em
regularly three times a week on venison and champagne at Christopher's.
Very happy to feed yours, too, if you like; game comes down to me every
Friday from the Duke's moors; they look uncommonly as if they wanted
it!' You should have seen his face!--fatten the Eight! He didn't let me
do that, of course; but he was very glad of my oar in his rowlocks, and
I helped him beat Cambridge without training an hour myself, except so
far as rowing hard went.”

And the Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the recollection, dipped
his fair mustaches into a foaming seltzer.

“Quite right, Seraph!” said Cecil; “when a man comes up to the weights,
looking like a homunculus, after he's been getting every atom of flesh
off him like a jockey, he ought to be struck out for the stakes, to
my mind. 'Tisn't a question of riding, then, nor yet of pluck, or of
management; it's nothing but a question of pounds, and of who can stand
the tamest life the longest.”

“Well, beneficial for one's morals, at any rate,” suggested Sir Vere.

“Morals be hanged!” said Bertie, very immorally. “I'm glad you remind us
of them, Vere; you're such a quintessence of decorum and respectability
yourself! I say--anybody know anything of this fellow of the Tenth
that's to ride Trelawney's chestnut?”

“Jimmy Delmar! Oh, yes; I know Jimmy,” answered Lord Cosmo Wentworth, of
the Scots Fusileers, from the far depths of an arm-chair. “Knew him at
Aldershot. Fine rider; give you a good bit of trouble, Beauty. Hasn't
been in England for years; troop been such a while at Calcutta. The
Fancy take to him rather; offering very freely on him this morning in
the village; and he's got a rare good thing in the chestnut.”

“Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that Irish mare
D'Orleans Diamonds, too.”

“Never mind! Tenth won't beat us. The Household will win safe enough,
unless Forest King goes and breaks his back over Brixworth--eh, Beauty?”
 said the Seraph, who believed devoutly in his comrade, with all the
loving loyalty characteristic of the House of Lyonnesse, that to
monarchs and to friends had often cost it very dear.

“You put your faith in the wrong quarter, Rock; I may fail you, he never
will,” said Cecil, with ever so slight a dash of sadness in his words;
the thought crossed him of how boldly, how straightly, how gallantly
the horse always breasted and conquered his difficulties--did he himself
deal half so well with his own?

“Well! you both of you carry all our money and all our credit; so for
the fair fame of the Household do 'all you know.' I haven't hedged a
shilling, not laid off a farthing, Bertie; I stand on you and the King,
and nothing else--see what a sublime faith I have in you.”

“I don't think you're wise then, Seraph; the field will be very
strong,” said Cecil languidly. The answer was indifferent, and certainly
thankless; but under his drooped lids a glance, frank and warm, rested
for the moment on the Seraph's leonine strength and Raphaelesque head;
it was not his way to say it, or to show it, or even much to think it;
but in his heart he loved his old friend wonderfully well.

And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple-chase of
the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Parliament, while the great
clouds of scented smoke circled heavily round; making a halo of Turkish
above the gold locks of the Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield's
velvets in strong odors of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented
mist over Bertie's long, lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough to
disdain all “training for the weights.”

“That's not the way to be in condition,” growled “Tom,” getting up with
a great shake as the clock clanged the strokes of five; they had only
returned from a ball three miles off, when Cecil had paid his visit
to the loose box. Bertie laughed; his laugh was like himself--rather
languid, but very light-hearted, very silvery, very engaging.

“Sit and smoke till breakfast time if you like, Tom; it won't make any
difference to me.”

But the Smoke Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion of the Household
over the ridge and furrow risking the steadiness of his wrist and the
keenness of his eye by any such additional tempting of Providence, and
went off itself in various directions, with good-night iced drinks,
yawning considerably like most other parliaments after a sitting.

It was the old family place of the Royallieu House in which he had
congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the great event, and
consequently the bachelor chambers in it were of the utmost comfort and
spaciousness, and when Cecil sauntered into his old quarters, familiar
from boyhood, he could not have been better off in his own luxurious
haunts in Piccadilly. Moreover, the first thing that caught his eye was
a dainty scarlet silk riding jacket broidered in gold and silver, with
the motto of his house, “Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume,” all circled
with oak and laurel leaves on the collar.

It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristocratic hands, and
he looked at it with a smile. “Ah, my lady, my lady!” he thought half
aloud, “do you really love me? Do I really love you?”

There was a laugh in his eyes as he asked himself what might be termed
an interesting question; then something more earnest came over his face,
and he stood a second with the pretty costly embroideries in his hand,
with a smile that was almost tender, though it was still much more
amused. “I suppose we do,” he concluded at last; “at least quite as
much as is ever worth while. Passions don't do for the drawing-room, as
somebody says in 'Coningsby'; besides--I would not feel a strong emotion
for the universe. Bad style always, and more detrimental to 'condition,'
as Tom would say, than three bottles of brandy!”

He was so little near what he dreaded, at present at least, that the
scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him no dreams of his fair
and titled embroideress. He looked out, the last thing, at some ominous
clouds drifting heavily up before the dawn, and the state of the
weather, and the chance of its being rainy, filled his thoughts, to the
utter exclusion of the donor of that bright gold-laden dainty gift. “I
hope to goodness there won't be any drenching shower. Forest King can
stand ground as hard as a slate, but if there's one thing he's weak in
it's slush!” was Bertie's last conscious thought, as he stretched his
limbs out and fell sound asleep.



CHAPTER III.

THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON.

“Take the Field bar one.” “Two to one on Forest King.” “Two to one on
Bay Regent.” “Fourteen to seven on Wild Geranium.” “Seven to two against
Brother to Fairy.” “Three to five on Pas de Charge.” “Nineteen to six
on Day Star.” “Take the Field bar one,” rose above the hoarse tumultuous
roar of the ring on the clear, crisp, sunny morning that was shining on
the Shires on the day of the famous steeple-chase.

The talent had come in great muster from London; the great bookmakers
were there with their stentor lungs and their quiet, quick entry of
thousands; and the din and the turmoil, at the tiptop of their height,
were more like a gathering on the Heath or before the Red House, than
the local throngs that usually mark steeple-chase meetings, even when
they be the Grand Military or the Grand National. There were keen
excitement and heavy stakes on the present event; the betting had never
stood still a second in Town or the Shires; and even the “knowing ones,”
 the worshipers of the “flat” alone, the professionals who ran down
gentlemen races and the hypercritics who affirmed that there is not such
a thing as a steeple-chaser to be found on earth (since, to be a
fencer, a water-jumper, and a racer were to attain an equine perfection
impossible on earth, whatever it may be in “happy hunting ground” of
immortality)--even these, one and all of them, came eager to see the
running for the Gilt Vase.

For it was known very well that the Guards had backed their horse
tremendously, and the county laid most of its money on him, and
the bookmakers were shy of laying off much against one of the first
cross-country riders of the Service, who had landed his mount at the
Grand National Handicap, the Billesdon Coplow, the Ealing, the Curragh,
the Prix du Donjon, the Rastatt, and almost every other for which he had
entered. Yet, despite this, the “Fancy” took most to Bay Regent; they
thought he would cut the work out; his sire had won the Champion Stakes
at Doncaster, and the Drawing-room at “glorious Goodwood,” and that
racing strain through the White Lily blood, coupled with a magnificent
reputation which he brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, found him
chief favor among the fraternity.

His jockey, Jimmy Delmar, too, with his bronzed, muscular, sinewy frame,
his low stature, his light weight, his sunburnt, acute face, and a way
of carrying his hands as he rode that was precisely like Aldcroft's,
looked a hundred times more professional than the brilliance of
“Beauty,” and the reckless dash of his well-known way of “sending the
horse along with all he had in him,” which was undeniably much more like
a fast kill over the Melton country, than like a weight-for-age race
anywhere. “You see the Service in his stirrups,” said an old nobbler who
had watched many a trial spin, lying hidden in a ditch or a drain; and
indisputably you did: Bertie's riding was superb, but it was still the
riding of a cavalryman, not of a jockey. The mere turn of the foot in
the stirrups told it, as the old man had the shrewdness to know.

So the King went down at one time two points in the morning betting.

“Know them flash cracks of the Household,” said Tim Varnet, as sharp a
little Leg as ever “got on” a dark thing, and “went halves” with a jock
who consented to rope a favorite at the Ducal. “Them swells, ye see,
they give any money for blood. They just go by Godolphin heads, and
little feet, and winners' strains, and all the rest of it; and so long
as they get pedigree never look at substance; and their bone comes no
bigger than a deer's. Now, it's force as well as pace that tells over a
bit of plow; a critter that would win the Derby on the flat would knock
up over the first spin over the clods; and that King's legs are too
light for my fancy, 'andsome as 'tis ondeniable he looks--for a little
'un, as one may say.”

And Tim Varnet exactly expressed the dominant mistrust of the talent;
despite all his race and all his exploits, the King was not popular in
the Ring, because he was like his backers--“a swell.” They thought him
“showy--very showy,” “a picture to frame,” “a luster to look at”; but
they disbelieved in him, almost to a man, as a stayer, and they trusted
him scarcely at all with their money.

“It's plain that he's 'meant,' though,” thought little Tim, who was
so used to the “shady” in stable matters that he could hardly persuade
himself that even the Grand Military could be run fair, and would have
thought a Guardsman or a Hussar only exercised his just privilege as
a jockey in “roping” after selling the race, if so it suited his book.
“He's 'meant,' that's clear, 'cause the swells have put all their
pots on him--but if the pots don't bile over, strike me a loser!” a
contingency he knew he might very well invoke; his investments being
invariably so matchlessly arranged that, let what would be “bowled
over,” Tim Varnet never could be.

Whatever the King might prove, however, the Guards, the Flower of the
Service, must stand or fall by him; they had not Seraph, they put in
“Beauty” and his gray. But there was no doubt as to the tremendousness
of the struggle lying before him. The running ground covered four miles
and a half, and had forty-two jumps in it, exclusive of the famous
Brixworth: half was grassland, and half ridge and furrow; a lane
with very awkward double fences laced in and in with the memorable
blackthorn, a laid hedge with thick growers in it and many another
“teaser,” coupled with the yawning water, made the course a severe one;
while thirty-two starters of unusual excellence gave a good field and
promised a close race. Every fine bit of steeple-chase blood that was to
be found in their studs, the Service had brought together for the great
event; and if the question could ever be solved, whether it is possible
to find a strain that shall combine pace over the flat with the heart
to stay over an inclosed country, the speed to race with the bottom to
fence and the force to clear water, it seemed likely to be settled
now. The Service and the Stable had done their uttermost to reach its
solution.

The clock of the course pointed to half-past one; the saddling bell
would ring at a quarter to two, for the days were short and darkened
early; the Stewards were all arrived, except the Marquis of Rockingham,
and the Ring was in the full rush of excitement; some “getting on”
 hurriedly to make up for lost time; some “peppering” one or other of the
favorites hotly; some laying off their moneys in a cold fit of caution;
some putting capfuls on the King, or Bay Regent, or Pas de Charge,
from the great commission stables, the local betting man, the shrewd
wiseacres from the Ridings, all the rest of the brotherhood of the Turf
were crowding together with the deafening shouting common to them which
sounds so tumultuous, so insane, and so unintelligible to outsiders.
Amid them half the titled heads of England, all the great names known
on the flat, and men in the Guards, men in the Rifles, men in the Light
Cavalry, men in the Heavies, men in the Scots Greys, men in the Horse
Artillery, men in all the Arms and all the Regiments that had sent their
first riders to try for the Blue Ribbon, were backing their horses with
crackers, and jotting down figure after figure, with jeweled pencils, in
dainty books, taking long odds with the fields. Carriages were standing
in long lines along the course, the stands were filled with almost as
bright a bevy of fashionable loveliness as the Ducal brings together
under the park trees of Goodwood; the horses were being led into the
inclosure for saddling, a brilliant sun shone for the nonce on the
freshest of February noons; beautiful women were fluttering out of their
barouches in furs and velvets, wearing the colors of the jockey they
favored, and more predominant than any were Cecil's scarlet and white,
only rivaled in prominence by the azure of the Heavy Cavalry champion,
Sir Eyre Montacute. A drag with four bays--with fine hunting points
about them--had dashed up, late of course; the Seraph had swung himself
from the roller-bolt into the saddle of his hack (one of these few rare
hacks that are perfect, and combine every excellence of pace, bone, and
action, under their modest appellative), and had cantered off to join
the Stewards; while Cecil had gone up to a group of ladies in the Grand
Stand, as if he had no more to do with the morning's business than they.
Right in front of that Stand was an artificial bullfinch that promised
to treat most of the field to a “purler,” a deep ditch dug and filled
with water, with two towering blackthorn fences on either side of it,
as awkward a leap as the most cramped country ever showed; some were
complaining of it; it was too severe, it was unfair, it would break the
back of every horse sent at it. The other Stewards were not unwilling to
have it tamed down a little, but he Seraph, generally the easiest of all
sweet-tempered creatures, refused resolutely to let it be touched.

“Look here,” said he confidentially, as he wheeled his hack round to the
Stand and beckoned Cecil down, “look here, Beauty; they're wanting
to alter that teaser, make it less awkward, you know; but I wouldn't
because I thought it would look as if I lessened it for you, you know.
Still it is a cracker and no mistake; Brixworth itself is nothing to it,
and if you'd like it toned down I'll let them do it--”

“My dear Seraph, not for worlds! You were quite right not to have a
thorn taken down. Why, that's where I shall thrash Bay Regent,” said
Bertie serenely, as if the winning of the stakes had been forecast in
his horoscope.

The Seraph whistled, stroking his mustaches. “Between ourselves, Cecil,
that fellow is going up no end. The Talent fancy him so--”

“Let them,” said Cecil placidly, with a great cheroot in his mouth,
lounging into the center of the Ring to hear how the betting went on his
own mount; perfectly regardless that he would keep them waiting at the
weights while he dressed. Everybody there knew him by name and sight;
and eager glances followed the tall form of the Guards' champion as he
moved through the press, in a loose brown sealskin coat, with a little
strip of scarlet ribbon round his throat, nodding to this peer, taking
evens with that, exchanging a whisper with a Duke, and squaring his
book with a Jew. Murmurs followed about him as if he were the horse
himself--“looks in racing form”--“looks used up to me”--“too little
hands surely to hold in long in a spin”--“too much length in the limbs
for a light weight; bone's always awfully heavy”--“dark under the eye,
been going too fast for training”--“a swell all over, but rides no end,”
 with other innumerable contradictory phrases, according as the speaker
was “on” him or against him, buzzed about him from the riff-raff of the
Ring, in no way disturbing his serene equanimity.

One man, a big fellow, “'ossy” all over, with the genuine sporting
cut-away coat, and a superabundance of showy necktie and bad jewelry,
eyed him curiously, and slightly turned so that his back was toward
Bertie, as the latter was entering a bet with another Guardsman well
known on the turf, and he himself was taking long odds with little Berk
Cecil, the boy having betted on his brother's riding, as though he
had the Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the lad had
the hereditary Royallieu instinct of extravagance, and, with a half
thoughtless, half willful improvidence, piled debts and difficulties
on this rather brainless and boyish head, he had much more to depend on
than his elder; old Lord Royallieu doted on him, spoilt him, and denied
him nothing, though himself a stern, austere, passionate man, made
irascible by ill health, and, in his fits of anger, a very terrible
personage indeed--no more to be conciliated by persuasion than iron
is to be bent by the hand; so terrible that even his pet dreaded him
mortally, and came to Bertie to get his imprudences and peccadilloes
covered from the Viscount's sight.

Glancing round at this moment as he stood in the ring, Cecil saw the
betting man with whom Berkeley was taking long odds on the race; he
raised his eyebrows, and his face darkened for a second, though resuming
its habitual listless serenity almost immediately.

“You remember that case of welshing after the Ebor St. Leger, Con?” he
said in a low tone to the Earl of Constantia, with whom he was talking.
The Earl nodded assent; everyone had heard of it, and a very flagrant
case it was.

“There's the fellow,” said Cecil laconically, and strode toward him with
his long, lounging cavalry swing. The man turned pallid under his florid
skin, and tried to edge imperceptibly away; but the density of the
throng prevented his moving quickly enough to evade Cecil, who stooped
his head, and said a word in his ear. It was briefly:

“Leave the ring.”

The rascal, half bully, half coward, rallied from the startled fear into
which his first recognition by the Guardsman (who had been the chief
witness against him in a very scandalous matter at York, and who had
warned him that if he ever saw him again in the Ring he would have him
turned out of it) had thrown him, and, relying on insolence and the
numbers of his fraternity to back him out of it, stood his ground.

“I've as much right here as you swells,” he said, with a hoarse laugh.
“Are you the whole Jockey Club, that you come it to a honest gentleman
like that?”

Cecil looked down on him slightly amused, immeasurably disgusted--of all
earth's terrors, there was not one so great for him as a scene, and the
eager bloodshot eyes of the Ring were turning on them by the thousand,
and the loud shouting of the bookmakers was thundering out, “What's up?”

“My 'honest gentleman,'” he said wearily, “leave this. I tell you; do
you hear?”

“Make me!” retorted the “welsher,” defiant in his stout-built square
strength, and ready to brazen the matter out. “Make me, my cock o' fine
feathers! Put me out of the ring if you can, Mr. Dainty Limbs! I've as
much business here as you.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before, light as a deer and
close as steel, Cecil's hand was on his collar, and without any seeming
effort, without the slightest passion, he calmly lifted him off the
ground, as though he were a terrier, and thrust him through the throng;
Ben Davis, as the welsher was named, meantime being so amazed at such
unlooked-for might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most gracefully
made, and indolently tempered of his born foes and prey, “the swells,”
 that he let himself be forced along backward in sheer passive paralysis
of astonishment, while Bertie, profoundly insensible to the tumult that
began to rise and roar about him, from those who were not too absorbed
in the business of the morning to note what took place, thrust him
along in the single clasp of his right hand outward to where the running
ground swept past the Stand, and threw him lightly, easily, just as one
may throw a lap-dog to take his bath, into the artificial ditch filled
with water that the Seraph had pointed out as “a teaser.” The man fell
unhurt, unbruised, so gently was he dropped on his back among the muddy,
chilly water, and the overhanging brambles; and, as he rose from the
ducking, a shudder of ferocious and filthy oaths poured from his lips,
increased tenfold by the uproarious laughter of the crowd, who knew him
as “a welsher,” and thought him only too well served.

Policemen rushed in at all points, rural and metropolitan, breathless,
austere, and, of course, too late. Bertie turned to them, with a slight
wave of his hand, to sign them away.

“Don't trouble yourselves! It's nothing you could interfere in; take
care that person doesn't come into the betting ring again, that's all.”

The Seraph, Lord Constantia, Wentworth, and may others of his set,
catching sight of the turmoil and of “Beauty,” with the great square-set
figure of Ben Davis pressed before him through the mob, forced their way
up as quickly as they could; but before they reached the spot Cecil was
sauntering back to meet them, cool and listless, and a little bored with
so much exertion; his cheroot in his mouth, and his ear serenely deaf to
the clamor about the ditch.

He looked apologetically at the Seraph and the others; he felt some
apology was required for having so far wandered from all the canons of
his Order as to have approached “a row,” and run the risk of a scene.

“Turf must be cleared of these scamps, you see,” he said, with a half
sigh. “Law can't do anything. Fellow was trying to 'get on' with
the young one, too. Don't bet with those riff-raff, Berk. The great
bookmakers will make you dead money, and the little Legs will do worse
to you.”

The boy hung his head, but looked sulky rather than thankful for his
brother's interference with himself and the welsher.

“You have done the Turf a service, Beauty--a very great service; there's
no doubt about that,” said the Seraph. “Law can't do anything, as you
say; opinion must clear the ring of such rascals; a welsher ought not to
dare to show his face here; but, at the same time, you oughtn't to have
gone unsteadying your muscle, and risking the firmness of your hand at
such a minute as this, with pitching that fellow over. Why couldn't you
wait till afterward? or have let me do it?”

“My dear Seraph,” murmured Bertie languidly, “I've gone in to-day
for exertion; a little more or less is nothing. Besides, welshers are
slippery dogs, you know.”

He did not add that it was having seen Ben Davis taking odds with his
young brother which had spurred him to such instantaneous action with
that disreputable personage; who, beyond doubt, only received a tithe
part of his deserts, and merited to be double-thonged off every course
in the kingdom.

Rake at that instant darted, panting like a hot retriever, out of
the throng. “Mr. Cecil, sir, will you please come to the weights--the
saddling bell's a-going to ring, and--”

“Tell them to wait for me; I shall only be twenty minutes dressing,”
 said Cecil quietly, regardless that the time at which the horses should
have been at the starting-post was then clanging from the clock within
the Grand Stand. Did you ever go to a gentleman-rider race where the
jocks were not at least an hour behind time, and considered themselves,
on the whole, very tolerably punctual? At last, however, he sauntered
into the dressing-shed, and was aided by Rake into tops that had at
length achieved a spotless triumph, and the scarlet gold-embroidered
jacket of his fair friend's art, with white hoops and the “Coeur
Vaillant se fait Royaume” on the collar, and the white, gleaming sash to
be worn across it, fringed by the same fair hands with silver.

Meanwhile the “welsher,” driven off the course by a hooting and
indignant crowd, shaking the water from his clothes, with bitter oaths,
and livid with a deadly passion at his exile from the harvest-field
of his lawless gleanings, went his way, with a savage vow of vengeance
against the “d----d dandy,” the “Guards' swell,” who had shown him up
before the world as the scoundrel he was.

The bell was clanging and clashing passionately, as Cecil at last went
down to the weights, all his friends of the Household about him, and
all standing “crushers” on their champion, for their stringent esprit de
corps was involved, and the Guards are never backward in putting their
gold down, as all the world knows. In the inclosure, the cynosure
of devouring eyes, stood the King, with the sangfroid of a superb
gentleman, amid the clamor raging round him, one delicate ear laid
back now and them, but otherwise indifferent to the din; with his coat
glistening like satin, the beautiful tracery of vein and muscle, like
the veins of vine-leaves, standing out on the glossy, clear-carved neck
that had the arch of Circassia, and his dark, antelope eyes gazing with
a gentle, pensive earnestness on the shouting crowd.

His rivals, too, were beyond par in fitness and in condition, and
there were magnificent animals among them. Bay Regent was a huge raking
chestnut, upward of sixteen hands, and enormously powerful, with very
fine shoulders, and an all-over-like-going head; he belonged to a
Colonel in the Rifles, but was to be ridden by Jimmy Delmar of the 10th
Lancers, whose colors were violet with orange hoops. Montacute's
horse, Pas de Charge, which carried all the money of the Heavy
Cavalry,--Montacute himself being in the Dragoon Guards,--was of much
the same order; a black hunter with racing-blood in his loins and
withers that assured any amount of force, and no fault but that of a
rather coarse head, traceable to a slur on his 'scutcheon on the distaff
side from a plebeian great-grandmother, who had been a cart mare, the
only stain on his otherwise faultless pedigree. However, she had given
him her massive shoulders, so that he was in some sense a gainer by her,
after all. Wild Geranium was a beautiful creature enough: a bright bay
Irish mare, with that rich red gloss that is like the glow of a horse
chestnut; very perfect in shape, though a trifle light perhaps, and with
not quite strength enough in neck or barrel; she would jump the fences
of her own paddock half a dozen times a day for sheer amusement, and was
game for anything[*]. She was entered by Cartouche of the Enniskillens,
to be ridden by “Baby Grafton,” of the same corps, a feather-weight,
and quite a boy, but with plenty of science in him. These were the three
favorites. Day Star ran them close, the property of Durham Vavassour, of
the Scots Greys, and to be ridden by his owner; a handsome, flea-bitten,
gray sixteen-hander, with ragged hips, and action that looked a trifle
string-halty, but noble shoulders, and great force in the loins and
withers; the rest of the field, though unusually excellent, did not find
so many “sweet voices” for them, and were not so much to be feared; each
starter was, of course, much backed by his party, but the betting was
tolerably even on these four--all famous steeple-chasers--the King at
one time, and Bay Regent at another, slightly leading in the Ring.

     [*] The portrait of this lady is that of a very esteemed
     young Irish beauty of my acquaintance; she this season did
     seventy-six miles on a warm June day, and ate her corn and
     tares afterward as if nothing had happened. She is six years
     old.

Thirty-two starters were hoisted up on the telegraph board, and as the
field got at last underway, uncommonly handsome they looked, while the
silk jackets of all the colors of the rainbow glittered in the bright
noon-sun. As Forest King closed in, perfectly tranquil still, but
beginning to glow and quiver all over with excitement, knowing as well
as his rider the work that was before him, and longing for it in every
muscle and every limb, while his eyes flashed fire as he pulled at
the curb and tossed his head aloft, there went up a general shout of
“Favorite!” His beauty told on the populace, and even somewhat on the
professionals, though his legs kept a strong business prejudice against
the working powers of “the Guards' Crack.” The ladies began to lay
dozens in gloves on him; not altogether for his points, which, perhaps,
they hardly appreciated, but for his owner and rider, who, in the
scarlet and gold, with the white sash across his chest, and a look of
serene indifference on his face, they considered the handsomest man in
the field. The Household is usually safe to win the suffrages of the
sex.

In the throng on the course Rake instantly bonneted an audacious dealer
who had ventured to consider that Forest King was “light and curby
in the 'ock.” “You're a wise 'un, you are!” retorted the wrathful and
ever-eloquent Rake; “there's more strength in his clean flat legs, bless
him! than in all the round, thick, mill-posts of your halfbreds, that
have no more tendon than a bit of wood, and are just as flabby as a
sponge!” Which hit the dealer home just as his hat was hit over his
eyes; Rake's arguments being unquestionable in their force.

The thoroughbreds pulled and fretted and swerved in their impatience;
one or two overcontumacious bolted incontinently, others put their heads
between their knees in the endeavor to draw their riders over their
withers; Wild Geranium reared straight upright, fidgeted all over with
longing to be off, passaged with the prettiest, wickedest grace in the
world, and would have given the world to neigh if she had dared, but
she knew it would be very bad style, so, like an aristocrat as she was,
restrained herself; Bay Regent almost sawed Jimmy Delmar's arms off,
looking like a Titan Bucephalus; while Forest King, with his nostrils
dilated till the scarlet tinge on them glowed in the sun, his muscles
quivering with excitement as intense as the little Irish mare's, and all
his Eastern and English blood on fire for the fray, stood steady as a
statue for all that, under the curb of a hand light as a woman's, but
firm as iron to control, and used to guide him by the slightest touch.

All eyes were on that throng of the first mounts in the Service;
brilliant glances by the hundred gleamed down behind hothouse bouquets
of their chosen color, eager ones by the thousand stared thirstily
from the crowded course, the roar of the Ring subsided for a second,
a breathless attention and suspense succeeded it; the Guardsmen sat on
their drags, or lounged near the ladies with their race-glasses ready,
and their habitual expression of gentle and resigned weariness in nowise
altered because the Household, all in all, had from sixty to seventy
thousand on the event; and the Seraph murmured mournfully to his
cheroot, “that chestnut's no end fit,” strong as his faith was in the
champion of the Brigades.

A moment's good start was caught--the flag dropped--off they went
sweeping out for the first second like a line of Cavalry about to
charge.

Another moment and they were scattered over the first field. Forest
King, Wild Geranium, and Bay Regent leading for two lengths, when
Montacute, with his habitual “fast burst,” sent Pas de Charge past them
like lightning. The Irish mare gave a rush and got alongside of him;
the King would have done the same, but Cecil checked him and kept him in
that cool, swinging canter which covered the grassland so lightly; Bay
Regent's vast thundering stride was Olympian, but Jimmy Delmar saw
his worst foe in the “Guards' Crack,” and waited on him warily, riding
superbly himself.

The first fence disposed of half the field; they crossed the second in
the same order, Wild Geranium racing neck to neck with Pas de Charge;
the King was all athirst to join the duello, but his owner kept him
gently back, saving his pace and lifting him over the jumps as easily
as a lapwing. The second fence proved a cropper to several, some awkward
falls took place over it, and tailing commenced; after the third field,
which was heavy plow, all knocked off but eight, and the real struggle
began in sharp earnest: a good dozen, who had shown a splendid stride
over the grass, being down up by the terrible work on the clods.

The five favorites had it all to themselves; Day Star pounding onward at
tremendous speed, Pas de Charge giving slight symptoms of distress owing
to the madness of his first burst, the Irish mare literally flying ahead
of him, Forest King and the chestnut waiting on one another.

In the Grand Stand the Seraph's eyes strained after the Scarlet and
White, and he muttered in his mustaches, “Ye gods, what's up! The
world's coming to an end!--Beauty's turned cautious!”

Cautious, indeed--with that giant of Pytchley fame running neck to
neck by him; cautious--with two-thirds of the course unrun, and all the
yawners yet to come; cautious--with the blood of Forest King lashing to
boiling heat, and the wondrous greyhound stride stretching out faster
and faster beneath him, ready at a touch to break away and take the
lead; but he would be reckless enough by and by; reckless, as his nature
was, under the indolent serenity of habit.

Two more fences came, laced high and stiff with the Shire thorn, and
with scarce twenty feet between them, the heavy plowed land leading to
them, clotted, and black, and hard, with the fresh earthy scent steaming
up as the hoofs struck the clods with a dull thunder--Pas de Charge rose
to the first: distressed too early, his hind feet caught in the thorn,
and he came down, rolling clear of his rider; Montacute picked him up
with true science, but the day was lost to the Heavy Cavalry man. Forest
King went in and out over both like a bird and led for the first time;
the chestnut was not to be beat at fencing and ran even with him; Wild
Geranium flew still as fleet as a deer--true to her sex, she would not
bear rivalry; but little Grafton, though he rode like a professional,
was but a young one, and went too wildly; her spirit wanted cooler curb.

And now only Cecil loosened the King to his full will and his full
speed. Now only the beautiful Arab head was stretched like a racer's in
the run-in for the Derby, and the grand stride swept out till the hoofs
seemed never to touch the dark earth they skimmed over; neither whip
nor spur was needed, Bertie had only to leave the gallant temper and the
generous fire that were roused in their might to go their way and hold
their own. His hands were low, his head a little back, his face very
calm; the eyes only had a daring, eager, resolute will lighting them;
Brixworth lay before him. He knew well what Forest King could do; but he
did not know how great the chestnut Regent's powers might be.

The water gleamed before them, brown and swollen, and deepened with the
meltings of winter snows a month before; the brook that has brought so
many to grief over its famous banks since cavaliers leaped it with their
falcon on their wrist, or the mellow note of the horn rang over the
woods in the hunting days of Stuart reigns. They knew it well, that long
line, shimmering there in the sunlight, the test that all must pass who
go in for the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon. Forest King scented water, and
went on with his ears pointed, and his greyhound stride lengthening,
quickening, gathering up all its force and its impetus for the leap that
was before--then, like the rise and the swoop of a heron, he spanned the
water, and, landing clear, launched forward with the lunge of a spear
darted through air. Brixworth was passed--the Scarlet and White, a mere
gleam of bright color, a mere speck in the landscape, to the breathless
crowds in the stand, sped on over the brown and level grassland; two and
a quarter miles done in four minutes and twenty seconds. Bay Regent
was scarcely behind him; the chestnut abhorred the water, but a finer
trained hunter was never sent over the Shires, and Jimmy Delmar rode
like Grimshaw himself. The giant took the leap in magnificent style,
and thundered on neck and neck with the “Guards' Crack.” The Irish mare
followed, and with miraculous gameness, landed safely; but her hind legs
slipped on the bank, a moment was lost, and “Baby” Grafton scarce knew
enough to recover it, though he scoured on, nothing daunted.

Pas de Charge, much behind, refused the yawner; his strength was not
more than his courage, but both had been strained too severely at first.
Montacute struck the spurs into him with a savage blow over the head;
the madness was its own punishment; the poor brute rose blindly to the
jump, and missed the bank with a reel and a crash; Sir Eyre was hurled
out into the brook, and the hope of the Heavies lay there with his
breast and forelegs resting on the ground, his hindquarters in the
water, and his neck broken. Pas de Charge would never again see the
starting flag waved, or hear the music of the hounds, or feel the
gallant life throb and glow through him at the rallying notes of the
horn. His race was run.

Not knowing, or looking, or heeding what happened behind, the trio tore
on over the meadow and the plowed; the two favorites neck by neck, the
game little mare hopelessly behind through that one fatal moment over
Brixworth. The turning-flags were passed; from the crowds on the
course a great hoarse roar came louder and louder, and the shouts rang,
changing every second: “Forest King wins!” “Bay Regent wins!” “Scarlet
and White's ahead!” “Violet's up with him!” “A cracker on the King!”
 “Ten to one on the Regent!” “Guards are over the fence first!” “Guards
are winning!” “Guards are losing!” “Guards are beat!”

Were they?

As the shout rose, Cecil's left stirrup-leather snapped and gave way; at
the pace they were going most men, aye, and good riders too, would have
been hurled out of their saddle by the shock; he scarcely swerved; a
moment to ease the King and to recover his equilibrium, then he took
the pace up again as though nothing had chanced. And his comrades of the
Household, when they saw this through their race-glasses, broke through
their serenity and burst into a cheer that echoed over the grasslands
and the coppices like a clarion, the grand rich voice of the Seraph
leading foremost and loudest--a cheer that rolled mellow and triumphant
down the cold, bright air like the blast of trumpets, and thrilled on
Bertie's ear where he came down the course, a mile away. It made his
heart beat quicker with a victorious, headlong delight, as his knees
pressed close into Forest King's flanks, and, half stirrupless like the
Arabs, he thundered forward to the greatest riding feat of his life. His
face was very calm still, but his blood was in tumult, the delirium of
pace had got on him, a minute of life like this was worth a year, and he
knew that he would win or die for it, as the land seemed to fly like a
black sheet under him, and, in that killing speed, fence and hedge and
double and water all went by him like a dream; whirling underneath him
as the gray stretched, stomach to earth, over the level, and rose to
leap after leap.

For that instant's pause, when the stirrup broke, threatened to lose him
the race.

He was more than a length behind the Regent, whose hoofs as they dashed
the ground up sounded like thunder, and for whose herculean strength the
plow had no terrors; it was more than the lead to keep now, there was
ground to cover--and the King was losing like Wild Geranium. Cecil felt
drunk with that strong, keen west wind that blew so strongly in his
teeth, a passionate excitation was in him, every breath of winter air
that rushed in its bracing currents round him seemed to lash him like a
stripe--the Household to look on and see him beaten!

Certain wild blood, that lay latent in Cecil under the tranquil
gentleness of temper and of custom, woke and had the mastery; he set
his teeth hard, and his hands clinched like steel on the bridle. “Oh,
my beauty, my beauty!” he cried, all unconsciously half aloud, as they
cleared the thirty-sixth fence. “Kill me if you like, but don't fail
me!”

As though Forest King heard the prayer and answered it with all his
hero's heart, the splendid form launched faster out, the stretching
stride stretched farther yet with lightning spontaneity, every fiber
strained, every nerve struggled; with a magnificent bound like an
antelope the gray recovered the ground he had lost, and passed Bay
Regent by a quarter-length. It was a neck-and-neck race once more,
across the three meadows with the last and lower fences that were
between them and the final leap of all; that ditch of artificial water
with the towering double hedge of oak rails and of blackthorn, that was
reared black and grim and well-nigh hopeless just in front of the Grand
Stand. A roar like the roar of the sea broke up from the thronged course
as the crowd hung breathless on the even race; ten thousand shouts rang
as thrice ten thousand eyes watched the closing contest, as superb a
sight as the Shires ever saw; while the two ran together--the gigantic
chestnut, with every massive sinew swelled and strained to tension,
side by side with the marvelous grace, the shining flanks, and the
Arabian-like head of the Guards' horse.

Louder and wilder the shrieked tumult rose: “The chestnut beats!” “The
gray beats!” “Scarlet's ahead!” “Bay Regent's caught him!” “Violet's
winning, Violet's wining!” “The King's neck by neck!” “The King's
beating!” “The Guards will get it!” “The Guard's crack has it!” “Not
yet, not yet!” “Violet will thrash him at the jump!” “Now for it!” “The
Guards, the Guards, the Guards!” “Scarlet will win!” “The King has the
finish!” “No, no, no, no!”

Sent along at a pace that Epsom flat never eclipsed, sweeping by the
Grand Stand like the flash of electric flame, they ran side to side one
moment more; their foam flung on each other's withers, their breath
hot in each other's nostrils, while the dark earth flew beneath their
stride. The blackthorn was in front behind five bars of solid oak; the
water yawning on its farther side, black and deep and fenced, twelve
feet wide if it were an inch, with the same thorn wall beyond it; a
leap no horse should have been given, no Steward should have set. Cecil
pressed his knees closer and closer, and worked the gallant hero for the
test; the surging roar of the throng, though so close, was dull on his
ear; he heard nothing, knew nothing, saw nothing but that lean chestnut
head beside him, the dull thud on the turf of the flying gallop, and the
black wall that reared in his face. Forest King had done so much, could
he have stay and strength for this?

Cecil's hands clinched unconsciously on the bridle, and his face was
very pale--pale with excitation--as his foot, where the stirrup was
broken, crushed closer and harder against the gray's flanks.

“Oh, my darling, my beauty--now!”

One touch of the spur--the first--and Forest King rose at the leap, all
the life and power there were in him gathered for one superhuman and
crowning effort; a flash of time, not half a second in duration, and he
was lifted in the air higher, and higher, and higher in the cold, fresh,
wild winter wind, stakes and rails, and thorn and water lay beneath him
black and gaunt and shapeless, yawning like a grave; one bound, even in
mid-air, one last convulsive impulse of the gathered limbs, and Forest
King was over!

And as he galloped up the straight run-in, he was alone.

Bay Regent had refused the leap.

As the gray swept to the Judge's chair, the air was rent with deafening
cheers that seemed to reel like drunken shouts from the multitude.
“The Guards win, the Guards win!” and when his rider pulled up at the
distance with the full sun shining on the scarlet and white, with the
gold glisten of the embroidered “Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume,” Forest
King stood in all his glory, winner of the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon, by a
feat without its parallel in all the annals of the Gold Vase.



But, as the crowd surged about him, and the mad cheering crowned his
victory, and the Household in the splendor of their triumph and the
fullness of their gratitude rushed from the drags and the stands
to cluster to his saddle, Bertie looked as serenely and listlessly
nonchalant as of old, while he nodded to the Seraph with a gentle smile.

“Rather a close finish, eh? Have you any Moselle Cup going there? I'm a
little thirsty.”

Outsiders would much sooner have thought him defeated than triumphant;
no one, who had not known him, could possibly have imagined that he
had been successful; an ordinary spectator would have concluded that,
judging by the resigned weariness of his features, he had won the race
greatly against his own will, and to his own infinite ennui. No one
could have dreamt that he was thinking in his heart of hearts how
passionately he loved the gallant beast that had been victor with him,
and that, if he had followed out the momentary impulse in him, he could
have put his arms round the noble bowed neck and kissed the horse like a
woman!

The Moselle Cup was brought to refresh the tired champion, and before he
drank it Bertie glanced at a certain place in the Grand Stand and bent
his head as the cup touched his lips: it was a dedication of his victory
to the Queen of Beauty. Then he threw himself lightly out of saddle,
and, as Forest King was led away for the after-ceremony of bottling,
rubbing, and clothing, his rider, regardless of the roar and hubbub of
the course, and of the tumultuous cheers that welcomed both him and his
horse from the men who pressed round him, into whose pockets he had put
thousands upon thousands, and whose ringing hurrahs greeted the “Guards'
Crack,” passed straight up toward Jimmy Delmar and held out his hand.

“You gave me a close thing, Major Delmar. The Vase is as much yours
as mine; if your chestnut had been as good a water jumper as he is a
fencer, we should have been neck to neck at the finish.”

The browned Indian-sunned face of the Lancer broke up into a cordial
smile, and he shook the hand held out to him warmly; defeat and
disappointment had cut him to the core, for Jimmy was the first
riding man of the Light Cavalry; but he would not have been the frank
campaigner that he was if he had not responded to the graceful and
generous overture of his rival and conqueror.

“Oh, I can take a beating!” he said good-humoredly; “at any rate, I am
beat by the Guards; and it is very little humiliation to lose against
such riding as yours and such a magnificent brute as your King. I
congratulate you most heartily, most sincerely.”

And he meant it, too. Jimmy never canted, nor did he ever throw the
blame, with paltry, savage vindictiveness, on the horse he had ridden.
Some men there are--their name is legion--who never allow that it is
their fault when they are “nowhere”--oh, no! it is the “cursed screw”
 always, according to them. But a very good rider will not tell you that.

Cecil, while he talked, was glancing up at the Grand Stand, and when the
others dispersed to look over the horses, and he had put himself out
of his shell into his sealskin in the dressing-shed, he went up thither
without a moment's loss of time.

He knew them all; those dainty beauties with their delicate cheeks just
brightened by the western winterly wind, and their rich furs and laces
glowing among the colors of their respective heroes; he was the pet of
them all; “Beauty” had the suffrages of the sex without exception; he
was received with bright smiles and graceful congratulations, even from
those who had espoused Eyre Montacute's cause, and still fluttered their
losing azure, though the poor hunter lay dead, with his back broken, and
a pistol-ball mercifully sent through his brains--the martyr to a man's
hot haste, as the dumb things have ever been since creation began.

Cecil passed them as rapidly as he could for one so well received by
them, and made his way to the center of the Stand, to the same spot at
which he had glanced when he had drunk the Moselle.

A lady turned to him; she looked like a rose camellia in her floating
scarlet and white, just toned down and made perfect by a shower of
Spanish lace; a beautiful brunette, dashing, yet delicate; a little
fast, yet intensely thoroughbred; a coquette who would smoke a
cigarette, yet a peeress who would never lose her dignity.

“Au coeur vaillant rien d'impossible!” she said, with an envoi of her
lorgnon, and a smile that should have intoxicated him--a smile that
might have rewarded a Richepanse for a Hohenlinden. “Superbly ridden! I
absolutely trembled for you as you lifted the King to that last leap. It
was terrible!”

It was terrible; and a woman, to say nothing of a woman who was in
love with him, might well have felt a heart-sick fear at sight of that
yawning water, and those towering walls of blackthorn, where one touch
of the hoofs on the topmost bough, one spring too short of the gathered
limbs, must have been death to both horse and rider. But, as she said
it, she was smiling, radiant, full of easy calm and racing interest, as
became her ladyship who had had “bets at even” before now on Goodwood
fillies, and could lead the first flight over the Belvoir and the Quorn
countries. It was possible that her ladyship was too thoroughbred not
to see a man killed over the oak-rails without deviating into unseemly
emotion, or being capable of such bad style as to be agitated.

Bertie, however, in answer, threw the tenderest eloquence into his eyes;
very learned in such eloquence.

“If I could not have been victorious while you looked on, I would at
least not have lived to meet you here!”

She laughed a little, so did he; they were used to exchange these
passages in an admirably artistic masquerade, but it was always a little
droll to each of them to see the other wear the domino of sentiment, and
neither had much credence in the other.

“What a preux chevalier!” cried his Queen of Beauty. “You would have
died in a ditch out of homage to me. Who shall say that chivalry is
past! Tell me, Bertie; is it very delightful, that desperate effort to
break your neck? It looks pleasant, to judge by its effects. It is the
only thing in the world that amuses you!”

“Well--there is a great deal to be said for it,” replied Bertie
musingly. “You see, until one has broken one's neck, the excitement
of the thing isn't totally worn out; can't be, naturally, because
the--what-do-you-call-it?--consummation isn't attained till then. The
worst of it is, it's getting commonplace, getting vulgar; such a number
break their necks, doing Alps and that sort of thing, that we shall have
nothing at all left to ourselves soon.”

“Not even the monopoly of sporting suicide! Very hard,” said her
ladyship, with the lowest, most languid laugh in the world, very like
“Beauty's” own, save that it had a considerable indication of studied
affectation, of which he, however much of a dandy he was, was wholly
guiltless. “Well! you won magnificently; that little black man, who
is he? Lancers, somebody said?--ran you so fearfully close. I really
thought at one time that the Guards had lost.”

“Do you suppose that a man happy enough to wear Lady Guenevere's colors
could lose? An embroidered scarf given by such hands has been a gage
of victory ever since the days of tournaments!” murmured Cecil with the
softest tenderness, but just enough laziness in the tone and laughter in
the eye to make it highly doubtful whether he was not laughing both at
her and at himself, and was wondering why the deuce a fellow had to talk
such nonsense. Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with whom he had been in love
ever since they stayed together at Belvoir for the Croxton Park week the
autumn previous; and who was beautiful enough to make their “friendship”
 as enchanting as a page out of the “Decamerone.” And while he bent
over her, flirting in the fashion that made him the darling of the
drawing-rooms, and looking down into her superb Velasquez eyes, he did
not know, and if he had known would have been careless of it, that
afar off, while with rage, and with his gaze straining on to the course
through his race-glass, Ben Davis, “the welsher,” who had watched the
finish--watched the “Guards' Crack” landed at the distance--muttered,
with a mastiff's savage growl:

“He wins, does he? Curse him! The d----d swell--he shan't win long.”



CHAPTER IV.

LOVE A LA MODE.

Life was very pleasant at Royallieu.

It lay in the Melton country, and was equally well placed for Pytchley,
Quorn, and Belvoir, besides possessing its own small but very perfect
pack of “little ladies,” or the “demoiselles,” as they were severally
nicknamed; the game was closely preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian
corn till they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little
winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first-rate shots,
with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to amuse them
till dinner, with rocketers and warm corners enough to content the most
insatiate of knickerbockered gunners. The stud was superb; the cook, a
French artist of consummate genius, who had a brougham to his own use
and wore diamonds of the first water; in the broad beech-studded grassy
lands no lesser thing than doe and deer ever swept through the thick
ferns in the sunlight and the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants
filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately
banqueting room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its
Vernets, and yet--there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it
all. Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the future, and the
parasite of extravagance was constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old
Norman-planted oak of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that?
Nobody. It was the way of the House never to take count of the morrow.
True, any one of them would have died a hundred deaths rather than have
had one acre of the beautiful green diadem of woods felled by the ax of
the timber contractor, or passed to the hands of a stranger; but no one
among them ever thought that this was the inevitable end to which they
surely drifted with blind and unthinking improvidence. The old
Viscount, haughtiest of haughty nobles, would never abate one jot of his
accustomed magnificence; and his sons had but imbibed the teaching of
all that surrounded them; they did but do in manhood what they had been
unconsciously molded to do in boyhood, when they were set to Eton at ten
with gold dressing-boxes to grace their Dame's tables, embryo Dukes for
their cofags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of
the champagnes at the Christopher. The old, old story--how it repeats
itself! Boys grow up amid profuse prodigality, and are launched into a
world where they can no more arrest themselves than the feather-weight
can pull in the lightning stride of the two-year-old, who defies all
check and takes the flat as he chooses. They are brought up like young
Dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can--on
nothing. Then, on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where
a dishonored alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lakeside, or
under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red
cross chills the lonely traveler in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian
forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a
nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters--then
at them the world “shoots out its lips with scorn.” Not on them lies the
blame.

A wintry, watery sun was shining on the terraces as Lord Royallieu paced
up and down the morning after the Grand Military; his step and limbs
excessively enfeebled, but the carriage of his head and the flash of
his dark hawk's eyes as proud and untamable as in his earliest years.
He never left his own apartments; and no one, save his favorite “little
Berk,” ever went to him without his desire. He was too sensitive a
man to thrust his age and ailing health in among the young leaders of
fashion, the wild men of pleasure, the good wits and the good shots of
his son's set; he knew very well that his own day was past; that they
would have listened to him out of the patience of courtesy, but that
they would have wished him away as “no end of a bore.” He was too shrewd
not to know this; but he was too quickly galled ever to bear to have it
recalled to him.

He looked up suddenly and sharply: coming toward him he saw the figure
of the Guardsman. For “Beauty” the Viscount had no love; indeed,
well-nigh a hatred, for a reason never guessed by others, and never
betrayed by him.

Bertie was not like the Royallieu race; he resembled his mother's
family. She, a beautiful and fragile creature whom her second son had
loved, for the first years of his life, as he would have thought it now
impossible that he could love anyone, had married the Viscount with no
affection toward him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous
passion that her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married
life, however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness toward
a lord into whose arms she had been thrown, trembling and reluctant; of
his wife's fidelity he could not entertain a doubt; though, that he had
never won her heart, he could not choose but know. He knew more, too;
for she had told it him with a noble candor before he wedded her; knew
that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, who
had made a famous name among the wild mountain tribes of Northern India.
This cousin, Alan Bertie--a fearless and chivalrous soldier, fitter for
the days of knighthood than for these--had seen Lady Royallieu at Nice,
some three years after her marriage; accident had thrown them across
each other's path; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had
ever been, had made him linger in her presence--had made her shrink
from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united their names
together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should
touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank
forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long
before he had rendered “Bertie's Horse” the most famous of all the wild
Irregulars of the East.

After her death, Lord Royallieu found Alan's miniature among her papers,
and recalled those winter months by the Mediterranean till he cherished,
with the fierce, eager, self-torture of a jealous nature, doubts and
suspicions that, during her life, one glance from her eyes would have
disarmed and abashed. Her second and favorite child bore her family
name--her late lover's name; and, in resembling her race, resembled the
dead soldier. It was sufficient to make him hate Bertie with a cruel
and savage detestation, which he strove indeed to temper, for he was
by nature a just man, and, in his better moments, knew that his doubts
wronged both the living and the dead; but which colored, too strongly
to be dissembled, all his feelings and his actions toward his son, and
might both have soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly
gentle and supremely careless than Cecil's.

As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father's dislike to
him, but never thought much about it, and attributed it, when he did
think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old man. To be jealous of
the favor shown to his boyish brother could never for a moment have come
into his imagination. Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the
little fellow, a child of three years old, in the affection and the care
of Bertie--himself then a boy of twelve or fourteen--and little as he
thought of such things now, the trust of his dying mother had never been
wholly forgotten.

A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount's still handsome aquiline,
saturnine face, as his second son approached up the terrace; Bertie
was too like the cavalry soldier whose form he had last seen standing
against the rose light of a Mediterranean sunset. The soldier had been
dead eight-and-twenty years; but the jealous hate was not dead yet.

Cecile took off his hunting-cap with a courtesy that sat very well on
his habitual languid nonchalance; he never called his father anything
but “Royal”; rarely saw, still less rarely consulted him, and cared
not a straw for his censure or opinion; but he was too thoroughbred by
nature to be able to follow the underbred indecorum of the day which
makes disrespect to old age the fashion. “You sent for me?” he asked,
taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

“No, sir,” answered the old lord curtly; “I sent for your brother. The
fools can't take even a message right now, it seems.”

“Shouldn't have named us so near alike; it's often a bore!” said Bertie.

“I didn't name you, sir; your mother named you,” answered his father
sharply; the subject irritated him.

“It's of no consequence which!” murmured Cecil, with an expostulatory
wave of his cigar. “We're not even asked whether we like to come into
the world; we can't expect to be asked what we like to be called in it.
Good-day to you, sir.”

He turned to move away to the house, but his father stopped him; he knew
that he had been discourteous--a far worse crime in Lord Royallieu's
eyes than to be heartless.

“So you won the Vase yesterday?” he asked pausing in his walk with his
back bowed, but his stern, silver-haired head erect.

“I didn't--the King did.”

“That's absurd, sir,” said the Viscount, in his resonant and yet
melodious voice. “The finest horse in the world may have his back broke
by bad riding, and a screw has won before now when it's been finely
handled. The finish was tight, wasn't it?”

“Well--rather. I have ridden closer spins, though. The fallows were
light.”

Lord Royallieu smiled grimly.

“I know what the Shire 'plow' is like,” he said, with a flash of his
falcon eyes over the landscape, where, in the days of his youth, he
had led the first flight so often; George Rex, and Waterford, and the
Berkeleys, and the rest following the rally of his hunting-horn. “You
won much in bets?”

“Very fair, thanks.”

“And won't be a shilling richer for it this day next week!” retorted
the Viscount, with a rasping, grating irony; he could not help darting
savage thrusts at this man who looked at him with eyes so cruelly like
Alan Bertie's. “You play 5 pound points, and lay 500 pounds on the
odd trick, I've heard, at your whist in the Clubs--pretty prices for a
younger son!”

“Never bet on the odd trick; spoils the game; makes you sacrifice
play to the trick. We always bet on the game,” said Cecil, with gentle
weariness; the sweetness of his temper was proof against his father's
attacks upon his patience.

“No matter what you bet, sir; you live as if you were a Rothschild while
you are a beggar!”

“Wish I were a beggar: fellows always have no end in stock, they say;
and your tailor can't worry you very much when all you have to think
about is an artistic arrangement of tatters!” murmured Bertie,
whose impenetrable serenity was never to be ruffled by his father's
bitterness.

“You will soon have your wish, then,” retorted the Viscount, with the
unprovoked and reasonless passion which he vented on everyone, but on
none so much as the son he hated. “You are on a royal road to it. I live
out of the world, but I hear from it sir. I hear that there is not a
man in the Guards--not even Lord Rockingham--who lives at the rate
of imprudence you do; that there is not a man who drives such costly
horses, keeps such costly mistresses, games to such desperation, fools
gold away with such idiocy as you do. You conduct yourself as if you
were a millionaire, sir; and what are you? A pauper on my bounty, and
on your brother Montagu's after me--a pauper with a tinsel fashion,
a gilded beggary, a Queen's commission to cover a sold-out poverty, a
dandy's reputation to stave off a defaulter's future! A pauper, sir--and
a Guardsman!”

The coarse and cruel irony flushed out with wicked, scorching malignity;
lashing and upbraiding the man who was the victim of his own unwisdom
and extravagance.

A slight tinge of color came on his son's face as he heard; but he gave
no sign that he was moved, no sign of impatience or anger. He lifted his
cap again, not in irony, but with a grave respect in his action that was
totally contrary to his whole temperament.

“This sort of talk is very exhausting, very bad style,” he said, with
his accustomed gentle murmur. “I will bid you good-morning, my lord.”

And he went without another word. Crossing the length of the
old-fashioned Elizabethan terrace, little Berk passed him: he motioned
the lad toward the Viscount. “Royal wants to see you, young one.”

The boy nodded and went onward; and, as Bertie turned to enter the low
door that led out to the stables, he saw his father meet the lad--meet
him with a smile that changed the whole character of his face, and
pleasant, kindly words of affectionate welcome; drawing his arm about
Berkeley's shoulder, and looking with pride upon his bright and gracious
youth.

More than an old man's preference would be thus won by the young one;
a considerable portion of their mother's fortune, so left that it could
not be dissipated, yet could be willed to which son the Viscount chose,
would go to his brother by this passionate partiality; but there was not
a tinge of jealousy in Cecil; whatever else his faults he had no
mean ones, and the boy was dear to him, by a quite unconscious, yet
unvarying, obedience to his dead mothers' wish.

“Royal hates me as game-birds hate a red dog. Why the deuce, I wonder?”
 he thought, with a certain slight touch of pain, despite his idle
philosophies and devil-may-care indifference. “Well--I am good for
nothing, I suppose. Certainly I am not good for much, unless it's riding
and making love.”

With which summary of his merits, “Beauty,” who felt himself to be a
master in those two arts, but thought himself a bad fellow out of
them, sauntered away to join the Seraph and the rest of his guests; his
father's words pursuing him a little, despite his carelessness, for they
had borne an unwelcome measure of truth.

“Royal can hit hard,” his thoughts continued. “'A pauper and a
Guardsman!' By Jove! It's true enough; but he made me so. They brought
me up as if I had a million coming to me, and turned me out among the
cracks to take my running with the best of them--and they give me just
about what pays my groom's book! Then they wonder that a fellow goes to
the Jews. Where the deuce else can he go?”

And Bertie, whom his gains the day before had not much benefited, since
his play-debts, his young brother's needs, and the Zu-Zu's insatiate
little hands were all stretched ready to devour them without leaving
a sovereign for more serious liabilities, went, for it was quite early
morning, to act the M. F. H. in his fathers' stead at the meet on the
great lawns before the house, for the Royallieu “lady-pack” were very
famous in the Shires, and hunted over the same country alternate days
with the Quorn. They moved off ere long to draw the Holt Wood, in as
open a morning and as strong a scenting wind as ever favored Melton
Pink.

A whimper and “gone away!” soon echoed from Beebyside, and the pack,
not letting the fox hang a second, dashed after him, making straight for
Scraptoft. One of the fastest things up-wind that hounds ever ran took
them straight through the Spinnies, past Hamilton Farm, away beyond
Burkby village, and down into the valley of the Wreake without a check,
where he broke away, was headed, tried earths, and was pulled down
scarce forty minutes from the find. The pack then drew Hungerton foxhole
blank, drew Carver's spinnies without a whimper; and lastly, drawing the
old familiar Billesden Coplow, had a short, quick burst with a brace of
cubs, and returning, settled themselves to a fine dog fox that was raced
an hour-and-half, hunted slowly for fifty minutes, raced again another
hour-and-quarter, sending all the field to their “second horses”; and
after a clipping chase through the cream of the grass country, nearly
saved his brush in the twilight when the scent was lost in a rushing
hailstorm, but had the “little ladies” laid on again like wildfire, and
was killed with the “who-whoop!” ringing far and away over Glenn Gorse,
after a glorious run--thirty miles in and out--with pace that tired the
best of them.

A better day's sport even the Quorn had never had in all its brilliant
annals, and faster things the Melton men themselves had never wanted:
both those who love the “quickest thing you ever knew--thirty minutes
without a check--such a pace!” and care little whether the finale be
“killed” or “broke away,” and those of the old fashion, who prefer “long
day, you know, steady as old time; the beauties stuck like wax through
fourteen parishes, as I live; six hours, if it were a minute; horses
dead-beat; positively walked, you know; no end of a day!” but must have
the fatal “who-whoop” as conclusion--both of these, the “new style and
the old,” could not but be content with the doings of the “demoiselles”
 from start to finish.

Was it likely that Cecil remembered the caustic lash of his father's
ironies while he was lifting Mother of Pearl over the posts and rails,
and sweeping on, with the halloo ringing down the wintry wind as the
grasslands flew beneath him? Was it likely that he recollected the
difficulties that hung above him while he was dashing down the Gorse
happy as a king, with the wild hail driving in his face, and a break of
stormy sunshine just welcoming the gallant few who were landed at the
death, as twilight fell? Was it likely that he could unlearn all the
lessons of his life, and realize in how near a neighborhood he stood
to ruin when he was drinking Regency sherry out of his gold flask as
he crossed the saddle of his second horse, or, smoking, rode slowly
homeward; chatting with the Seraph through the leafless, muddy lanes in
the gloaming?

Scarcely; it is very easy to remember our difficulties when we are
eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad soups and worse wines
in continental impecuniosity; sleeping on them as rough Australian
shake-downs, or wearing them perpetually in Californian rags and
tatters--it were impossible very well to escape from them then; but
it is very hard to remember them when every touch and shape of life is
pleasant to us--when everything about us is symbolical and redolent of
wealth and ease--when the art of enjoyment is the only one we are called
on to study, and the science of pleasure all we are asked to explore.

It is well-nigh impossible to believe yourself a beggar while you never
want sovereigns for whist; and it would be beyond the powers of human
nature to conceive your ruin irrevocable while you still eat turbot
and terrapin, with a powdered giant behind your chair daily. Up in his
garret a poor wretch knows very well what he is, and realizes in stern
fact the extremities of the last sou, the last shirt, and the last
hope; but in these devil-may-care pleasures--in this pleasant, reckless,
velvet-soft rush down-hill--in this club-palace, with every luxury
that the heart of man can devise and desire, yours to command at your
will--it is hard work, then, to grasp the truth that the crossing
sweeper yonder, in the dust of Pall Mall, is really not more utterly in
the toils of poverty than you are!

“Beauty” was never, in the whole course of his days, virtually
or physically, or even metaphorically, reminded that he was not a
millionaire; much less still was he ever reminded so painfully.

Life petted him, pampered him, caressed him, gifted him, though of half
his gifts he never made use; lodged him like a prince, dined him like
a king, and never recalled to him by a single privation or a single
sensation that he was not as rich a man as his brother-in-arms, the
Seraph, future Duke of Lyonnesse. How could he then bring himself to
understand, as nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his
father had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase--“A Pauper and
a Guardsman”? If he had ever been near a comprehension of it, which he
never was, he must have ceased to realize it when--pressed to dine with
Lord Guenevere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while a
groom dashed over to Royallieu for his change of clothes--he caught a
glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their
preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace and
silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blond cheeks and brunette
tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed
the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among them to be the darling of
that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by those soft,
languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his
chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women will spoil the
privileged pet of their drawing rooms whom they had made “free of
the guild,” and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of
anything “serious.”

He was the recognized darling and permitted property of the young
married beauties; the unwedded knew he was hopeless for them, and
tacitly left him to the more attractive conquerors, who hardly prized
the Seraph so much as they did Bertie, to sit in their barouches and
opera boxes, ride and drive and yacht with them, conduct a Boccaccio
intrigue through the height of the season, and make them really believe
themselves actually in love while they were at the moors or down the
Nile, and would have given their diamonds to get a new distraction.

Lady Guenevere was the last of these, his titled and wedded captors;
and perhaps the most resistless of all of them. Neither of them believed
very much in their attachment, but both of them wore the masquerade
dress to perfection. He had fallen in love with her as much as he ever
fell in love, which was just sufficient to amuse him, and never enough
to disturb him. He let himself be fascinated, not exerting himself
either to resist or advance the affair till he was, perhaps, a little
more entangled with her than it was, according to his canons, expedient
to be; and they had the most enchanting--friendship.

Nobody was ever so indiscreet as to call it anything else; and my Lord
was too deeply absorbed in the Alderney beauties that stood knee-deep in
the yellow straw of his farmyard, and the triumphant conquests that he
gained over his brother peers' Shorthorns and Suffolks, to trouble his
head about Cecil's attendance on his beautiful Countess.

They corresponded in Spanish; they had a thousand charming ciphers; they
made the columns of the “Times” and the “Post” play the unconscious role
of medium to appointments; they eclipsed all the pages of Calderon's or
Congreve's comedies in the ingenuities with which they met, wrote, got
invitations together to the same houses, and arranged signals for mute
communication: but there was not the slightest occasion for it all. It
passed the time, however, and went far to persuade them that they really
were in love, and had a mountain of difficulties and dangers to contend
with; it added the “spice to the sauce,” and gave them the “relish of
being forbidden.” Besides, an open scandal would have been very shocking
to her brilliant ladyship, and there was nothing on earth, perhaps,
of which he would have had a more lively dread than a “scene”; but his
present “friendship” was delightful, and presented no such dangers,
while his fair “friend” was one of the greatest beauties and the
greatest coquettes of her time. Her smile was honor; her fan was a
scepter; her face was perfect; and her heart never troubled herself or
her lovers; if she had a fault, she was a trifle exacting, but that was
not to be wondered at in one so omnipotent, and her chains, after all,
were made of roses.

As she sat in the deep ruddy glow of the library fire, with the light
flickering on her white brow and her violet velvets; as she floated
to the head of her table, with opals shining among her priceless point
laces, and some tropical flower with leaves of glistening gold crowning
her bronze hair; as she glided down in a waltz along the polished floor,
or bent her proud head over ecarte in a musing grace that made her
opponent utterly forget to mark the king or even play his cards at all;
as she talked in the low music of her voice of European imbrogli, and
consols and coupons, for she was a politician and a speculator, or
lapsed into a beautifully tinted study of la femme incomprise, when
time and scene suited, when the stars were very clear above the terraces
without, and the conservatory very solitary, and a touch of Musset or
Owen Meredith chimed in well with the light and shade of the oleanders
and the brown luster of her own eloquent glance--in all these how superb
she was!

And if in truth her bosom only fell with the falling of Shares, and rose
with the rising of Bonds; if her soft shadows were only taken up, like
the purple tinting under her lashes, to embellish her beauty; if in her
heart of hearts she thought Musset a fool, and wondered why “Lucille”
 was not written in prose, in her soul far preferring “Le Follet”;
why--it did not matter, that I can see. All great ladies gamble in
stocks nowadays under the rose, and women are for the most part as cold,
clear, hard, and practical as their adorers believe them the contrary;
and a femme incomprise is so charming, when she avows herself
comprehended by you, that you would never risk spoiling the confidence
by hinting a doubt of its truth. If she and Bertie only played at love;
if neither believed much in the other; if each trifled with a pretty
gossamer soufflet of passion much as they trifled with the soufflets at
dinner; if both tried it to trifle away ennui much as they tried staking
a Friedrich d'Or at Baden, this light, surface, fashionable, philosophic
form of a passion they both laughed at, in its hot and serious follies,
suited them admirably. Had it ever mingled a grain of bitterness in her
ladyship's Souchong before dinner, or given an aroma of bitterness to
her lover's Naples punch in the smoking room, it would have been out of
all keeping with themselves and their world.

Nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in love; nothing on
earth so destructive as being too much so; and as Cecil, in the idle
enjoyment of the former gentle luxury, flirted with his liege lady that
night; lying back in the softest of lounging-chairs, with his dark,
dreamy, handsome eyes looking all the eloquence in the world, and his
head drooped till his mustaches were almost touching her laces, his
Queen of Beauty listened with charmed interest, and to look at him he
might have been praying after the poet:

     How is it under our control
     To love or not to love?

In real truth he was gently murmuring:

“Such a pity that you missed to-day! Hounds found directly; three of the
fastest things I ever knew, one after another; you should have seen the
'little ladies' head him just above the Gorse! Three hares crossed us
and a fresh fox; some of the pack broke away after the new scent, but
old Bluebell, your pet, held on like death, and most of them kept after
her--you had your doubts about Silver Trumpet's shoulders; they're not
the thing, perhaps, but she ran beautifully all day, and didn't show a
symptom of rioting.”

Cecil could, when needed, do the Musset and Meredith style of thing to
perfection, but on the whole he preferred love a la mode; it is so much
easier and less exhausting to tell your mistress of a ringing run, or a
close finish, than to turn perpetual periods on the luster of her eyes,
and the eternity of your devotion.

Nor did it at all interfere with the sincerity of his worship that the
Zu-Zu was at the prettiest little box in the world, in the neighborhood
of Market Harborough, which he had taken for her, and had been at the
meet that day in her little toy trap, with its pair of snowy ponies and
its bright blue liveries that drove so desperately through his finances,
and had ridden his hunter Maraschino with immense dash and spirit for a
young lady who had never done anything but pirouette till the last six
months, and a total and headlong disregard of “purlers” very reckless
in a white-skinned, bright-eyed, illiterate, avaricious little beauty,
whose face was her fortune; and who most assuredly would have been
adored no single moment longer, had she scarred her fair, tinted cheek
with the blackthorn, or started as a heroine with a broken nose like
Fielding's cherished Amelia. The Zu-Zu might rage, might sulk, might
even swear all sorts of naughty Mabille oaths, most villainously
pronounced, at the ascendancy of her haughty, unapproachable patrician
rival--she did do all these things--but Bertie would not have been
the consummate tactician, the perfect flirt, the skilled and steeled
campaigner in the boudoirs that he was, if he had not been equal to the
delicate task of managing both the peeress and the ballet-dancer with
inimitable ability; even when they placed him in the seemingly difficult
dilemma of meeting them both, with twenty yards between them, on the
neutral ground of the gathering to see the Pytchley or the Tailby throw
off--a task he had achieved with victorious brilliance more than once
already this season.

“You drive a team, Beauty--never drive a team,” the Seraph had said on
occasion, over a confidential “sherry-peg” in the mornings, meaning
by the metaphor of a team Lady Guenevere, the Zu-Zu, and various other
contemporaries in Bertie's affections. “Nothing on earth so dangerous;
your leader will bolt, or your off-wheeler will turn sulky, or your
young one will passage and make the very deuce of a row; they'll never
go quiet till the end, however clever your hand is on the ribbons. Now,
I'll drive six-in-hand as soon as any man--drove a ten-hander last year
in the Bois--when the team comes out of the stables; but I'm hanged if
I'd risk my neck with managing even a pair of women. Have one clean out
of the shafts before you trot out another!”

To which salutary advice Cecil only gave a laugh, going on his own ways
with the “team” as before, to the despair of his fidus Achates; the
Seraph being a quarry so incessantly pursued by dowager-beaters,
chaperone-keepers, and the whole hunt of the Matrimonial Pack, with
those clever hounds Belle and Fashion ever leading in full cry after
him, that he dreaded the sight of a ballroom meet; and, shunning the
rich preserves of the Salons, ran to earth persistently in the shady
Wood of St. John's, and got--at some little cost and some risk of
trapping, it is true, but still efficiently--preserved from all other
hunters or poachers by the lawless Robin Hoods aux yeux noirs of those
welcome and familiar coverts.



CHAPTER V.

UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE.

“You're a lad o' wax, my beauty!” cried Mr. Rake enthusiastically,
surveying the hero of the Grand Military with adoring eyes as that
celebrity, without a hair turned or a muscle swollen from his exploit,
was having a dressing down after a gentle exercise. “You've pulled it
off, haven't you? You've cut the work out for 'em! You've shown 'em what
a luster is! Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is in blood. The
littlest pippin that ever threw a leg across the pigskin knows that in
the stables; then why the dickens do the world run against such a plain
fact out of it?”

And Rake gazed with worship at the symmetrical limbs of the champion
of the “First Life,” and plunged into speculation on the democratic
tendencies of the age, as clearly contradicted by all the evidences of
the flat and furrow, while Forest King drank a dozen go-downs of
water, and was rewarded for the patience with which he had subdued
his inclination to kick, fret, spring, and break away throughout the
dressing by a full feed thrown into his crib, which Rake watched him,
with adoring gaze, eat to the very last grain.

“You precious one!” soliloquized that philosopher, who loved the horse
with a sort of passion since his victory over the Shires. “You've won
for the gentlemen, my lovely--for your own cracks, my boy!”

And Rake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts, went out of the
box to get into saddle and ride off on an errand of his master's to the
Zu-Zu at her tiny hunting-lodge, where the snow-white ponies made her
stud, and where she gave enchanting little hunting-dinners, at which she
sang equally enchanting little hunting-songs, and arrayed herself, in
the Fontainebleau hunting costume, gold-hilted knife and all, and spent
Cecil's winnings for him with a rapidity that threatened to leave very
few of them for the London season. She was very pretty, sweetly pretty;
with hair that wanted no gold powder, the clearest, sauciest eyes, and
the handsomest mouth in the world; but of grammar she had not a notion,
of her aspirates she had never a recollection, of conversation she had
not an idea; of slang she had, to be sure, a repertoire, but to this was
her command of language limited. She dressed perfectly, but she was a
vulgar little soul; drank everything, from Bass' ale to rum-punch, and
from cherry-brandy to absinthe; thought it the height of wit to stifle
you with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice, and the climax of repartee
to cram your hat full of peach stones and lobster shells; was thoroughly
avaricious, thoroughly insatiate, thoroughly heartless, pillaged with
both hands, and then never had enough; had a coarse good nature when
it cost her nothing, and was “as jolly as a grig,” according to her
phraseology, so long as she could stew her pigeons in champagne, drink
wines and liqueurs that were beyond price, take the most dashing trap
in the Park up to Flirtation Corner, and laugh and sing and eat Richmond
dinners, and show herself at the Opera with Bertie or some other “swell”
 attached to her, in the very box next to a Duchess.

The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy; and as for the pathetic pictures that
novelists and moralists draw, of vice sighing amid turtle and truffles
for childish innocence in the cottage at home where honeysuckles
blossomed and brown brooks made melody, and passionately grieving on
the purple cushions of a barouche for the time of straw pallets and
untroubled sleep, why--the Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the
box-seat of a drag, and told you “to stow all that trash”; her childish
recollections were of a stifling lean-to with the odor of pigsty and
straw-yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all the other six
days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a general atmosphere of beer and
wash-tubs; she hated her past, and loved her cigar on the drag. The
Zu-Zu is fact; the moralists' pictures are moonshine.

The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, moreover, daily becoming more
prominent in the world, more brilliant, more frankly recognized, and
more omnipotent. Whether this will ultimately prove for the better or
the worse, it would be a bold man who should dare say; there is at least
one thing left to desire in it--i. e., that the synonym of “Aspasia,”
 which serves so often to designate in journalistic literature these
Free Lances of life, were more suitable in artistic and intellectual
similarity, and that, when the Zu-Zu and her sisterhood plunge their
white arms elbow-deep into so many fortunes, and rule the world right
and left as they do, they could also sound their H's properly, and knew
a little orthography, if they could not be changed into such queens of
grace, of intellect, of sovereign mind and splendid wit as were their
prototypes when she whose name they debase held her rule in the City of
the Violet Crown, and gathered about her Phidias the divine, haughty
and eloquent Antipho, the gay Crates, the subtle Protagorus, Cratinus so
acrid and yet so jovial, Damon of the silver lyre, and the great poets
who are poets for all time. Author and artist, noble and soldier, court
the Zu-Zu order now; but it must be confessed that the Hellenic idols
were of a more exalted type than are the Hyde Park goddesses!

However, the Zu-Zu was the rage, and spent Bertie's money, when he got
any, just as her willful sovereignty fancied, and Rake rode on now with
his master's note, bearing no very good will to her; for Rake had very
strong prejudices, and none stronger than against these fair pillagers
who went about seeking whom they should devour, and laughing at the
wholesale ruin they wrought while the sentimentalists babbled in “Social
Science” of “pearls lost” and “innocence betrayed.”

“A girl that used to eat tripe and red herring in a six-pair pack, and
dance for a shilling a night in gauze, coming it so grand that she'll
only eat asparagus in March, and drink the best Brands with her
truffles! Why, she ain't worth sixpence thrown away on her, unless it's
worth while to hear how hard she can swear at you!” averred Rake, in his
eloquence; and he was undoubtedly right for that matter; but then--the
Zu-Zu was the rage, and if ever she should be sold up, great ladies
would crowd to her sale and buy with eager curiosity at high prices her
most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most flimsy gew-gaws of marqueterie!

Rake had seen a good deal of men and manners, and, in his own opinion at
least, was “up to every dodge on the cross” that this iniquitous world
could unfold. A bright, lithe, animated, vigorous, yellow-haired, and
sturdy fellow; seemingly with a dash of the Celt in him that made him
vivacious and peppery; Mr. Rake polished his wits quite as much as he
polished the tops, and considered himself a philosopher. Of whose son he
was he had not the remotest idea; his earliest recollections were of the
tender mercies of the workhouse; but even that chill foster-mother, the
parish, had not damaged the liveliness of his temper or the independence
of his opinions, and as soon as he was fifteen Rake had run away and
joined a circus; distinguishing himself there by his genius for standing
on his head and tying his limbs into a porter's knot.

From the circus he migrated successively into the shape of a comic
singer, a tapster, a navvy, a bill-sticker, a guacho in Mexico (working
his passage out), a fireman in New York, a ventriloquist in Maryland,
a vaquero in Spanish California, a lemonade seller in San Francisco, a
revolutionist in the Argentine (without the most distant idea what he
fought for), a boatman on the bay of Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, a
trapper in the Wilderness, and finally, working his passage home
again, took the Queen's shilling in Dublin, and was drafted into a
light-cavalry regiment. With the --th he served half a dozen years in
India; a rough-rider, a splendid fellow in a charge or a pursuit, with
an astonishing power over horses, and the clearest back-handed sweep of
a saber that ever cut down a knot of natives; but--insubordinate. Do his
duty whenever fighting was in question, he did most zealously; but to
kick over the traces at other times was a temptation that at last became
too strong for that lawless lover of liberty.

From the moment that he joined the regiment a certain Corporal Warne and
he had conceived an antipathy to one another, which Rake had to control
as he might, and which the Corporal was not above indulging in every
petty piece of tyranny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active
service Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage to keep
the curb on himself tolerably well though he was always regarded in his
troop rather as a hound that will “riot” is regarded in the pack; but
when the --th came back to Brighton and to barracks, the evil spirit of
rebellion began to get a little hotter in him under th Corporal's “Idees
Napoliennes” of justifiable persecution. Warne indisputably provoked his
man in a cold, iron, strictly lawful sort of manner, moreover, all the
more irritating to a temper like Rake's.

“Hanged if I care how the officers come it over me; they're gentlemen,
and it don't try a fellow,” would Rake say in confidential moments over
purl and a penn'orth of bird's-eye, his experience in the Argentine
Republic having left him with strongly aristocratic prejudices; “but
when it comes to a duffer like that, that knows no better than me,
what ain't a bit better than me, and what is as clumsy a duffer about a
horse's plates as ever I knew, and would almost let a young 'un buck him
out of his saddle--why, then I do cut up rough, I ain't denying it; and
I don't see what there is in his Stripes to give him such a license to
be aggravating.”

With which Rake would blow the froth off his pewter with a puff of
concentrated wrath, and an oath against his non-commissioned officers
that might have let some light in upon the advocates for “promotion
from the ranks,” had they been there to take the lesson. At last, in the
leisure of Brighton, the storm broke. Rake had a Scotch hound that
was the pride of his life; his beer-money often going instead to buy
dainties for the dog, who became one of the channels through which Warne
could annoy and thwart him. The dog did no harm, being a fine, well-bred
deerhound; but it pleased the Corporal to consider that it did, simply
because it belonged to Rake, whose popularity in the corps, owing to
his good nature, his good spirits, and his innumerable tales of American
experience and amorous adventures, increased the jealous dislike which
his knack with an unbroken colt and his abundant stable science had
first raised in his superior.

One day in the chargers' stables the hound ran out of a loose box with a
rush to get at Rake, and upset a pailful of warm mash. The Corporal, who
was standing by in harness, hit him over the head with a heavy whip he
had in his hand; infuriated by the pain, the dog flew at him, tearing
his overalls with a fierce crunch of his teeth. “Take the brute off, and
string him up with a halter; I've put up with him too long!” cried Warne
to a couple of privates working near in their stable dress. Before the
words were out of his mouth Rake threw himself on him with a bound
like lightning, and, wrenching the whip out of his hands, struck him a
slashing, stinging blow across his face.

“Hang my hound, you cur! If you touch a hair of him, I'll double-thong
you within an inch of your life!”

And assuredly he would have kept his word, had he not been made a
prisoner and marched off to the guardroom.

Rake learned the stern necessity of the law, which, for the sake of
morale, must make the soldiers, whose blood is wanted to be like fire
on the field, patient, pulseless, and enduring of every provocation,
cruelty, and insolence in the camp and barrack, as though they were
statues of stone--a needful law, a wise law, an indispensable law,
doubtless, but a very hard law to be obeyed by a man full of life and
all life's passions.

At the court-martial on his mutinous conduct, which followed, many
witnesses brought evidence, on being pressed, to the unpopularity of
Warne in the regiment and to his harshness and his tyranny to Rake. Many
men spoke out what had been chained down in their thoughts for years;
and, in consideration of the provocation received, the prisoner, who was
much liked by the officers, was condemned to six months' imprisonment
for his insubordination and blow to his superior officer, without being
tied up to the triangles. At the court-martial, Cecil, who chanced to
be in Brighton after Goodwood, was present one day with some
other Guardsmen; and the look of Rake, with his cheerfulness under
difficulties, his love for the hound, and his bright, sunburnt, shrewd,
humorous countenance, took his fancy.

“Beauty” was the essence of good nature. Indolent himself, he hated to
see anything or anybody worried; lazy, gentle, wayward, and spoilt
by his own world, he was still never so selfish and philosophic as he
pretended but what he would do a kindness, if one came in his way; it is
not a very great virtue, perhaps, but it is a rare one.

“Poor devil! Struck the other because he wouldn't have his dog hanged.
Well, on my word, I should have done the same in his place, if I could
have got up the pace for so much exertion,” murmured Cecil to his
cheroot, careless of the demoralizing tendency of his remarks for the
army in general. Had it occurred in the Guards, and he had “sat” on the
case, Rake would have had one very lenient judge.

As it was, Bertie actually went the lengths of thinking seriously about
the matter; he liked Rake's devotion to his dumb friend, and he heard of
his intense popularity in his troop; he wished to save, if he could, so
fine a fellow from the risks of his turbulent passion and from the stern
fetters of a trying discipline; hence, when Rake found himself condemned
to his cell, he had a message sent him by Bertie's groom that, when his
term of punishment should be over, Mr. Cecil would buy his discharge
from the service and engage him as extra body-servant, having had a good
account of his capabilities; he had taken the hound to his own kennels.

Now, the fellow had been thoroughly devil-may-care throughout the
whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence with sublime
impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels with an utterly reckless
nonchalance; but somehow or other, when that message reached him, a
vivid sense that he was a condemned and disgraced man suddenly flooded
in on him; a passionate gratitude seized him to the young aristocrat
who had thought of him in his destitution and condemnation, who had even
thought of his dog; and Rake the philosophic and undauntable, could
have found it in his heart to kneel down in the dust and kiss the
stirrup-leather when he held it for his new master, so strong was the
loyalty he bore from that moment to Bertie.

Martinets were scandalized at a Life-Guardsman taking as his private
valet a man who had been guilty of such conduct in the Light Cavalry;
but Cecil never troubled his head about what people said; and so
invaluable did Rake speedily become to him that he had kept him about
his person wherever he went from then until now, two years after.

Rake loved his master with a fidelity very rare in these days; he loved
his horses, his dogs, everything that was his, down to his very rifle
and boots; slaved for him cheerfully, and was as proud of the deer he
stalked, of the brace he bagged, of his winnings when the Household
played the Zingari, or his victory when his yacht won the Cherbourg Cup,
as though those successes had been Rake's own.

“My dear Seraph,” said Cecil himself once, on this point, to the
Marquis, “if you want generosity, fidelity, and all the rest of the
cardinal what-d'ye-call-'ems--sins, ain't it?--go to a noble-hearted
Scamp; he'll stick to you till he kills himself. If you want to be
cheated, get a Respectable Immaculate; he'll swindle you piously, and
decamp with your Doncaster Vase.”

And Rake, who assuredly had been an out-and-out scamp, made good
Bertie's creed; he “stuck to him” devoutly, and no terrier was ever more
alive to an otter than he was to the Guardsman's interests. It was that
very vigilance which made him, as he rode back from the Zu-Zu's in
the twilight, notice what would have escaped any save one who had been
practiced as a trapper in the red Canadian woods; namely, the head of a
man, almost hidden among the heavy, though leafless, brushwood and
the yellow gorse of a spinney which lay on his left in Royallieu Park.
Rake's eyes were telescopic and microscopic; moreover, they had been
trained to know such little signs as a marsh from a hen harrier in full
flight, by the length of wing and tail, and a widgeon or a coot from
a mallard or a teal, by the depth each swam out of the water. Gray and
foggy as it was, and high as was the gorse, Rake recognized his born-foe
Willon.

“What's he up to there?” thought Rake, surveying the place, which was
wild, solitary, and an unlikely place enough for a head groom to be
found in. “If he ain't a rascal, I never seen one; it's my belief he
cheats the stable thick and thin, and gets on Mr. Cecil's mounts to a
good tune--aye, and would nobble 'em as soon as not, if it just suited
his book. That blessed King hates the man; how he lashes his heels at
him!”

It was certainly possible that Willon might be passing an idle hour
in potting rabbits, or be otherwise innocently engaged enough; but the
sight of him, there among the gorse, was a sight of suspicion to Rake.
Instantaneous thoughts darted through his mind of tethering his horse,
and making a reconnaissance, safely and unseen, with the science of
stalking brute or man that he had learned of his friends the Sioux. But
second thoughts showed him that was impossible. The horse he was on was
a mere colt, just breaking in, who had barely had so much as a “dumb
jockey” on his back; and stand for a second, the colt would not.

“At any rate, I'll unearth him,” thought Rake, with his latent animosity
to the head groom and his vigilant loyalty to Cecil overruling any
scruple as to his right to overlook his foe's movements; and with a
gallop that was muffled on the heathered turf he dashed straight at the
covert, unperceived till he was within ten paces. Willon started and
looked up hastily; he was talking to a square-built man very quietly
dressed in shepherd's plaid, chiefly remarkable by a red-hued beard and
whiskers.

The groom turned pale, and laughed nervously as Rake pulled up with a
jerk.

“You on that young 'un again? Take care you don't get bucked out o'
saddle in the shape of a cocked-hat.”

“I ain't afraid of going to grass, if you are!” retorted Rake
scornfully; boldness was not his enemy's strong point. “Who's your pal,
old fellow?”

“A cousin o' mine, out o' Yorkshire,” vouchsafed Mr. Willon, looking
anything but easy, while the cousin aforesaid nodded sulkily on the
introduction.

“Ah! looks like a Yorkshire tyke,” muttered Rake, with a volume of
meaning condensed in these innocent words. “A nice, dry, cheerful sort
of place to meet your cousin in, too; uncommon lively; hope it'll raise
his spirits to see all his cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don't
seem much in sorts now,” continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a
glance at the “keeper's tree” by which they stood, in the middle of dank
undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, curs, owls,
kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens. To what issue the passage of
arms might have come it is impossible to say, for at that moment the
colt took matters into his own hands, and bolted with a rush that even
Rake could not pull in till he had had a mile-long “pipe-opener.”

“Something up there,” thought that sagacious rough-rider; “if that
red-haired chap ain't a rum lot, I'll eat him. I've seen his face, too,
somewhere; where the deuce was it? Cousin; yes, cousins in Queer Street,
I dare say! Why should he go and meet his 'cousin' out in the fog there,
when, if you took twenty cousins home to the servants' hall, nobody'd
ever say anything? If that Willon ain't as deep as Old Harry----”

And Rake rode into the stable-yard, thoughtful and intensely suspicious
of the rendezvous under the keeper's tree in the out-lying coverts. He
would have been more so had he guessed that Ben Davis' red beard and
demure attire, with other as efficient disguises, had prevented even his
own keen eyes from penetrating the identity of Willon's “Cousin” with
the welsher he had seen thrust off the course the day before by his
master.



CHAPTER VI.

THE END OF A RINGING RUN.

“Tally-ho! is the word, clap spurs and let's follow. The world has no
charm like a rattling view-halloa!”



Is hardly to be denied by anybody in this land of fast bursts and
gallant M. F. H.'s, whether they “ride to hunt,” or “hunt to ride,” in
the immortal distinction of Assheton Smith's old whip; the latter class,
by the bye, becoming far and away the larger, in these days of rattling
gallops and desperate breathers. Who cares to patter after a sly old dog
fox, that, fat and wary, leads the pack a tedious, interminable wind,
in and out through gorse and spinney, bricks himself up in a drain, and
takes an hour to be dug out, dodges about till twilight, and makes
the hounds pick the scent slowly and wretchedly over marsh and through
water? Who would not give fifty guineas a second for the glorious thirty
minutes of racing that show steam and steel over fence and fallow in a
clipping rush, without a check from find to finish? So be it ever! The
riding that graces the Shires, that makes Tedworth and Pytchley, the
Duke's and the Fitzwilliam's, household words and “names beloved”--that
fills Melton and Market Harborough, and makes the best flirts of the
ballroom gallop fifteen miles to covert, careless of hail or rain, mire
or slush, mist or cold, so long as it is a fine scenting wind--is
the same riding that sent the Six Hundred down in to the blaze of the
Muscovite guns; that in our fathers' days gave to Grant's Hussars their
swoop, like eagles, on to the rearguard at Morales, and that, in the
grand old East and the rich trackless West, makes exiled campaigners
with high English names seek and win an aristeia of their own at the
head of their wild Irregular Horse, who would charge hell itself at
their bidding.

Now in all the service there was not a man who loved hunting better than
Bertie. Though he was incorrigibly lazy, and inconceivably effeminate in
every one of his habits; though he suggested a portable lounging-chair
as an improvement at battues, so that you might shoot sitting; drove to
every breakfast and garden party in the season in his brougham with the
blinds down lest a grain of dust should touch him; thought a waltz too
exhaustive, and a saunter down Pall Mall too tiring, and asked to
have the end of a novel told him in the clubs, because it was too much
trouble to read on a warm day; though he was more indolent than any
spoiled Creole--“Beauty” never failed to head the first flight, and
adored a hard day cross country, with an east wind in his eyes and the
sleet in his teeth. The only trouble was to make him get up in time for
it.

“Mr. Cecil, sir; if you please, the drag will be round in ten minutes,”
 said Rake, with a dash of desperation for the seventh time into his
chamber, one fine scenting morning.

“I don't please,” answered Cecil sleepily, finishing his cup of coffee,
and reading a novel of La Demirep's.

“The other gentlemen are all down, sir, and you will be too late.”

“Not a bit. They must wait for me,” yawned Bertie.

Crash came the Seraph's thunder on the panels of the door, and a strong
volume of Turkish through the keyhole: “Beauty, Beauty, are you dead?”

“Now, what an inconsequent question!” expostulated Cecil, with appealing
rebuke. “If a fellow were dead, how the devil could he say he was? Do be
logical, Seraph.”

“Get up!” cried the Seraph with a deafening rataplan, and a final dash
of his colossal stature into the chamber. “We've all done breakfast; the
traps are coming round; you'll be an hour behind time at the meet.”

Bertie lifted his eyes with plaintive resignation from the Demirep's
yellow-papered romance.

“I'm really in an interesting chapter: Aglae has just had a marquis kill
his son, and two brothers kill each other in the Bois, about her, and
is on the point of discovering a man she's in love with to be her own
grandfather; the complication is absolutely thrilling,” murmured Beauty,
whom nothing could ever “thrill”--not even plunging down the Matterhorn,
losing “long odds in thou'” over the Oaks, or being sunned in the eyes
of the fairest woman of Europe.

The Seraph laughed, and tossed the volume straight to the other end of
the chamber.

“Confound you, Beauty; get up!”

“Never swear, Seraph; not ever so mildly,” yawned Cecil, “it's gone out,
you know; only the cads and the clergy can damn one nowadays; it's
such bad style to be so impulsive. Look! You have broken the back of my
Demirep!”

“You deserve to break the King's back over the first cropper,” laughed
the Seraph. “Do get up!”

“Bother!” sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, while the
Seraph disappeared in a cloud of Turkish.

Neither Bertie's indolence nor his insouciance was assumed; utter
carelessness was his nature, utter impassability was his habit, and he
was truly for the moment loath to leave his bed, his coffee, and his
novel; he must have his leg over the saddle, and feel the strain on his
arms of that “pulling” pace with which the King always went when once he
settled into his stride, before he would really think about winning.

The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present squires
found no favor with Bertie; a slice of game and a glass of Curacoa were
all he kept the drag waiting to swallow; and the four bays going at
a pelting pace, he and the rest of the Household who were gathered at
Royallieu were by good luck in time for the throw-off of the Quorn,
where the hero o' the Blue Ribbon was dancing impatiently under Willon's
hand, scenting the fresh, keen, sunny air, and knowing as well what all
those bits of scarlet straying in through field and lane, gate and
gap, meant, as well as though the merry notes of the master's horn were
winding over the gorse. The meet was brilliant and very large; showing
such a gathering as only the Melton country can; and foremost among the
crowd of carriages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare
Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite peeress in
her violet habit and her tiny velvet hat; and the pony equipage of the
Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure and silver, leopard rugs, and snowy
reins: the breadth of half an acre of grassland was between them, but
the groups of men about them were tolerably equal for number and for
rank.

“Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph; there's a good
fellow,” murmured Cecil, as he swung himself into saddle. The Seraph
gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced. He detested women in the
hunting-field, but that sweetest tempered giant of the Brigades never
refused anything to anybody--much less to “Beauty.”

To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in
its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the
delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his
two claimants--bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that
assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival
might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the
pony-trap under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and
restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little
gold sherry-flash, studded with turquoises, just ordered for her from
Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously contemned, because she
thought it had only cost twenty guineas; anchoring the victimized Seraph
beside her by an adroit “Ah! by the way, Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your
rose-scented papelitos; she's been wild to smoke them”; and leaving the
Zu-Zu content at securing a future Duke, was free to canter back and
flirt on the offside of Vivandiere, till the “signal,” the “cast,”
 made with consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the
brushwood, the tightening of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the
challenge, the whimper, and the “stole away!” sent the field headlong
down the course after as fine a long-legged greyhound fox as ever
carried a brush.

Away he went in a rattling spin, breaking straight at once for the open,
the hounds on the scent like mad: with a tally-ho that thundered through
the cloudless, crisp, cold, glittering noon, the field dashed off
pell-mell; the violet habit of her ladyship, and the azure skirts of the
Zu-Zu foremost of all in the rush through the spinneys while Cecil
on the King, and the Seraph on a magnificent white weight-carrier, as
thoroughbred and colossal as himself, led the way with them. The scent
was hot as death in the spinneys, and the pack raced till nothing but
a good one could live with them; few but good ones, however, were to
be found with the Quorn, and the field held together superbly over the
first fence, and on across the grassland, the game old fox giving no
sign of going to covert, but running straight as a crow flies, while the
pace grew terrific.

“Beats cock-fighting!” cried the Zu-Zu, while her blue skirts fluttered
in the wind, as she lifted Cecil's brown mare, very cleverly, over
a bilberry hedge, and set her little white teeth with a will on the
Seraph's attar-of-rose cigarette. Lady Guenevere heard the words as
Vivandiere rose in the air with the light bound of a roe, and a slight
superb dash of scorn came into her haughty eyes for the moment; she
never seemed to know that “that person” in the azure habit even existed,
but the contempt awoke in her, and shone in her glance, while she rode
on as that fair leader of the Belvoir and Pytchley alone could ride over
the fallows.

The steam was on at full pressure, the hounds held close to his
brush,--heads up, sterns down,--running still straight as an arrow over
the open, past coppice and covert, through gorse and spinney, without a
sign of the fox making for shelter. Fence and double, hedge and brook,
soon scattered the field; straying off far and wide, and coming to grief
with lots of “downers,” it grew select, and few but the crack men could
keep the hounds in view. “Catch 'em who can,” was the one mot d'ordre,
for they were literally racing; the line-hunters never losing the scent
a second, as the fox, taking to dodging, made all the trouble he could
for them through the rides of the woods. Their working was magnificent,
and, heading him, they ran him round and round in a ring, viewed him for
a second, and drove him out of covert once more into the pastures, while
they laid on at a hotter scent and flew after him like staghounds.

Only half a dozen were up with them now; the pace was tremendous, though
all over grass; here a flight of posts and rails tried the muscle of
the boldest; there a bullfinch yawned behind the blackthorn; here a big
fence towered; there a brook rushed angrily among its rushes; while the
keen, easterly wind blew over the meadows, and the pack streamed
along like the white trail of a plume. Cecil “showed the way” with the
self-same stride and the self-same fencing as had won him the Vase. Lady
Guenevere and the Seraph were running almost even with him; three of the
Household farther down; the Zu-Zu and some Melton men two meadows off;
the rest of the field, nowhere. Fifty-two minutes had gone by in that
splendid running, without a single check, while the fox raced as gamely
and as fast as at the find; the speed was like lightning past the brown
woods, the dark-green pine plantations, the hedges, bright with scarlet
berries; through the green low-lying grasslands, and the winding drives
of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued beech trunks, whose roots the
violets were just purpling with their blossom; while far away stretched
the blue haze of the distance, and above-head a flight of rooks cawed
merrily in the bright air, soon left far off as the pack swept onward in
the most brilliant thing of the hunting year.

“Water! Take care!” cried Cecil, with a warning wave of his hand as
the hounds, with a splash like a torrent, dashed up to their necks in
a broad, brawling brook that Reynard had swam in first-rate style, and
struggled as best they could after him. It was an awkward bit, with
bad taking-off and a villainous mud-bank for landing; and the water,
thickened and swollen with recent rains, had made all the land that
sloped to it miry and soft as sponge. It was the risk of life and limb
to try it; but all who still viewed the hounds, catching Bertie's shout
of warning, worked their horses up for it, and charged toward it as
hotly as troops charge a square. Forest King was over like a bird;
the winner of the Grand Military was not to be daunted by all the
puny streams of the Shires; the artistic riding of the Countess landed
Vivandiere, with a beautiful clear spring, after him by a couple of
lengths: the Seraph's handsome white hunter, brought up at a headlong
gallop with characteristic careless dash and fine science mingled,
cleared it; but, falling with a mighty crash, gave him a purler on the
opposite side, and was within an inch of striking him dead with his hoof
in frantic struggles to recover. The Seraph, however, was on his legs
with a rapidity marvelous in a six-foot-three son of Anak, picked up
the horse, threw himself into saddle, and dashed off again quick
as lightning, with his scarlet stained all over, and his long fair
mustaches floating in the wind. The Zu-Zu turned Mother of Pearl back
with a fiery French oath; she hated to be “cut down,” but she liked
still less to risk her neck; and two of the Household were already
treated to “crackers” that disabled them for the day, while one Melton
man was pitched head foremost into the brook, and another was sitting
dolorously on the bank with his horse's head in his lap, and the poor
brute's spine broken. There were only three of the first riders in
England now alone with the hounds, who, with a cold scent as the fox led
them through the angular corner of a thick pheasant covert, stuck like
wax to the line, and working him out, viewed him once more, for one
wild, breathless, tantalizing second; and through the straggling street
of a little hamlet, and got him out again on the level pasture and
across a fine line of hunting country, with the leafless woods and the
low gates of a park far away to their westward.

“A guinea to a shilling that we kill him,” cried the flute-voice of her
brilliant ladyship, as she ran a moment side by side with Forest King,
and flashed her rich eyes on his rider; she had scorned the Zu-Zu,
but on occasion she would use betting slang and racing slang with the
daintiest grace in the world herself, without their polluting her lips.
As though the old fox heard the wager, he swept in a bend round toward
the woods on the right; making, with all the craft and speed there were
in him, for the deep shelter of the boxwood and laurel. “After him, my
beauties, my beauties--if he run there he'll go to ground and save his
brush!” thundered the Seraph, as though he were hunting his own hounds
at Lyonnesse, who knew every tone of his rich clarion notes as well as
they knew every wind of his horn. But the young ones of the pack saw
Reynard's move and his meaning as quickly as he did; having run fast
before, they flew now; the pace was terrific. Two fences were crossed as
though they were paper; the meadows raced with lightning speed, a ha-ha
leaped, a gate cleared with a crashing jump, and in all the furious
excitement of “view,” they tore down the mile-long length of an avenue,
dashed into a flower garden, and smashing through a gay trellis-work of
scarlet creeper, plunged into the home-paddock and killed with as loud
a shout ringing over the country in the bright, sunny day as ever was
echoed by the ringing cheers of the Shire; Cecil, the Seraph, and her
victorious ladyship alone coming in for the glories of the “finish.”

“Never had a faster seventy minutes up-wind,” said Lady Guenevere,
looking at the tiny jeweled watch, the size of a sixpence, that was
set in the handle of her whip, as the brush, with all the compliments
customary, was handed to her. She had won twenty before.

The park so unceremoniously entered belonged to a baronet, who, though
he hunted little himself, honored the sport and scorned a vulpecide, he
came out naturally and begged them to lunch. Lady Guenevere refused to
dismount, but consented to take a biscuit and a little Lafitte, while
clarets, liqueurs, and ales, with anything else they wanted, were
brought to her companions. The stragglers strayed in; the M. F. H. came
up just too late; the men, getting down, gathered about the Countess or
lounged on the gray stone steps of the Elizabethan house. The sun
shone brightly on the oriole casements, the antique gables, the twisted
chimneys, all covered with crimson parasites and trailing ivy; the
horses, the scarlet, the pack in the paddock adjacent, the shrubberies
of laurel and araucaria, the sun-tinted terraces, made a bright and
picturesque grouping. Bertie, with his hand on Vivandiere's pommel,
after taking a deep draught of sparkling Rhenish, looked on at it all
with a pleasant sigh of amusement.

“By Jove!” he murmured softly, with a contented smile about his lips,
“that was a ringing run!”

At that very moment, as the words were spoken, a groom approached him
hastily; his young brother, whom he had scarcely seen since the find,
had been thrown and taken home on a hurdle; the injuries were rumored to
be serious.

Bertie's smile faded, he looked very grave; world-spoiled as he
was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long been by
profession, he loved the lad.



When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloroform odor, the
boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered on the pillow, his
chest bare, and his right arm broken and splintered. The deathlike coma
was but the result of the chloroform; but Cecil never stayed to ask or
remember that; he was by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down
by it, his head bent on his arms.

“It was my fault. I should have looked to him.”

The words were very low; he hated that any should see he could still be
such a fool as to feel. A minute, and he conquered himself; he rose,
and with his hand on the boy's fair tumbled curls, turned calmly to
the medical men who, attached to the household, had been on the spot at
once.

“What is the matter?”

“Fractured arm, contusion; nothing serious, nothing at all, at his age,”
 replied the surgeon. “When he wakes out of the lethargy he will tell you
so himself, Mr. Cecil.”

“You are certain?”--do what he would his voice shook a little; his hand
had not shaken, two days before, when nothing less than ruin or ransom
had hung on his losing or winning the race.

“Perfectly certain,” answered the surgeon cheerfully. “He is not
overstrong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight; he will be out of
that bed in a fortnight.”

“How did he fall?”

But while they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking at the
handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay stretched helpless
and stricken before him; and he was remembering the death-bed of their
mother, when the only voice he had ever reverenced had whispered, as she
pointed to the little child of three summers: “When you are a man take
care of him, Bertie.” How had he fulfilled the injunction? Into how much
brilliantly tinted evil had he not led him--by example, at least?

The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a lengthened silence:

“Your brother will be best unexcited when he comes to himself, sir;
look--his eyes are unclosing now. Could you do me the favor to go to his
lordship? His grief made him perfectly wild--so dangerous to his life at
his age. We could only persuade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the
plea of Mr. Berkeley's safety. If you could see him----”

Cecil went, mechanically almost, and with a grave, weary depression on
him; he was so unaccustomed to think at all, so utterly unaccustomed to
think painfully, that he scarcely knew what ailed him. Had he had his
old tact about him, he would have known how worse than useless it would
be for him to seek his father in such a moment.

Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened the door of his
private apartments, heavily darkened and heavily perfumed; at the turn
of the lock he started up eagerly.

“What news of him?”

“Good news, I hope,” said Cecil gently, as he came forward. “The
injuries are not grave, they tell me. I am so sorry that I never watched
his fencing, but--”

The old man had not recognized him till he heard his voice, and he
waved him off with a fierce, contemptuous gesture; the grief for his
favorite's danger, the wild terrors that his fears had conjured up, his
almost frantic agony at the sight of the accident, had lashed him into
passion well-nigh delirious.

“Out of my sight, sir,” he said fiercely, his mellow tones quivering
with rage. “I wish to God you had been dead in a ditch before a hair of
my boy's had been touched. You live, and he lies dying there!”

Cecil bowed in silence; the brutality of the words wounded, but they did
not offend him, for he knew his father was in that moment scarce better
than a maniac, and he was touched with the haggard misery upon the old
Peer's face.

“Out of my sight, sir,” re-echoed Lord Royallieu as he strode forward,
passion lending vigor to his emaciated frame, while the dignity of his
grand carriage blent with the furious force of his infuriated blindness.
“If you had had the heart of a man, you would have saved such a child as
that from his peril; warned him, watched him, succored him at least when
he fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, if death
comes to him! You are safe, you are always safe. You try to kill
yourself with every vice under heaven, and only get more strength, more
grace, more pleasure from it--you are always safe because I hate you.
Yes! I hate you, sir!”

No words can give the force, the malignity, the concentrated meaning
with which the words were hurled out, as the majestic form of the
old Lord towered in the shadow, with his hands outstretched as if in
imprecation.

Cecil heard him in silence, doubting if he could hear aright, while the
bitter phrases scathed and cut like scourges, but he bowed once more
with the manner that was as inseparable from him as his nature.

“Hate is so exhausting; I regret I give you the trouble of it. May I ask
why you favor me with it?”

“You may!” thundered his father, while his hawk's eyes flashed their
glittering fire. “You are like the man I cursed living and curse dead.
You look at me with Alan Bertie's eyes, you speak to me with Alan
Bertie's voice; I loved your mother, I worshiped her; but--you are his
son, not mine!”

The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The blood
flushed Bertie's face a deep and burning scarlet; he started with an
irrepressible tremor, like a man struck with a shot; he felt like one
suddenly stabbed in the dark by a sure and a cruel hand. The insult and
the amazement of the words seemed to paralyze him for the moment, the
next he recovered himself, and lifted his head with as haughty a gesture
as his father's, his features perfectly composed again, and sterner than
in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked.

“You lie, and you know you lie. My mother was pure as the angels.
Henceforth you can be only to me a slanderer who has dared to taint the
one name holy in my sight.”

And without another word, he turned and went out of the chamber. Yet,
as the door closed, old habit was so strong on him that, even in his hot
and bitter pain, and his bewildered sense of sudden outrage, he almost
smiled at himself. “It is a mania; he does not know what he says,” he
thought. “How could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the
Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such bad form!”

But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, and gentle
though his nature was, beyond all forgiveness from him was the dishonor
of his mother's memory.



CHAPTER VII.

AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER.

It was the height of the season, and the duties of the Household were
proportionately and insupportably heavy. The Brigades were fairly worked
to death, and the Indian service, in the heat of the Afghan war, was
never more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby
to Ducal.

Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field-days in
the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of it. Far more
severe, and still less to be shirked, were the morning exercise in the
Ride; the daily parade in the Lady's Mile; the reconnaissances from
club windows, the vedettes at Flirtation Corner; the long campaigns at
mess-breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and the
fortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse and
Chambertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases when
a fashionable drum beat the rataplan; the skirmishes with sharpshooters
of the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the foraging duty when fair
commanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties; the
ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the terrible risk of crossing the
enemy's lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at the
jails of St. George's, or of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge; the constant
inspections of the Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the pickets
afterward in the Wood of St. John; the anxieties of the Club
commissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines; the fatigue
duty of ballrooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the
clause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice; all
these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and the
unremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First Life and the
rest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and incessantly that some
almost thought of changing into the dreary depot of St. Stephen's; and
one mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enough and false enough to his
colors to meditate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself up
at St. George's--“because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you know!”

The Household were very hard pressed through the season--a crowded and
brilliant one; and Cecil was in request most of all. Bertie, somehow
or other, was the fashion--marvelous and indefinable word, that gives a
more powerful crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever
bestow. And no list was “the thing” without his name; no reception,
no garden party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowed
boudoir, fashionably affiche without being visited by him. How he, in
especial, had got his reputation it would have been hard to say, unless
it were that he dressed a shade more perfectly than anyone, and with
such inimitable carelessness in the perfection, too, and had an almost
unattainable matchlessness in the sangfroid of his soft, languid
insolence, and incredible, though ever gentle, effrontery. However
gained, he had it; and his beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton with
two blood grays dancing in impatience over the stones, or his little
dark-green brougham for night-work, were, one or another of them, always
seen from two in the day till four or five in the dawn about the park or
the town.

And yet this season, while he made a prima donna by a bravissima,
introduced a new tie by an evening's wear, gave a cook the cordon
with his praise, and rendered a fresh-invented liqueur the rage by his
recommendation, Bertie knew very well that he was ruined.

The breach between his father and himself was irrevocable. He had left
Royallieu as soon as his guests had quitted it and young Berkeley was
out of all danger. He had long known he could look for no help from the
old lord, or from his elder brother, the heir; and now every chance of
it was hopelessly closed; nothing but the whim or the will of those who
held his floating paper, and the tradesmen who had his name on their
books at compound interest of the heaviest, stood between him and the
fatal hour when he must “send in his papers to sell,” and be “nowhere”
 in the great race of life.

He knew that a season, a month, a day, might be the only respite left
him, the only pause for him, 'twixt his glittering luxurious world and
the fiat of outlawry and exile. He knew that the Jews might be down
on him any night that he sat at the Guards' mess, flirted with foreign
princesses, or laughed at the gossamer gossip of the town over iced
drinks in the clubs. His liabilities were tremendous, his resources
totally exhausted; but such was the latent recklessness of the careless
Royallieu blood, and such the languid devil-may-care of his training
and his temper, that the knowledge scarcely ever seriously disturbed his
enjoyment of the moment. Somehow, he never realized it.

If any weatherwise had told the Lisbon people of the coming of the great
earthquake, do you think they could have brought themselves to realize
that midnight darkness, that yawning desolation which were nigh, while
the sun was still so bright and the sea so tranquil, and the bloom so
sweet on purple pomegranate and amber grape, and the scarlet of odorous
flowers, and the blush of a girl's kiss-warmed cheek?

A sentimental metaphor with which to compare the difficulties of a dandy
of the Household, because his “stiff” was floating about in too many
directions at too many high figures, and he had hardly enough till
next pay-day came round to purchase the bouquets he sent and meet the
club-fees that were due! But, after all, may it not well be doubted if a
sharp shock and a second's blindness, and a sudden sweep down under
the walls of the Cathedral or the waters of the Tagus, were not, on
the whole, a quicker and pleasanter mode of extinction than that social
earthquake--“gone to the bad with a crash”? And the Lisbonites did not
more disbelieve in, and dream less of their coming ruin than Cecil did
his, while he was doing the season, with engagements enough in a night
to spread over a month, the best known horses in the town, a dozen
rose-notes sent to his clubs or his lodgings in a day, and the newest
thing in soups, colts, beauties, neckties, perfumes, tobaccos, or square
dances waiting his dictum to become the fashion.

“How you do go on with those women, Beauty,” growled the Seraph, one
day after a morning of fearful hard work consequent on having played the
Foot Guards at Lord's, and, in an unwary moment, having allowed himself
to be decoyed afterward to a private concert, and very nearly proposed
to in consequence, during a Symphony in A; an impending terror from
which he could hardly restore himself of his jeopardized safety. “You're
horribly imprudent!”

“Not a bit of it,” rejoined Beauty serenely. “That is the superior
wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbor's
wife--she can't marry you!”

“But she may get you into the D. C.,” mused the Seraph, who had gloomy
personal recollection of having been twice through that phase of law and
life, and of having been enormously mulcted in damages because he was a
Duke in future, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion,
“You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran away
with me each time!”

“Oh, everybody goes through the D. C. somehow or other,” answered Cecil,
with philosophy. “It's like the Church, the Commons, and the Gallows,
you know--one of the popular Institutions.”

“And it's the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better figure than
the robbed,” laughed the Seraph; consoling himself that he had escaped
the future chance of showing in the latter class of marital defrauded,
by shying that proposal during the Symphony in A, on which his thoughts
ran, as the thoughts of one who has just escaped from an Alpine crevasse
run on the past abyss in which he had been so nearly lost forever. “I
say, Beauty, were you ever near doing anything serious--asking anybody
to marry you, eh? I suppose you have been--they do make such awful hard
running on one” and the poor hunted Seraph stretched his magnificent
limbs with the sigh of a martyred innocent.

“I was once--only once!”

“Ah, by Jove! And what saved you?”

The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying, sympathizing
curiosity toward a fellow-sufferer.

“Well, I'll tell you,” said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man who hated
long sentences, and who was about to plunge into a painful past. “It's
ages ago; day I was at a Drawing room; year Blue Ruin won the Clearwell
for Royal, I think. Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw such a
face--the deuce, it almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She was just
out--an angel with a train! She had delicious eyes--like a spaniel's you
know--a cheek like this peach, and lips like that strawberry there, on
the top of your ice. She looked at me, and I was in love! I knew who she
was--Irish lord's daughter--girl I could have had for the asking; and I
vow that I thought I would ask her--I actually was as far gone as that;
I actually said to myself, I'd hang about her a week or two, and then
propose. You'll hardly believe it, but I did. Watched her presented;
such grace, such a smile, such a divine lift of the lashes. I was really
in love, and with a girl who would marry me! I was never so near a fatal
thing in my life----”

“Well?” asked the Seraph, pausing to listen till he let the ice in his
sherry-cobbler melt away. When you have been so near breaking your neck
down the Matrimonial Matterhorn, it is painfully interesting to hear how
your friend escaped the same risks of descent.

“Well,” resumed Bertie, “I was very near it. I did nothing but watch
her; she saw me, and I felt she was as flattered and as touched as she
ought to be. She blushed most enchantingly; just enough, you know; she
was conscious I followed her; I contrived to get close to her as she
passed out, so close that I could see those exquisite eyes lighten and
gleam, those exquisite lips part with a sigh, that beautiful face beam
with the sunshine of a radiant smile. It was the dawn of love I had
taught her! I pressed nearer and nearer, and I caught her soft whisper
as she leaned to her mother: 'Mamma, I'm so hungry! I could eat a
whole chicken!' The sigh, the smile, the blush, the light, were for
her dinner--not for me! The spell was broken forever. A girl whom I had
looked at could think of wings and merry-thoughts and white sauce! I
have never been near a proposal again.”

The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung a hautboy
at him.

“Hang you, Beauty! If I didn't think you were going to tell one how you
really got out of a serious thing; it is so awfully difficult to keep
clear of them nowadays. Those before-dinner teas are only just so many
new traps! What became of her--eh?”

“She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, somewhere among
the Hebrides. Served her right,” murmured Cecil sententiously. “Only
think what she lost just through hungering for a chicken; if I
hadn't proposed for her,--for one hardly keeps the screw up to such
self-sacrifice as that when one is cool the next morning,--I would have
made her the fashion!”

With which masterly description in one phrase of all he could have done
for the ill-starred debutante who had been hungry in the wrong place,
Cecil lounged out of the club to drive with half a dozen of his set to a
water-party--a Bacchanalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters
for the Naiads and the Household for their Tritons.

A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in driving
down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours over the courses,
contributing seven guineas apiece for the repast, listening to the songs
of the Café Alcazar, reproduced with matchless elan by a pretty French
actress, being pelted with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their
best cigars thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving
back again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythms
ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretching
gallop down the Kew Road. It certainly had no other more aquatic feature
in it save a little drifting about for twenty minutes before dining,
in toy boats and punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the
brunette actress, sang a barcarolle.

“Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop.”

          “Where be all those
     Dear dead women, with such hair too; what's become of all the gold
     Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old;”

It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion,
because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think
at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew
nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where
they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'd
you if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were
ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women,
he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that
moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making
him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.

As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil's
box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in the dining room. A
cashmere is a Parisian's soul, idol, and fetich; servants could not find
it; Cecil, who, to do him this justice, was always as courteous to a
comedienne as to a countess, went himself. Passing the open window of
another room, he recognized the face of his little brother among a set
of young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They had no
women with them; but they had brought what was perhaps worse--dice
for hazard--and were turning the unconscious Star and Garter unto an
impromptu Crockford's over their wine.

Little Berk's pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set tight, his
eyes were glittering; the boy had the gambler's passion of the Royallieu
blood in its hottest intensity. He was playing with a terrible eagerness
that went to Bertie's heart with the same sort of pang of remorse with
which he had looked on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bed
at home.

Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window.

“Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; will
you come?” he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the young
fellows.

Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance.

“No, I can't,” he said irritably; “don't you see we are playing,
Bertie?”

“I see,” answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of sadness in
him, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in his
teeth.

“Come away,” he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, who
chanced to be close to the casement. “Hazard is the very deuce for
anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's a
capital set here, and I'm going to half a dozen good houses to-night,
when we get back. I'll take you with me. Come! you like waltzing, and
all that sort of thing, you know.”

The lad shook himself peevishly; a sullen cloud over his fair,
picturesque, boyish face.

“Let me alone before the fellows,” he muttered impatiently. “I won't
come, I tell you.”

“Soit!”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Lelas'
cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any more
expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never be annoyed, but
also he never troubled himself to utter useless words. Moreover, he had
never been in is life much in earnest about anything; it was not worth
while.

“A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins enough on
my own shoulders for twenty,” he thought; as he shook the ribbons and
started the leaders off to the gay music of Laura Lelas' champagne-tuned
laughter.

The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his
brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt
something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer
dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with
the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous,
half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, with
all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from
his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk,
though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and
unstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant,
and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward
he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful
of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. And
Cecil--the last man in the world to turn mentor--would light a cheroot,
as he did to-night, and forget all about it. The boy would be right
enough when he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy was
the essence of laissez-faire.

He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer's Field, to be
long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived in
the right set. “If it be very severe,” he would say, “it may give him
a pang once a twelvemonth--say the morning after a whitebait dinner.
Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may
generally be traced to too many truffles or olives.”

Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; would not have
thought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly skimmed over in bed,
was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the
papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he
was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement and
variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly
fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without
even the trouble of pulling the strings. He had naturally considerable
talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have
been as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.

“If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I'd use such wits as I
have: but why should I now?” he said on one occasion, when a fair lady
reproached him with this inertia. “The best style is only just to say
yes or no--and be bored even in saying that--and a very comfortable
style it is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening your
lips.”

“But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then? You would not get
amused,” suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.

“Well--everybody is, pretty nearly,” said Bertie; “but there are always
a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners--social
rockets, you know--who will always fire themselves off to sparkle
instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them
a card for good houses. It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore
to have to talk.”

He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses,
midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow in
a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same
flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at
a Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently
weary in an ambassadress

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