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Title: Under Two Flags

Author: Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

Release Date: April 6, 2006 [EBook #3465]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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




Produced by Dagny; John Bickers





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 Creme
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 very 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 Cafe 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' drawing room, and winding up the series by a
dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party
of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.

When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five
o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that
cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of
the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, without
the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy,
dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.

"Here--get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake," he murmured, dropping
into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing
by him instead the boy Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of raw
inexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief,
or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have
excited it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted his
eyebrows and said, "Be a fearful bore!" in the second he would have done
the same, and murmured, "Queer old cad!"

Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy's untimely apparition; but
his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but one
word:

"Amber-Amulet?"

Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieu
establishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby
as a certainty. An accident to the young chestnut was the only thing
that suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his
brother wait for him at five o'clock on a June morning.

Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently:

"You are never thinking but of horses or women," he said peevishly;
"there may be others things in the world, surely."

"Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy; but none
so much to my taste," said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with a
yawn. "With every regard to hospitality and the charms of your society,
might I hint that five o'clock in the morning is not precisely the most
suitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?"

"For God's sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most miserable wretch in
creation."

Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanished
from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the serene
insouciance of his face.

"Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard," he thought, but he
was not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and its
rejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himself
with a sigh.

"Dear boy, why didn't you sleep upon it? I never think of disagreeable
things till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with the
cup and put them down with it. You don't know how well it answers; it
disposes of them wonderfully."

The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in the
gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.

"How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and you care no
more than if you were a stone. You only think of yourself; you only live
for yourself!"

He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that very
table the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts that
had been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race. There is a
childish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits received
save as title-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him with
just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his
glance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish,
passionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.

"'Brutal'! What a word, little one. Nobody's brutal now; you never see
that form nowadays. Come, what is the worst this time?"

Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows leaned;
scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and the
gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was something
dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, upon
him, that was new there.

"The worst is soon told," he said huskily, and his teeth chattered
together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. "I lost two hundred
to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing;
I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am under
age; and--and"--his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew
that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and
his brothers was the thing he had now to tell--"and--I borrowed three
ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot
of banknotes after settling-day. I told him I would pay them to-morrow;
I made sure I should have won to-night."

The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the
belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a
bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken
in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's
confession.

Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his
face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his
mother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and
unmentionable degradation--it was to borrow of a friend.

"You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley," he said,
with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his
voice. "Have you no common knowledge of honor?"

The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger
rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down
on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.

"You are severe enough," he said gloomily, and yet insolently. "Are you
such a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, are
about one-fifth of yours."

For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way. Be
his debts what they would, there was not one among them to his friends,
or one for which the law could not seize him. He was silent; he did not
wish to have a scene of discussion with one who was but a child to him;
moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to avert
even a dispute, at any cost.

He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting his
cheroot in his mouth.

"Tres cher, you are not courteous," he said wearily; "but it may be
that you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anything
except the fit of my coats; I don't think I ever told you I was. I am
not altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a model
for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond
Street to show the muffs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; you
say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow--to-day rather. I can suggest
nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal
straight out; he never refuses you."

Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a
stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly
moved by fear.

"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration that
was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live I
would! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--and
now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on
Royallieu--"

"What? Foreclose what?"

"The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish
egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be
considered save his own. "You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as
Monti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose--I
think that's the word--and Royal has had God knows what work to stave
them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than
I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard."

Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn
the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find
how entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him from
all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him
ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.

"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languid
stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects.
"And--I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would help
you?"

"I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him."

Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he
shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came
to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest
himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,--less
extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,--he might
have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might
have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a
sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary
in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the sum that
the boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set, and with his habits,
that he had betted it over and over again in a clubroom, on a single
game of whist. It cut him with a bitter, impatient pain; he was as
generous as the winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temper
than the poverty that paralyzes its power to give.

"It is no use to give you false hopes, young one," he said gently. "I
can do nothing! You ought to know me by this time; and if you do, you
know too that if the money was mine it would be yours at a word--if you
don't, no matter! Frankly, Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may be
called in any moment; when they are I must send in my papers to sell,
and cut the country, if my duns don't catch me before, which
they probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents and
purposes--dead. This is not lively conversation, but you will do me the
justice to say that it was not I who introduced it. Only--one word for
all, my boy; understand this: if I could help you I would, cost what it
might, but as matters stand--I cannot."

And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to envelope him; the
subject was painful, the denial wounded him by whom it had to be given
full as much as it could wound him whom it refused. Berkeley heard it
in silence; his head still hung down, his color changing, his hands
nervously playing with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening their
gold tops.

"No--yes--I know," he said hurriedly; "I have no right to expect it, and
have been behaving like a cur, and--and--all that, I know. But--there is
one way you could save me, Bertie, if it isn't too much for a fellow to
ask."

"I can't say I see the way, little one," said Cecil, with a sigh. "What
is it?"

"Why--look here. You see I'm not of age; my signature is of no use; they
won't take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come to
me when Royal dies; though 'tisn't enough to make the Jews 'melt' at a
risk. Now--now--look here. I can't see that there could be any harm in
it. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he's as rich as all the
Jews put together. What could there be in it if you just asked him to
lend you a monkey for me? He'd do it in a minute, because he'd give
his head away to you--they all say so--and he'll never miss it. Now,
Bertie--will you?"

In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal was
panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot
color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full
of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from
his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look
disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.

"What you ask is impossible," he said briefly. "If I did such a thing as
that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow."

The boy's face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still
bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother's.

"You speak as if it would be a crime," he muttered savagely, with a
plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt
with and unjustly punished.

"It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a
gentleman," said Cecil, as briefly still. "That is answer enough."

"Then you will not do it?"

"I have replied already."

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused
before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before;
something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of
the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the
haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the
too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil's disposition.

"You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so
wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel," he moaned
passionately. "The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is your
pride--nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless
beggars!"

"If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other
men?"

"You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!"

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did
not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to
defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far
greater than his heed of misconstruction.

"You are a brute to me!" went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter
passion rising almost to tears like a woman's. "You pretend you can
refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn
on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'll
let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save
me; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor's
prison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helping
a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug
your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest
picked out of your cursed French novels!"

"Melodramatic, and scarcely correct," murmured Bertie.

The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not
given to making much of anything that was due to himself--partly through
carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother
of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men
call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did
to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.

There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament
created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never
own a reality.

"Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say," he began very
gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in
the boy's eyes. "Don't be down about this; you will pull through, never
fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know
him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell
every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you
safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind--tell him all. No half
measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You
will not come back without it."

Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother's, the red color darker
on his face.

"Do as I say," said Cecil, very gently still. "Tell him, if you like,
that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; he
will be sure to pity you then."

There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the last words,
but it passed at once as he added:

"Do your hear me? will you go?"

"If you want me--yes."

"On your word, now?"

"On my word."

There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eagerness in the way
he assented that might have made the consent rather a means to evade the
pressure than a genuine pledge to follow the advice; that darker, more
evil, more defiant look was still upon his face, sweeping its youth
away and leaving in its stead a wavering shadow. He rose with a sudden
movement; his tumbled hair, his disordered attire, his bloodshot eyes,
his haggard look of sleeplessness and excitement in strange contrast
with the easy perfection of Cecil's dress and the calm languor of his
attitude. The boy was very young, and was not seasoned to his life and
acclimatized to his ruin, like his elder brother. He looked at him with
a certain petulant envy; the envy of every young fellow for a man of the
world. "I beg your pardon for keeping you up, Bertie," he said huskily.
"Good-night."

Cecil gave a little yawn.

"Dear boy, it would have been better if you could have come in with
the coffee. Never be impulsive; don't do a bit of good, and is such bad
form!"

He spoke lightly, serenely; both because such was as much his nature as
it was to breathe, and because his heart was heavy that he had to send
away the young one without help, though he knew that the course he
had made him adopt would serve him more permanently in the end. But he
leaned his hand a second on Berk's shoulder, while for one single moment
in his life he grew serious.

"You must know I could not do what you asked; I could not meet any man
in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself and sunk them so low. Can't
you see that, little one?"

There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly have believed
that his brother had at length some perception of his meaning.

"You say so, and that is enough," said the boy pettishly; "I cannot
understand that I asked anything so dreadful; but I suppose you have too
many needs of your own to have any resources left for mine."

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. But he
could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, less even for
his brother's ingratitude than at his callousness to all those finer,
better instincts of which honor is the concrete name.

For the moment, thought--grave, weary, and darkened--fell on him; he had
passed through what he would have suffered any amount of misconstruction
to escape--a disagreeable scene; he had been as unable as though he
were a Commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor the
necessities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced,
despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face the
ruin that awaited him. There was no other name for it: it would be ruin
complete and wholly inevitable. His signature would have been accepted
no more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to the
uttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have
no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few
months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay
beyond.

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to him
endurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits,
habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become to
him as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from
all that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his very
name forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man
without a career, without a hope, without a refuge--he could not realize
that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must within
so short a space be his. Life had gone so smoothly with him, and his
world was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was so
habitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation
lying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health
can believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sun
has set.

As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glancing on the
gold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the fireplace, and the
smoke of his cheroot curling among the pile of invitation cards to all
the best houses in town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe that
things were really come to this pass with him. It is so hard for a man
who has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day and
night to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence he may
be lying in the debtors' prison at Baden; it is so difficult for a man
who has had no greater care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of a
Guards' Ball or of a yacht's summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceive
the fact that in a year's time he will thank God if he have a few francs
left to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreign
bathing-place.

"It mayn't come to that," he thought; "something may happen. If I could
get my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should win
some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I must
win; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only be
the French horses between us and an absolute 'walk over.' Things mayn't
come to the worst, after all."

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was his
temperament, that he read himself to sleep with Terrail's "Club des
Valets de Coeur," and slept in ten minutes' time as composedly as though
he had inherited fifty thousand a year.



That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, Forest King stood
without any body-covering, for the night was close and sultry, a lock of
the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and his favorite wheaten-gruel
standing uncared-for under his very nose; the King was in the height
of excitation, alarm, and haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his
head, his nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with
a nervous, angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his
heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite wall, with
a force that reverberated through the stables and made his companions
start and edge away. It was precisely these companions that the
aristocratic hero of the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred.

They had just been looking him over--to their own imminent peril; and
the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant six-year-old of Paris,
and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the knightly descendant of the
White Cockade blood and of the coursers of Circassia, had resented the
familiarity proportionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was
a very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to
a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would suffer
liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were very just; and
if his clever heels had caught--and it was not his fault that they
did not--the heads of his two companions, instead of coming with that
ponderous crash into the panels of his box, society would certainly have
been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than had ever before
hung in the careless balance of his life.

But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught the oak of
his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went
on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully
chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever
seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in
their mouths.

"It's almost a pity--he's in such perfect condition. Tip-top. Cool as
a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats up to the last
grain; leads the whole string such a rattling spin as never was spun
but by a Derby cracker before him. It's almost a pity," said Willon
meditatively, eyeing his charge, the King, with remorseful glances.

"Prut-tush-tish!" said his companion, with a whistle in his teeth that
ended with a "damnation!" "It'll only knock him over for the race; he'll
be right as a trivet after it. What's your little game; coming it soft
like that, all of a sudden? You hate that ere young swell like p'ison."

"Aye," assented the head groom with a tigerish energy, viciously
consuming his bit of straw. "What for am I--head groom come nigh twenty
years; and to Markisses and Wiscounts afore him--put aside in that ere
way for a fellow as he's took into his service out of the dregs of a
regiment; what was tied up at the triangles and branded D, as I know on,
and sore suspected of even worse games than that, and now is that set
up with pride and sich-like that nobody's woice ain't heard here except
his; I say what am I called on to bear it for?": and the head groom's
tones grew hoarse and vehement, roaring louder under his injuries. "A
man what's attended a Duke's 'osses ever since he was a shaver, to be
put aside for that workhus blackguard! A 'oss had a cold--it's Rake
what's to cure him. A 'oss is entered for a race--it's Rake what's to
order his morning gallops, and his go-downs o' water. It's past bearing
to have a rascally chap what's been and gone and turned walet, set up
over one's head in one's own establishment, and let to ride the high
'oss over one, roughshod like that!"

And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely thus heaped
on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made an end of it, with a
vindictive "Will yer be quiet there; blow yer," to the King, who was
protesting with his heels against the conversation.

"Come, then, no gammon," growled his companion--the "cousin out o'
Yorkshire" of the keeper's tree.

"What's yer figure, you say?" relented Willon meditatively.

"Two thousand to nothing--come!--can't no handsomer," retorted the
Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man conscious of behaving very
nobly.

"For the race in Germany?" pursued Mr. Willon, still meditatively.

"Two thousand to nothing--come!" reiterated the other, with his arms
folded to intimate that this and nothing else was the figure to which he
would bind himself.

Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse as though he
were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to judge, grew a little
pale; and stooped forward.

"Hush! Somebody'll spy on us. It's a bargain."

"Done! And you'll paint him, eh?"

"Yes--I'll--paint him."

The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while his eyes
glanced with a furtive, frightened glance over the loose-box.
Then--still with that cringing, terrified look backward to the horse,
as an assassin may steal a glance before his deed at his unconscious
victim--the head groom and his comrade went out and closed the door of
the loose-box and passed into the hot, lowering summer night.

Forest King, left in solitude, shook himself with a neigh; took a
refreshing roll in the straw, and turned with an appetite to his
neglected gruel. Unhappily for himself, his fine instincts could not
teach him the conspiracy that lay in wait for him and his; and the
gallant beast, content to be alone, soon slept the sleep of the
righteous.



CHAPTER VIII.

A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE.

"Seraph--I've been thinking," said Cecil musingly, as they paced
homeward together from the Scrubs, with the long line of the First
Life stretching before and behind their chargers, and the hands of the
Household Cavalry plying mellowly in their rear.

"You don't mean it. Never let it ooze out, Beauty; you'll ruin your
reputation!"

Cecil laughed a little, very languidly; to have been in the sun for
four hours, in full harness, had almost taken out of him any power to be
amused at anything.

"I've been thinking," he went on undisturbed, pulling down his
chin-scale. "What's a fellow to do when he's smashed?"

"Eh?" The Seraph couldn't offer a suggestion; he had a vague idea that
men who were smashed never did do anything except accept the smashing;
unless, indeed, they turned up afterward as touts, of which he had an
equally vague suspicion.

"What do they do?" pursued Bertie.

"Go to the bad," finally suggested the Seraph, lighting a great cigar,
without heeding the presence of the Duke, a Field-Marshal, and a Serene
Highness far on in front.

Cecil shook his head.

"Can't go where they are already. I've been thinking what a fellow might
do that was up a tree; and on my honor there are lots of things one
might turn to----"

"Well, I suppose there are," assented the Seraph, with a shake of his
superb limbs in his saddle till his cuirass and chains and scabbard rang
again. "I should try the P. R., only they will have you train."

"One might do better than the P. R. Getting yourself into prime
condition, only to be pounded out of condition and into a jelly, seems
hardly logical or satisfactory--specially to your looking-glass, though,
of course, it's a matter of taste. But now, if I had a cropper, and got
sold up----"

"You, Beauty?" The Seraph puffed a giant puff of amazement from his
Havana, opening his blue eyes to their widest.

"Possible!" returned Bertie serenely, with a nonchalant twist to his
mustaches. "Anything's possible. If I do now, it strikes me there are
vast fields open."

"Gold fields!" suggested the Seraph, wholly bewildered.

"Gold fields? No! I mean a field for--what d'ye call it--genius. Now,
look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world don't know how to put
on a glove. It's an art, and an art that requires long study. If a few
of us were to turn glove-fitters when we are fairly crushed, we might
civilize the whole world, and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting
glove ever blotting creation and prostituting Houbigant. What do you
say?"

"Don't be such a donkey, Beauty!" laughed the Seraph, while his charger
threatened to passage into an oyster cart.

"You don't appreciate the majesty of great plans," rejoined Beauty
reprovingly. "There's an immense deal in what I'm saying. Think what we
might do for society--think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we
just dedicated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, where
the traders might go through a course of polite training before they
blossomed out as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of
dropped h's and bad bows. We might have a Bureau where we registered all
our social experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map of Belgravia, with
all the pitfalls marked; all the inaccessible heights colored red, and
all the hard-up great people dotted with gold to show the amount they'd
be bought for--with directions to the ignoramuses whom to know, court,
and avoid. We might form a Courier Company, and take Brummagem abroad
under our guidance, so that the Continent shouldn't think Englishwomen
always wear blue veils and gray shawls, and hear every Englishman shout
for porter and beefsteak in Tortoni's. We might teach them to take their
hats off to women, and not to prod pictures with sticks, and to look at
statutes without poking them with an umbrella, and to be persuaded that
all foreigners don't want to be bawled at, and won't understand
bad French any the better for its being shouted. Or we might have a
Joint-Stock Toilette Association, for the purposes of national art,
and receive Brummagem to show it how to dress; we might even succeed in
making the feminine British Public drape itself properly, and the B. P.
masculine wear boots that won't creak, and coats that don't wrinkle, and
take off its hat without a jerk, as though it were a wooden puppet hung
on very stiff strings. Or one might--"

"Talk the greatest nonsense under the sun!" laughed the Seraph. "For
mercy's sake, are you mad, Bertie?"

"Inevitable question addressed to Genius!" yawned Cecil. "I'm showing
you plans that might teach a whole nation good style if we just threw
ourselves into it a little. I don't mean you, because you'll never
smash, and one don't turn bear-leader, even to the B. P., without the
primary impulse of being hard-up. And I don't talk for myself, because,
when I go to the dogs I have my own project."

"And what's that?"

"To be groom of the chambers at Meurice's or Claridge's," responded
Bertie solemnly. "Those sublime creatures with their silver chains round
their necks and their ineffable supremacy over every other mortal!--one
would feel in a superior region still. And when a snob came to poison
the air, how exquisitely one could annihilate him with showing him his
ignorance of claret; and when an epicure dined, how delightfully, as one
carried in a turbot, one could test him with the eprouvette positive,
or crush him by the eprouvette negative. We have been Equerries at the
Palace, both of us, but I don't think we know what true dignity is till
we shall have risen to headwaiters at a Grand Hotel."

With which Bertie let his charger pace onward, while he reflected
thoughtfully on his future state. The Seraph laughed till he almost
swayed out of saddle, but he shook himself into his balance again with
another clash of his brilliant harness, while his eyes lightened and
glanced with a fiery gleam down the line of the Household Cavalry.

"Well, if I went to the dogs I wouldn't go to Grand Hotels; but I'll
tell you where I would go, Beauty."

"Where's that?"

"Into hot service, somewhere. By Jove, I'd see some good fighting
under another flag--out in Algeria, there, or with the Poles, or after
Garibaldi. I would, in a day--I'm not sure I won't now, and I bet you
ten to one the life would be better than this."

Which was ungrateful in the Seraph, for his happy temper made him the
sunniest and most contented of men, with no cross in his life save the
dread that somebody would manage to marry him some day. But Rock had
the true dash and true steel of the soldier in him, and his blue eyes
flashed over his Guards as he spoke, with a longing wish that he were
leading them on to a charge instead of pacing with them toward Hyde
Park.

Cecil turned in his saddle and looked at him with a certain wonder and
pleasure in his glance, and did not answer aloud. "The deuce--that's not
a bad idea," he thought to himself; and the idea took root and grew with
him.

Far down, very far down, so far that nobody had ever seen it, nor
himself ever expected it, there was a lurking instinct in "Beauty,"--the
instinct that had prompted him, when he sent the King at the Grand
Military cracker, with that prayer, "Kill me if you like, but don't
fail me!"--which, out of the languor and pleasure-loving temper of his
unruffled life, had a vague, restless impulse toward the fiery perils
and nervous excitement of a sterner and more stirring career.

It was only vague, for he was naturally very indolent, very gentle, very
addicted to taking all things passively, and very strongly of persuasion
that to rouse yourself for anything was a niaiserie of the strongest
possible folly; but it was there. It always is there with men of
Bertie's order, and only comes to light when the match of danger is
applied to the touchhole. Then, though "the Tenth don't dance," perhaps,
with graceful, indolent, dandy insolence, they can fight as no others
fight when Boot and Saddle rings through the morning air, and the
slashing charge sweeps down with lightning speed and falcon swoop.

"In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more excited," says
Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little opportunity of putting that
doctrine for amatory intrigues to the test in actual practice. Bertie,
who had many opportunities, differed with him. He found love-making in
his own polished, tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was
more amused by Laura Lelas. However, he was sworn to the service of the
Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down that day to another sort
of Richmond dinner, of which the lady was the object instead of the
Zu-Zu.

She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and inexorable lord,
and arranged her flirtations to evade him with a degree of skill so
great that it was lamentable it should be thrown away on an agricultural
husband, who never dreamt that the "Fidelio-III-TstnegeR," which met his
eyes in the innocent face of his "Times" referred to an appointment at
a Regent Street modiste's, or that the advertisement--"White
wins--Twelve," meant that if she wore white camellias in her hair at the
opera she would give "Beauty" a meeting after it.

Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate conventionalities.
And yet she was a little fast--very fast, indeed, and was a queen of one
of the fastest sets; but then--O sacred shield of a wife's virtue--she
could not have borne to lose her very admirable position, her very
magnificent jointure, and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds!

So, for the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their rendezvous
under the rose.

This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out at Hampton
Court--really went, she was never so imprudent as to falsify her word;
and with the Dowager, who was very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond,
while the world thought her dining at Hampton Court. It was nothing to
anyone, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there;
that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at
Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the grapes and
peaches--she had been a beauty herself, in her own day, and still had
her sympathies--they went on the river, in the little toy that he kept
there for his fair friends' use; floating slowly along in the coolness
of evening, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the
sunset, and doing a graceful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a
certain languid amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for
they were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in the
other.

When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the
clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the
afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but
only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to
feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who
expects you to feel it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was
a low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its
sedges. She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among her laces
and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths of her eyes
and on her delicate cheek. And Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady,
really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at
his heart, as he gazed on her in the half-light, and thought, almost
wistfully, "If the Jews were down on me to-morrow, would she really
care, I wonder?"

Really care? Bertie knew his world and its women too well to deceive
himself in his heart about the answer. Nevertheless, he asked the
question. "Would you care much, chere belle?"

"Care what?"

"If I came to grief--went to the bad, you know; dropped out of the world
altogether?"

She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder through
all her laces. "Bertie! You would break my heart! What can you dream
of?"

"Oh, lots of us end so! How is a man to end?" answered Bertie
philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a speculative
skepticism. "Is there a heart to break?"

Her ladyship looked at him an laughed.

"A Werther in the Guards! I don't think the role will suit either you
or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it artistically. I
remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, when they had found a
young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and
he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a
man who knew how to die gracefully, and make his death an idyl!"

"Died for a woman?--ah!" murmured Bertie, with the Brummel nonchalance
of his order. "I don't think I should do that, even for you--not, at
least, while I had a cigar left."

And then the boat drifted backward, while the stars grew brighter
and the last reflection of the sun died out; and they planned to meet
to-morrow, and talked of Baden, and sketched projects for the winter
in Paris, and went in and sat by the window, taking their coffee, and
feeling, in a half-vague pleasure, the heliotrope-scented air blowing
softly in from the garden below, and the quiet of the starlit river in
the summer evening, with a white sail gleaming here and there, or the
gentle splash of an oar following on the swift trail of a steamer; the
quiet, so still and so strange after the crowded rush of the London
season.

"Would she really care?" thought Cecil, once more. In that moment he
could have wished to think she would.

But heliotrope, stars, and a river, even though it had been tawny and
classical Tiber instead of ill-used and inodorous Thames, were not
things sufficiently in the way of either of them to detain them long.
They had both seen the Babylonian sun set over the ruins of the Birs
Nimrud, and had talked of Paris fashions while they did so; they had
both leaned over the terraces of Bellosguardo, while the moon was full
on Giotto's tower, and had discussed their dresses for the Veglione
masquerade. It was not their style to care for these matters; they were
pretty, to be sure, but they had seen so many of them.

The Dowager went home in her brougham; the Countess drove in
his mail-phaeton--objectionable, as she might be seen, but less
objectionable than letting her servants know he had met her at Richmond.
Besides, she obviated danger by bidding him set her down at a little
villa across the park, where dwelt a confidential protegee of hers, whom
she patronized; a former French governess, married tolerably well, who
had the Countess' confidences, and kept them religiously for sake of so
aristocratic a patron, and of innumerable reversions of Spanish point
and shawls that had never been worn, and rings, of which her lavish
ladyship had got tired.

From here she would take her ex-governess' little brougham, and get
quietly back to her own home in Eaton Square, in due time for all the
drums and crushes at which she must make her appearance. This was the
sort of little device which really made them think themselves in love,
and gave the salt to the whole affair. Moreover, there was this ground
for it, that had her lord once roused from the straw-yards of his prize
cattle, there was a certain stubborn, irrational, old-world prejudice of
pride and temper in him that would have made him throw expediency to the
winds, then and there, with a blind and brutal disregard to slander and
to the fact that none would ever adorn his diamonds as she did. So that
Cecil had not only her fair fame, but her still more valuable jewels in
his keeping when he started from the Star and Garter in the warmth of
the bright summer's evening.

It was a lovely night; a night for lonely highland tarns, and southern
shores by Baiae; without a cloud to veil the brightness of the stars. A
heavy dew pressed the odors from the grasses, and the deep glades of
the avenue were pierced here and there with a broad beam of silvery
moonlight, slanting through the massive boles of the trees, and falling
white and serene across the turf. Through the park, with the gleam of
the water ever and again shining through the branches of the foliage,
Cecil started his horses; his groom he had sent away on reaching
Richmond, for the same reason as the Countess had dismissed her
barouche, and he wanted no servant, since, as soon as he had set down
his liege lady at her protegee's, he would drive straight back to
Piccadilly. But he had not noticed what he noted now, that instead of
one of his carriage-grays, who had fallen slightly lame, they had put
into harness the young one, Maraschino, who matched admirably for size
and color, but who, being really a hunter, though he had been broken to
shafts as well, was not the horse with which to risk driving a lady.

However, Beauty was a perfect whip and had the pair perfectly in hand,
so that he thought no more of the change, as the grays dashed at a
liberal half-speed through the park, with their harness flashing in the
moonlight, and their scarlet rosettes fluttering in the pleasant air.
The eyes beside him, the Titian-like mouth, the rich, delicate cheek,
these were, to be sure, rather against the coolness and science that
such a five-year-old as Maraschino required; they were distracting even
to Cecil, and he had not prudence enough to deny his sovereign lady when
she put her hands on the ribbons.

"The beauties! Give them to me, Bertie. Dangerous? How absurd you are;
as if I could not drive anything? Do you remember my four roans at
Longchamps?"

She could, indeed, with justice, pique herself on her skill; she
drove matchlessly, but as he resigned them to her, Maraschino and his
companion quickened their trot, and tossed their pretty thoroughbred
heads, conscious of a less powerful hand on the reins.

"I shall let their pace out; there is nobody to run over here," said her
ladyship.

Maraschino, as though hearing the flattering conjuration swung off into
a light, quick canter, and tossed his head again; he knew that, good
whip though she was, he could jerk his mouth free in a second, if he
wanted. Cecil laughed--prudence was at no time his virtue--and leaned
back contentedly, to be driven at a slashing pace through the balmy
summer's night, while the ring of the hoofs rang merrily on the turf,
and the boughs were tossed aside with a dewy fragrance. As they went,
the moonlight was shed about their path in the full of the young night,
and at the end of a vista of boughs, on a grassy knoll were some phantom
forms--the same graceful shapes that stand out against the purple
heather and the tawny gorse of Scottish moorlands, while the lean
rifle-tube creeps up by stealth. In the clear starlight there stood
the deer--a dozen of them, a clan of stags alone--with their antlers
clashing like a clash of swords, and waving like swaying banners as they
tossed their heads and listened.[*]

     [*] Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant
     Highland stags for comparing them one instant with the
     shabby, miserable-looking wretches that travesty them in
     Richmond Park. After seeing these latter scrubby, meager
     apologies for deer, one wonders why something better cannot
     be turned loose there. A hunting-mare I know well
     nevertheless flattered them thus by racing them through the
     park: when in harness herself, to her own great disgust.

In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and twitched
with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant and he had got
his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, rushed down the glade.

Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the ribbons that in
one instant had cut his companion's gloves to stripes.

"Sit still," he said calmly, but under his breath. "He had been always
ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer as sure as we live!"

Race the deer he did.

Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the stags were
off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the horses tore after them;
no skill, no strength, no science could avail to pull them in; they
had taken their bits between their teeth, and the devil that was in
Maraschino lent the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare,
who had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in her
break.

Neither Cecil's hands nor any other force could stop them now; on they
went, hunting as straight in line as though staghounds streamed in front
of them, and no phaeton rocked and swayed in a dead and dragging weight
behind them. In a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of
the peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep
his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign of
exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death might have come to them
both; but there was a gay excitation in that headlong rush through the
summer night; there was a champagne-draught of mirth and mischief in
that dash through the starlit woodland; there was a reckless, breathless
pleasure in that neck-or-nothing moonlight chase!

Yet danger was so near with every oscillation; the deer were trooping
in fast flight, now clear in the moonlight, now lost in the shadow,
bounding with their lightning grace over sward and hillock, over briar
and brushwood, at that speed which kills most living things that dare to
race the "Monarch of the Glens." And the grays were in full pursuit; the
hunting fire was in the fresh young horse; he saw the shadowy branches
of the antlers toss before him, and he knew no better than to hunt down
in their scenting line as hotly as though the field of the Queen's or
the Baron's was after them. What cared he for the phaeton that rocked
and reeled on his traces; he felt its weight no more than if it were
a wicker-work toy, and, extended like a greyhound, he swerved from the
road, swept through the trees, and tore down across the grassland in the
track of the herd.

Through the great boles of the trunks, bronze and black in the shadows,
across the hilly rises of the turf, through the brushwood pell-mell, and
crash across the level stretches of the sward, they raced as though the
hounds were streaming in front; swerved here, tossed there, carried in
a whirlwind over the mounds, wheeled through the gloom of the woven
branches, splashed with a hiss through the shallow rain-pools, shot
swift as an arrow across the silver radiance of the broad moonlight,
borne against the sweet south wind, and down the odors of the trampled
grass, the carriage was hurled across the park in the wild starlight
chase. It rocked, it swayed, it shook, at every yard, while it was
carried on like a paper toy; as yet the marvelous chances of accident
had borne it clear of the destruction that threatened it at every step
as the grays, in the height of their pace now, and powerless even to
have arrested themselves, flew through the woodland, neither knowing
what they did, nor heeding where they went; but racing down on the
scent, not feeling the strain of the traces, and only maddened the more
by the noise of the whirling wheels behind them.

As Cecil leaned back, his hands clinched on the reins, his sinews
stretched almost to bursting in their vain struggle to recover power
over the loosened beasts, the hunting zest awoke in him too, even while
his eyes glanced on his companion in fear and anxiety for her.

"Tally-ho! hark forward! As I live, it is glorious!" he cried, half
unconsciously. "For God's sake, sit still, Beatrice! I will save you."

Inconsistent as the words were, they were true to what he felt; alone,
he would have flung himself delightedly into the madness of the chase;
for her he dreaded with horror the eminence of their peril.

On fled the deer, on swept the horses; faster in the gleam of the
moonlight the antlered troop darted on through the gloaming; faster tore
the grays in the ecstasy of their freedom; headlong and heedless they
dashed through the thickness of leaves and the weaving of branches; neck
to neck, straining to distance each other, and held together by the gall
of the harness. The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew up beneath
their hoofs; their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire from the stones,
the carriage was whirled, rocking and tottering, through the maze
of tree-trunks, towering like pillars of black stone up against the
steel-blue clearness of the sky. The strain was intense; the danger
deadly. Suddenly, straight ahead, beyond the darkness of the foliage,
gleamed a line of light; shimmering, liquid, and glassy--here brown as
gloom where the shadows fell on it, here light as life where the stars
mirrored on it. That trembling line stretched right in their path. For
the first time, from the blanched lips beside him a cry of terror rang.

"The river!--oh, heaven!--the river!"

There it lay in the distance, the deep and yellow water, cold in the
moon's rays, with its further bank but a dull gray line in the mists
that rose from it, and its swamp a yawning grave as the horses, blind
in their delirium and racing against each other, bore down through all
obstacles toward its brink. Death was rarely ever closer; one score
yards more, one plunge, one crash down the declivity and against the
rails, one swell of the noisome tide above their heads, and life would
be closed and passed for both of them. For one breathless moment his
eyes met hers--in that moment he loved her, in that moment their hearts
beat with a truer, fonder impulse to each other than they had ever done.
Before the presence of a threatening death life grows real, love grows
precious, to the coldest and most careless.

No aid could come; not a living soul was nigh; the solitude was as
complete as though a western prairie stretched round them; there were
only the still and shadowy night, the chilly silence, on which the beat
of the plunging hoofs shattered like thunder, and the glisten of the
flowing water growing nearer and nearer every yard. The tranquillity
around only jarred more horribly on ear and brain; the vanishing forms
of the antlered deer only gave a weirder grace to the moonlight chase
whose goal was the grave. It was like the midnight hunt after Herne the
Hunter; but here, behind them, hunted Death.

The animals neither saw nor knew what waited them, as they rushed down
on to the broad, gray stream, veiled from them by the slope and the
screen of flickering leaves; to save them there was but one chance, and
that so desperate that it looked like madness. It was but a second's
thought; he gave it but a second's resolve.

The next instant he stood on his feet, as the carriage swayed to and
fro over the turf, balanced himself marvelously as it staggered in that
furious gallop from side to side, clinched the reins hard in the grip of
his teeth, measured the distance with an unerring eye, and crouching his
body for the spring with all the science of the old playing-fields of
his Eton days, cleared the dashboard and lighted astride on the back of
the hunting five-year old--how, he could never have remembered or have
told.

The tremendous pace at which they went swayed him with a lurch and a
reel over the off-side; a woman's cry rang again, clear, and shrill,
and agonized on the night; a moment more, and he would have fallen, head
downward, beneath the horses' feet. But he had ridden stirrupless and
saddleless ere now; he recovered himself with the suppleness of an Arab,
and firm-seated behind the collar, with one leg crushed between the
pole and Maraschino's flanks, gathering in the ribbons till they were
tight-drawn as a bridle, he strained with all the might and sinew that
were in him to get the grays in hand before they could plunge down into
the water. His wrists were wrenched like pulleys, the resistance against
him was hard as iron; but as he had risked life and limb in the leap
which had seated him across the harnessed loins of the now terrified
beast, so he risked them afresh to get the mastery now; to slacken them,
turn them ever so slightly, and save the woman he loved--loved, at least
in this hour, as he had not loved her before. One moment more, while the
half-maddened beast rushed through the shadows; one moment more, till
the river stretched full before them in all its length and breadth,
without a living thing upon its surface to break the still and awful
calm; one moment--and the force of cool command conquered and broke
their wills despite themselves. The hunter knew his master's voice,
his touch, his pressure, and slackened speed by an irresistible, almost
unconscious habit of obedience; the carriage mare, checked and galled
in the full height of her speed, stood erect, pawing the air with her
forelegs, and flinging the white froth over her withers, while she
plunged blindly in her nervous terror; then with a crash, her feet came
down upon the ground, the broken harness shivered together with a sharp,
metallic clash; snorting, panting, quivering, trembling, the pair stood
passive and vanquished.

The carriage was overthrown; but the high and fearless courage of the
peeress bore her unharmed, even as she was flung out on to the yielding
fern-grown turf. Fair as she was in every hour, she had never looked
fairer than as he swung himself from the now powerless horses and threw
himself beside her.

"My love--my love, you are saved!"

The beautiful eyes looked up, half unconscious; the danger told on her
now that it was passed, as it does most commonly with women.

"Saved!--lost! All the world must know, now, that you are with me this
evening," she murmured with a shudder. She lived for the world, and her
first thought was of self.

He soothed her tenderly.

"Hush--be at rest! There is no injury but what I can repair, nor is
there a creature in sight to have witnessed the accident. Trust in me;
no one shall ever know of this. You shall reach town safely and alone."

And, while he promised, he forgot that he thus pledged his honor to
leave four hours of his life so buried that, however much he needed, he
neither should nor could account for them.



CHAPTER IX.

THE PAINTED BIT.

Baden was at its brightest. The Victoria, the Badischer Hof, the
Stephanie Bauer were crowded. The Kurliste had a dazzling string of
names. Imperial grandeur sauntered in slippers; chiefs, used to be
saluted with "Ave Caesar Imperator," smoked a papelito in peace over
"Galignani." Emperors gave a good-day to ministers who made their
thrones beds of thorns, and little kings elbowed great capitalists who
could have bought them all up in a morning's work in the money market.
Statecraft was in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown.
Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the hazard of
European politics laughed good-humoredly as they laid their gold down on
the color. Rivals who had lately been quarreling over the knotty points
of national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the
bouquetiere. Knights of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece,
who had hated each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the
Continent between them, got friends over a mutually good book on the
Rastadt or Foret Noir. Brains that were the powder depot of one-half of
the universe let themselves be lulled to tranquil amusement by a fair
idiot's coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could loosen the
coursing slips of the wild hell-dogs of war, murmured love to a
princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morning, or smiled
over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or Cham.

Baden was full. The supreme empires of demi-monde sent their sovereigns,
diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all other principalities and
powers, while in breadth of marvelous skirts, in costliness of cobweb
laces, in unapproachability of Indian shawls and gold embroideries,
and mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a
Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced by none.

Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered under the
pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there was not one in his way
greater than the steeple-chaser, Forest King--certes, there was not one
half so honest.

The Guards' Crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the sole
representative of England. There were two or three good things out of
French stables,--specially a killing little boy, L'Etoile,--and there
was an Irish sorrel, the property of an Austrian of rank, of which fair
things were whispered; but it was scarcely possible that anything
could stand against the King and that wonderful stride of his which
spread-eagled his field like magic, and his countrymen were well
content to leave their honor and their old renown to "Beauty" and his
six-year-old.

Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort of
conviction that the German race would set everything square. He stood
either to make a very good thing on it or to be very heavily bit. There
could be no medium. He never hedged in his life; and as it was almost
a practical impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get
together would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of
the King. Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably too
careless to take the chance of adverse accident into account, had come
to Baden, and was amusing himself there dropping a Friedrich d'Or on the
rouge, flirting in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady
Guenevere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness,
supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that a Russian
Prince had had before him, with all the serenity of a millionaire, as
far as memory of money went; with much more than the serenity in other
matters of most millionaires, who, finding themselves uncommonly ill
at ease in the pot-pourri of monarchs and ministers, of beau-monde and
demi-monde, would have given half their newly turned thousands to get
rid of the odor of Capel Court and the Bourse, and to attain the calm,
negligent assurance, the easy, tranquil insolence, the nonchalance with
Princes, and the supremacy among the Free Lances, which they saw and
coveted in the indolent Guardsman.

Bertie amused himself. He might be within a day of his ruin, but that
was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a
pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as
old Herrick's, and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain
into

     Drink a pure claret while you may,
     Your "stiff" is still a-flying;
     And he who dines so well to-day
     To-morrow may be lying,
     Pounced down upon by Jews _tout net_,
     Or outlawed in a French _guinguette!_

Bertie was a great believer--if the words are not too sonorous and
too earnest to be applied to his very inconsequent views upon any and
everything--in the philosophy of happy accident. Far as it was in him to
have a conviction at all,--which was a thorough-going, serious sort
of thing not by any means his "form,"--he had a conviction that
the doctrine of "Eat, drink, and enjoy, for to-morrow we die" was
a universal panacea. He was reckless to the uttermost stretch of
recklessness, all serene and quiet though his pococurantism and his
daily manner were; and while subdued to the undeviating monotone and
languor of his peculiar set in all his temper and habits, the natural
dare-devil in him took out its inborn instincts in a wildly careless and
gamester-like imprudence with that most touchy tempered and inconsistent
of all coquettes--Fortune.

Things, he thought, could not well be worse with him than they were now.
So he piled all on one coup, and stood to be sunk or saved by the
Prix de Dames. Meanwhile, all the same, he murmured Mussetism to the
Guenevere under the ruins of the Alte Schloss, lost or won a rouleau at
the roulette-wheel, gave a banknote to the famous Isabel for a tea-rose,
drove the Zu-Zu four in hand to see the Flat races, took his guinea
tickets for the Concerts, dined with Princes, lounged arm-in-arm with
Grand Dukes, gave an Emperor a hint as to the best cigars, and charmed a
Monarch by unfolding the secret of the aroma of a Guards' Punch, sacred
to the Household.

Bertie who believed in bivalves but not in heroics, thought it best to
take the oysters first and eschew the despair entirely.

He had one unchangeable quality--insouciance; and he had, moreover, one
unchangeable faith--the King. Lady Guenevere had reached home unnoticed
after the accident of their moonlight stag-hunt. His brother, meeting
him a day or two after their interview, had nodded affirmatively, though
sulkily, in answer to his inquiries, and had murmured that it was "all
square now." The Jews and the tradesmen had let him leave for Baden
without more serious measures than a menace, more or less insolently
worded. In the same fashion he trusted that the King's running at the
Bad, with the moneys he had on it, would set all things right for a
little while; when, if his family interest, which was great, would get
him his step in the First Life, he thought, desperate as things were,
they might come round again smoothly, without a notorious crash.

"You are sure the King will 'stay,' Bertie?" asked Lady Guenevere, who
had some hundreds in gloves (and even under the rose "sported a pony" or
so more seriously) on the event.

"Certain! But if he don't I promise you as pretty a tableau as your
Asnieres one; for your sake, I'll make the finish as picturesque as
possible. Wouldn't it be well to give me a lock of hair in readiness?"

Her ladyship laughed and shook her head; if a man killed himself, she
did not desire that her gracious name should be entangled with the
folly.

"No; I don't do those things," she said, with captivating waywardness.
"Besides, though the Oos looks cool and pleasant, I greatly doubt that
under any pressure you would trouble it; suicides are too pronounced for
your style, Bertie."

"At all events, a little morphia in one's own rooms would be quieter,
and better taste," said Cecil, while he caught himself listlessly
wondering, as he had wondered at Richmond, if this badinage were to turn
into serious fact--how much would she care.



"May your sins be forgiven you!" cried Chesterfield, the apostle of
training, as he and the Seraph came up to the table where Cecil and
Cos Wentworth were breakfasting in the garden of the Stephanien on the
race-day itself. "Liqueurs, truffles, and every devilment under the
sun?--cold beef, and nothing to drink, Beauty, if you've any conscience
left!"

"Never had a grain, dear boy, since I can remember," murmured Bertie
apologetically. "You took all the rawness off me at Eton."

"And you've been taking coffee in bed, I'll swear!" pursued the
cross-examiner.

"What if he have? Beauty's condition can't be upset by a little mocha,
nor mine either," said his universal defender; and the Seraph shook his
splendid limbs with a very pardonable vanity.

"Ruteroth trains; Ruteroth trains awfully," put in Cos Wentworth,
looking up out of a great silver flagon of Badminton, with which he was
ending his breakfast; and referring to that Austrian who was to ride the
Paris favorite. "Remember him at La Marche last year, and the racing at
Vincennes--didn't take a thing that could make flesh--muscles like iron,
you know--never touched a soda even----"

"I've trained, too," said Bertie submissively; "look how I've been
waltzing! There isn't harder work than that for any fellow. A deuxtemps
with the Duchess takes it out of you like any spin over the flat."

His censurers laughed, but did not give in their point.

"You've run shocking risks, Beauty," said Chesterfield; "the King's in
fine running-form; don't say he isn't; but you've said scores of times
what a deal of riding he takes. Now, can you tell us yourself that
you're in as hard condition as you were when you won the Military, eh?"

Cecil shook his head with a sigh.

"I don't think I am; I've had things to try me, you see. There was that
Verschoyle's proposal. I did absolutely think at one time she'd marry
me before I could protest against it! Then there was that shock to one's
whole nervous system, when that indigo man, who took Lady Laura's house,
asked us to dinner, and actually thought we should go!--and there was a
scene, you know, of all earthly horrors, when Mrs. Gervase was so near
eloping with me, and Gervase cut up rough, instead of pitying me; and
then the field-days were so many, and so late into the season; and I
exhausted myself so at the Belvoir theatricals at Easter; and I toiled
so atrociously playing 'Almaviva' at your place, Seraph--a private
opera's galley slave's work!--and, altogether, I've had a good many
things to pull me down since the winter," concluded Bertie, with a
plaintive self-condolence over his truffles.

The rest of his condemning judges laughed, and passed the plea of
sympathy; the Coldstreamer alone remained censorious and untouched.

"Pull you down! You'll never pull off the race if you sit drinking
liqueurs all the morning!" growled that censor. "Look at that!"

Bertie glanced at the London telegram tossed across to him, sent from a
private and confidential agent.

"Betting here--two to one on L'Etoile; Irish Roan offered and taken
freely. Slight decline in closing prices for the King; getting on French
bay rather heavily at midnight. Fancy there's a commission out against
the King. Looks suspicious." Cecil shrugged his shoulders and raised his
eyebrows a little.

"All the better for us. Take all they'll lay against me. It's as good
as our having a 'Commission out'; and if any cads get one against us it
can't mean mischief, as it would with professional jocks."

"Are you so sure of yourself, Beauty?"

Beauty shook his head repudiatingly.

"Never am sure of anything, much less of myself. I'm a chameleon, a
perfect chameleon!"

"Are you so sure of the King, then?"

"My dear fellow, no! I ask you in reason, how can I be sure of what
isn't proved? I'm like that country fellow the old story tells of; he
believed in fifteen shillings because he'd once had it in his hand;
others, he'd heard, believed in a pound; but, for his part, he didn't,
because he'd never seen it. Now that was a man who'd never commit
himself; he might had had the Exchequer! I'm the same; I believe the
King can win at a good many things because I've seen him do 'em; but I
can't possibly tell whether he can get this, because I've never ridden
him for it. I shall be able to tell you at three o'clock--but that you
don't care for----"

And Bertie, exhausted with making such a lengthened exposition--the
speeches he preferred were monosyllabic--completed his sins against
training with a long draught of claret-cup.

"Then what the devil do you mean by telling us to pile our pots on you?"
asked the outraged Coldstreamer, with natural wrath.

"Faith is a beautiful sight!" said Bertie, with solemnity.

"Offered on the altar of the Jews!" laughed the Seraph, as he turned him
away from the breakfast table by the shoulders. "Thanks, Beauty; I've
'four figures' on you, and you'll be good enough to win them for me.
Let's have a look at the King. They are just going to walk him over."

Cecil complied; while he lounged away with the others to the stables,
with a face of the most calm, gentle, weary indifference in the world,
the thought crossed him for a second of how very near he was to the
wind. The figures in his betting-book were to the tune of several
thousands, one way or another. If he won this morning it would be all
right, of course; if he lost--even Beauty, odd mixture of devil-may-care
and languor though he was, felt his lips grow, for the moment, hot and
cold by turns as he thought of that possible contingency.

The King looked in splendid condition; he knew well enough what was up
again, knew what was meant by that extra sedulous dressing-down, that
setting muzzle that had been buckled on him some nights previous, the
limitation put to his drink, the careful trial spins in the gray of the
mornings, the conclusive examination of his plates by a skillful hand;
he knew what was required of him, and a horse in nobler condition never
stepped out in body clothing, as he was ridden slowly down on to the
plains of Iffesheim. The Austrian Dragoon, a Count and a Chamberlain
likewise, who was to ride his only possible rival, the French horse
L'Etoile, pulled his tawny silken mustaches as he saw the great English
hero come up the course, and muttered to himself, "L'affaire est finie."
L'Etoile was a brilliant enough bay in his fashion, but Count Ruteroth
knew the measure of his pace and powers too thoroughly to expect him to
live against the strides of the Guards' gray.

"My beauty, won't you cut those German fellows down!" muttered Rake, the
enthusiast, in the saddling inclosure. "As for those fools what go agin
you, you'll put them in a hole, and no mistake. French horse, indeed!
Why, you'll spread-eagle all them Mossoos' and Meinherrs' cattle in a
brace of seconds--"

Rake's foe, the head groom, caught him up savagely.

"Won't you never learn decent breeding? When we wins we wins on the
quiet, and when we loses we loses as if we liked it; all that braying,
and flaunting, and boasting is only fit for cads. The 'oss is in tip-top
condition; let him show what he can do over furren ground."

"Lucky for him, then, that he hasn't got you across the pigskin; you'd
rope him, I believe, as soon as look at him, if it was made worth your
while," retorted Rake, in caustic wrath; his science of repartee chiefly
lay in a successful "plant," and he was here uncomfortably conscious
that his opponent was in the right of the argument, as he started
through the throng to put his master into the "shell" of the
Shire-famous scarlet and white.

"Tip-top condition, my boy--tip-top, and no mistake," murmured Mr.
Willon for the edification of those around them as the saddle-girths
were buckled on, and the Guards' Crack stood the cynosure of every eye
at Iffesheim.

Then, in his capacity as head attendant on the hero, he directed the
exercise bridle to be taken off, and with his own hands adjusted a new
and handsome one, slung across his arm.

"'Tis a'most a pity. 'Tis a'most a pity," thought the worthy, as he put
the curb on the King; "but I shouldn't have been haggravated with that
hinsolent soldiering chap. There, my boy! if you'll win with a painted
quid, I'm a Dutchman."

Forest King champed his bit between his teeth a little; it tasted
bitter; he tossed his head and licked it with his tongue impatiently;
the taste had got down his throat and he did not like its flavor; he
turned his deep, lustrous eyes with a gentle patience on the crowd about
him, as though asking them what was the matter with him. No one moved
his bit; the only person who could have had such authority was busily
giving the last polish to his coat with a fine handkerchief--that
glossy neck which had been so dusted many a time with the cobweb
coronet-broidered handkerchiefs of great ladies--and his instincts,
glorious as they were, were not wise enough to tell him to kick his head
groom down, then and there, with one mortal blow, as his poisoner and
betrayer.

The King chafed under the taste of that "painted quid"; he felt a
nausea as he swallowed, and he turned his handsome head with a strange,
pathetic astonishment in his glance. At that moment a familiar hand
stroked his mane, a familiar foot was put into his stirrup, Bertie threw
himself into saddle; the lightest weight that ever gentleman-rider rode,
despite his six-foot length of limb. The King, at the well-known touch,
the well-loved voice, pricked his delicate ears, quivered in all his
frame with eager excitation, snuffed the air restlessly through his
distended nostrils, and felt every vein under his satin skin thrill
and swell with pleasure; he was all impatience, all power, all longing,
vivid intensity of life. If only that nausea would go! He felt a
restless sickliness stealing on him that his young and gallant strength
had never known since he was foaled. But it was not in the King to yield
to a little; he flung his head up, champing angrily at the bit, then
walked down to the starting-post with his old calm, collected grace; and
Cecil, looking at the glossy bow of the neck, and feeling the width of
the magnificent ribs beneath him, stooped from his saddle a second as he
rode out of the inclosure and bent to the Seraph.

"Look at him, Rock! The thing's as good as won."

The day was very warm and brilliant; all Baden had come down to the
race-course; continuous strings of carriages, with their four or six
horses and postilions, held the line far down over the plains; mob there
was none, save of women in matchless toilets, and men with the highest
names in the "Almanac de Gotha"; the sun shone cloudlessly on the broad,
green plateau of Iffesheim, on the white amphitheater of chalk hills,
and on the glittering, silken folds of the flags of England, France,
Prussia, and of the Grand Duchy itself, that floated from the summits of
the Grand Stand, Pavilion, and Jockey Club.

The ladies, descending from the carriages, swept up and down on the
green course that was so free from "cads" and "legs"; their magnificent
skirts trailing along without the risk of a grain of dust; their costly
laces side by side with the Austrian uniforms of the military men from
Rastadt. The betting was but slight, in odd contrast with the hubbub and
striking clamor of English betting rings; the only approach to anything
like "real business" being transacted between the members of the
Household and those of the Jockey Clubs. Iffesheim was pure pleasure,
like every other item of Baden existence, and all aristocratic,
sparkling, rich, amusement-seeking Europe seemed gathered there under
the sunny skies, and on everyone's lips in the titled throng was but one
name--Forest King's. Even the coquettish bouquet-sellers, who remembered
the dresses of his own colors which Cecil had given them last year when
he had won the Rastadt, would sell nothing except little twin scarlet
and white moss rosebuds; of which thousands were gathered and died that
morning in honor of the English Guards' champion.

A slender event usually, the presence of the renowned crack of the
Household Cavalry made the Prix de Dames the most eagerly watched-for
entry on the card; and the rest of the field were scarcely noticed as
the well-known gold-embroidered jacket came up at the starting-post.

The King saw that blaze of light and color over course and stands that
he knew so well by this time; he felt the pressure round him of his
foreign rivals as they reared and pulled and fretted and passaged; the
old longing quivered in all his eager limbs, the old fire wakened in all
his dauntless blood; like the charger at sound of the trumpet-call, he
lived in his past victories, and was athirst for more. But yet--between
him and the sunny morning there seemed a dim, hazy screen; on his
delicate ear the familiar clangor smote with something dulled and
strange; there seemed a numbness stealing down his frame; he shook his
head in an unusual and irritated impatience; he did not know what ailed
him. The hand he loved so loyally told him the work that was wanted of
him; but he felt its guidance dully too, and the dry, hard, hot earth,
as he struck it with his hoof, seemed to sway and heave beneath him; the
opiate had stolen into his veins and was creeping stealthily and surely
to the sagacious brain, and over the clear, bright senses.

The signal for the start was given; the first mad headlong rush broke
away with the force of a pent-up torrent suddenly loosened; every
instinct of race and custom, and of that obedience which rendered him
flexible as silk to his rider's will, sent him forward with that stride
which made the Guards' Crack a household word in all the Shires. For a
moment he shook himself clear of all the horses, and led off in the old
grand sweeping canter before the French bay, three lengths in the one
single effort.

Then into his eyes a terrible look of anguish came; the numb and sickly
nausea was upon him, his legs trembled, before his sight was a blurred,
whirling mist; all the strength and force and mighty life within him
felt ebbing out, yet he struggled bravely. He strained, he panted, he
heard the thundering thud of the first flight gaining nearer and nearer
upon him; he felt his rivals closing hotter and harder in on him; he
felt the steam of his opponent's smoking, foam-dashed withers burn
on his own flanks and shoulders; he felt the maddening pressure of a
neck-to-neck struggle; he felt what in all his victorious life he had
never known--the paralysis of defeat.

The glittering throngs spreading over the plains gazed at him in the
sheer stupor of amazement; they saw that the famous English hero was
dead-beat as any used-up knacker.

One second more he strove to wrench himself through the throng of the
horses, through the headlong crushing press, through--worst foe of
all!--the misty darkness curtaining his sight! One second more he
tried to wrestle back the old life into his limbs, the unworn power
and freshness into nerve and sinew. Then the darkness fell utterly; the
mighty heart failed; he could do no more--and his rider's hand slackened
and turned him gently backward; his rider's voice sounded very low and
quiet to those who, seeing that every effort was hopeless, surged and
clustered round his saddle.

"Something ails the King," said Cecil calmly; "he is fairly knocked
off his legs. Some Vet must look to him; ridden a yard farther he will
fall."

Words so gently spoken!--yet in the single minute that alone had passed
since they had left the Starter's Chair, a lifetime seemed to have been
centered, alike to Forest King and to his owner.

The field swept on with a rush, without the favorite; and the Prix de
Dames was won by the French bay L'Etoile.



CHAPTER X.

"PETITE REINE."

When a young Prussian had shot himself the night before for roulette
losses, the event had not thrilled, startled, and impressed the gay
Baden gathering one tithe so gravely and so enduringly as did now the
unaccountable failure of the great Guards' Crack.

Men could make nothing of it save the fact that there was "something
dark" somewhere. The "painted quid" had done its work more thoroughly
than Willon and the welsher had intended; they had meant that the opiate
should be just sufficient to make the favorite off his speed, but not to
make effects so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly prepared
that under examination no trace could be found of it, and the result of
veterinary investigation, while it left unremoved the conviction that
the horse had been doctored, could not explain when or how, or by what
medicines. Forest King had simply "broken down"; favorites do this on
the flat and over the furrow from an overstrain, from a railway journey,
from a touch of cold, from a sudden decay of power, from spasm, or from
vertigo; those who lose by them may think what they will of "roping," or
"painting," or "nobbling," but what can they prove?

Even in the great scandals that come before the autocrats of the Jockey
Club, where the tampering is clearly known, can the matter ever be
really proved and sifted? Very rarely. The trainer affects stolid
unconsciousness or unimpeachable respectability; the hapless stable-boy
is cross-examined, to protest innocence and ignorance, and most likely
protest them rightly; he is accused, dismissed, and ruined; or some
young jock has a "caution" out everywhere against him, and never again
can get a mount even for the commonest handicap; but, as a rule, the
real criminals are never unearthed, and by consequence are never reached
and punished.

The Household, present and absent, were heavily hit. They cared little
for the "crushers" they incurred, but their champion's failure, when
he was in the face of Europe, cut them more terribly. The fame of the
English riding-men had been trusted to Forest King and his owner, and
they, who had never before betrayed the trust placed in them, had broken
down like any screw out of a livery stable; like any jockey bribed to
"pull" at a suburban selling-race. It was fearfully bitter work; and,
unanimous to a voice, the indignant murmur of "doctored" ran through
the titled, fashionable crowds on the Baden course in deep and ominous
anger.

The Seraph's grand wrath poured out fulminations against the wicked-doer
whosoever he was, or wheresoever he lurked; and threatened, with a
vengeance that would be no empty words, the direst chastisement of the
"Club," of which both his father and himself were stewards, upon the
unknown criminal. The Austrian and French nobles, while winners by the
event, were scarce in less angered excitement. It seemed to cast the
foulest slur upon their honor that, upon foreign ground, the renowned
English steeple-chaser should have been tampered with thus; and the fair
ladies of either world added the influence of their silver tongues, and
were eloquent in the vivacity of their sympathy and resentment with a
unanimity women rarely show in savoring defeat, but usually reserve for
the fairer opportunity of swaying the censer before success.

Cecil alone, amid it all, was very quiet; he said scarcely a word,
nor could the sharpest watcher have detected an alteration in
his countenance. Only once, when they talked around him of the
investigations of the Club, and of the institution of inquiries to
discover the guilty traitor, he looked up with a sudden, dangerous
lighting of his soft, dark, hazel eyes, under the womanish length of
their lashes: "When you find him, leave him to me."

The light was gone again in an instant; but those who knew the wild
strain that ran in the Royallieu blood knew by it that, despite his
gentle temper, a terrible reckoning for the evil done his horse might
come some day from the Quietist.

He said little or nothing else, and to the sympathy and indignation
expressed for him on all sides he answered with his old, listless calm.
But, in truth, he barely knew what was saying or doing about him; he
felt like a man stunned and crushed with the violence of some tremendous
fall; the excitation, the agitation, the angry amazement around
him (growing as near clamor as was possible in those fashionable
betting-circles, so free from roughs and almost free from bookmakers),
the conflicting opinions clashing here and there--even, indeed, the
graceful condolence of the brilliant women--were insupportable to him.
He longed to be out of this world which had so well amused him; he
longed passionately, for the first time in his life, to be alone.

For he knew that with the failure of Forest King had gone the last plank
that saved him from ruin; perhaps the last chance that stood between him
and dishonor. He had never looked on it as within the possibilities of
hazard that the horse could be defeated; now, little as those about him
knew it, an absolute and irremediable disgrace fronted him. For, secure
in the issue of the Prix de Dames, and compelled to weight his chances
in it very heavily that his winnings might be wide enough to relieve
some of the debt-pressure upon him, his losses now were great; and he
knew no more how to raise the moneys to meet them than he would have
known how to raise the dead.

The blow fell with crushing force; the fiercer because his indolence had
persisted in ignoring his danger, and because his whole character was so
naturally careless and so habituated to ease and to enjoyment.

A bitter, heartsick misery fell on him; the tone of honor was high with
him; he might be reckless of everything else, but he could never be
reckless in what infringed, or went nigh to infringe, a very stringent
code. Bertie never reasoned in that way; he simply followed the
instincts of his breeding without analyzing them; but these led him
safely and surely right in all his dealings with his fellow-men, however
open to censure his life might be in other matters. Careless as he was,
and indifferent, to levity, in many things, his ideas of honor were
really very pure and elevated; he suffered proportionately now that,
through the follies of his own imprudence, and the baseness of some
treachery he could neither sift nor avenge, he saw himself driven down
into as close a jeopardy of disgrace as ever befell a man who did not
willfully, and out of guilty coveting of its fruits, seek it.

For the first time in his life the society of his troops of acquaintance
became intolerably oppressive; for the first time in his life he sought
refuge from thought in the stimulus of drink, and dashed down neat
Cognac as though it were iced Badminton, as he drove with his set off
the disastrous plains of Iffesheim. He shook himself free of them as
soon as he could; he felt the chatter round him insupportable; the men
were thoroughly good-hearted, and though they were sharply hit by the
day's issue, never even by implication hinted at owing the disaster to
their faith in him, but the very cordiality and sympathy they showed cut
him the keenest--the very knowledge of their forbearance made his own
thoughts darkest.

Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day's calamity
brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith these men had placed
in him, and the losses which his own mistaken security had caused them.
Granted he could neither guess nor avert the trickery which had brought
about his failure; but none the less did he feel that he had failed
them; none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed
him sting him like a scourge.

He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into the gardens
of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley shut him in in
solitude, and the only echo of the gay world of Baden was the strain of
a band, the light mirth of a laugh, or the roll of a carriage sounding
down the summer air.

It was eight o'clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless
splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to
bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest. In another hour he was the
expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was
highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every
nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this
radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth
owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for
welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as
the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house. No aid could serve him,
for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no
power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the
farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps
dishonored man--a debtor and an alien.

Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying
vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him--and to meet which
not training, nor habit, nor a moment's grave reflection had ever done
the slightest to prepare him; gazing, blankly and unconsciously, at the
dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and
around above the green and leafy nest of Baden--he watched mechanically
the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in
distance through the firs.

"Those poor devils envy us!" he thought. "Better be one of them ten
thousand times than be trained for the Great Race, and started with the
cracks, dead weighted with the penalty-shot of Poverty!"

A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there; he looked up, surprised.
Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all gay with white
lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and floating hair fastened
backward with a golden fillet; it was that of the little Lady
Venetia,--the only daughter of the House of Lyonnesse, by a late
marriage of his Grace,--the eight-year-old sister of the colossal
Seraph; the plaything of a young and lovely mother, who had flirted
in Belgravia with her future stepson before she fell sincerely and
veritably in love with the gallant and still handsome Duke.

Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by months together
at Lyonnesse most years of the child's life, and had been gentle to her
as he was to every living thing, though he had noticed her seldom.

"Well, Petite Reine," he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts were;
calling her by the name she generally bore. "All alone? Where are your
playmates?"

"Petite Reine," who, to justify her sobriquet, was a grand, imperial
little lady, bent her delicate head--a very delicate head, indeed,
carrying itself royally, young though it was.

"Ah! you know I never care for children!"

It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a touch of
affectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a matured and
contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment it amused him. She did
not wait an answer, but bent nearer, with an infinite pity and anxiety
in her pretty eyes.

"I want to know--you are so vexed; are you not? They say you have lost
all your money!"

"Do they? They are not far wrong then. Who are 'they,' Petite Reine?"

"Oh! Prince Alexis, and the Duc de Lorance, and mamma, and everybody. Is
it true?"

"Very true, my little lady."

"Ah!" She gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, with her head
on one side, and her lips parted; "I heard the Russian gentleman saying
that you were ruined. Is that true, too?"

"Yes, dear," he answered wearily, thinking little of the child in the
desperate pass to which his life had come.

Petite Reine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young ladyship had
a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she had understood what
had been said before her of him vaguely indeed, and with no sense of
its true meaning, yet still with the quick perception of a brilliant
and petted child. Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes
were filled with tears. He put out his hand and drew her to him.

"Why, little one, what do you know of these things? How did you find me
out here?"

She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its bright
gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting her face to
his--earnest, beseeching, and very eager.

"I came--I came--please don't be angry--because I heard them say you
had no money, and I want you to take mine. Do take it! Look, it is all
bright gold, and it is my own, my very own. Papa gives it to me to do
just what I like with. Do take it; pray do!"

Coloring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct of generous
natures,--a most sensitive delicacy for others,--but growing ardent in
her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, she shook on to Cecil's
knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat box, twenty bright Napoleons that
fell in a glittering shower on the grass.

He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook for offense.
She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, and with her large eyes
gleaming and melting with passionate entreaty.

"Don't be angry; pray take it; it is all my own, and you know I have
bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, and dogs till I am tired
of them; I never want the money; indeed I don't. Take it, please take
it; and if you will only let me ask Papa or Rock they will give you
thousands and thousands of pounds, if that isn't enough. Do let me!"

Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him. When he spoke his
voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim with an emotion
that he had not known in all his careless life; the child's words and
action touched him deeply, the caressing, generous innocence of the
offered gift, beside the enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy
of his career, smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange
pleasure.

"Petite Reine," he murmured gently, striving vainly for his old
lightness, "Petite Reine, how some man will love you one day! Thank you
from my heart, my little innocent friend."

Her face flushed with gladness; she smiled with all a child's unshadowed
joy.

"Ah! then you will take it! and if you want more only let me ask them
for it; papa and Philip never refuse me anything!"

His hand wandered gently over the shower of her hair, as he put back the
Napoleons that he had gathered up into her azure bonbonniere.

"Petite Reine, you are a little angel; but I cannot take your money, my
child, and you must ask for none for my sake from your father or from
Rock. Do not look so grieved, little one; I love you none the less
because I refuse it."

Petite Reine's face was very pale and grave; a delicate face, in its
miniature feminine childhood almost absurdly like the Seraph's; her eyes
were full of plaintive wonder and of pathetic reproach.

"Ah!" she said, drooping her head with a sigh; "it is no good to you
because it is such a little; do let me ask for more!"

He smiled, but the smile was very weary.

"No, dear, you must not ask for more; I have been very foolish, my
little friend, and I must take the fruits of my folly; all men must.
I can accept no one's money, not even yours; when you are older and
remember this, you will know why. But I do not thank you the less from
my heart."

She looked at him, pained and wistful.

"You will not take anything, Mr. Cecil?" she asked with a sigh, glancing
at her rejected Napoleons.

He drew the enamel bonbonniere away.

"I will take that if you will give it me, Petite Reine, and keep it in
memory of you."

As he spoke, he stooped and kissed her very gently; the act had
moved him more deeply than he thought he had it in him to be moved
by anything, and the child's face turned upward to him was of a very
perfect and aristocratic loveliness, far beyond her years. She colored
as his lips touched hers, and swayed slightly from him. She was an
extremely proud young sovereign, and never allowed caresses; yet she
lingered by him, troubled, grave, with something intensely tender and
pitiful in the musing look of her eyes. She had a perception that this
calamity which smote him was one far beyond the ministering of her
knowledge.

He took the pretty Palais Royal gold-rimmed sweetmeat box, and slipped
it into his waistcoat pocket. It was only a child's gift, a tiny Paris
toy; but it had been brought to him in a tender compassion, and he did
keep it; kept it through dark days and wild nights, through the scorch
of the desert and the shadows of death, till the young eyes that
questioned him now with such innocent wonder had gained the grander
luster of their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider than he knew
now.

At that moment, as the child stood beside him under the drooping acacia
boughs, with the green, sloping lower valley seen at glimpses through
the wall of leaves, one of the men of the Stephanien approached him
with an English letter, which, as it was marked "instant," they had laid
apart from the rest of the visitors' pile of correspondence. Cecil took
it wearily--nothing but fresh embarrassments could come to him from
England--and looked at the little Lady Venetia.

"Will you allow me?"

She bowed her graceful head; with all the naif unconsciousness of a
child, she had all the manner of the veille cour; together they made her
enchanting.

He broke the envelope and read--a blurred, scrawled, miserable letter;
the words erased with passionate strokes, and blotted with hot tears,
and scored out in impulsive misery. It was long, yet at a glance he
scanned its message and its meaning; at the first few words he knew its
whole as well as though he had studied every line.

A strong tremor shook him from head to foot, a tremor at once of
passionate rage and of as passionate pain; his face blanched to a deadly
whiteness; his teeth clinched as though he were restraining some bodily
suffering, and he tore the letter in two and stamped it down into the
turf under his heel with a gesture as unlike his common serenity of
manner as the fiery passion that darkened in his eyes was unlike the
habitual softness of his too pliant and too unresentful temper. He
crushed the senseless paper again and again down into the grass beneath
his heel; his lips shook under the silky abundance of his beard; the
natural habit of long usage kept him from all utterance, and even in the
violence of its shock he remembered the young Venetia's presence; but,
in that one fierce, unrestrained gesture the shame and suffering upon
him broke out, despite himself.

The child watched him, startled and awed. She touched his hand softly.

"What is it? Is it anything worse?"

He turned his eyes on her with a dry, hot, weary anguish in them; he was
scarcely conscious what he said or what he answered.

"Worse--worse?" he repeated mechanically, while his heel still ground
down in loathing the shattered paper into the grass. "There can be
nothing worse! It is the vilest, blackest shame."

He spoke to his thoughts, not to her; the words died in his throat; a
bitter agony was on him; all the golden summer evening, all the fair
green world about him, were indistinct and unreal to his senses; he felt
as if the whole earth were of a sudden changed; he could not realize
that this thing could come to him and his--that this foul dishonor could
creep up and stain them--that this infamy could ever be of them and upon
them. All the ruin that before had fallen on him to-day was dwarfed and
banished; it looked nothing beside the unendurable horror that reached
him now.

The gay laughter of children sounded down the air at that moment; they
were the children of a French Princess seeking their playmate Venetia,
who had escaped from them and from their games to find her way to Cecil.
He motioned her to them; he could not bear even the clear and pitying
eyes of the Petite Reine to be upon him now.

She lingered wistfully; she did not like to leave him.

"Let me stay with you," she pleaded caressingly. "You are vexed at
something; I cannot help you, but Rock will--the Duke will. Do let me
ask them?"

He laid his hand on her shoulder; his voice, as he answered, was hoarse
and unsteady.

"No; go, dear. You will please me best by leaving me. Ask none--tell
none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite Reine."

She gave him a long, earnest look.

"Yes," she answered simply and gravely, as one who accepts, and not
lightly, a trust.

Then she went slowly and lingeringly, with the sun on the gold fillet
binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the shadow of her silken
lashes. When next they met again the luster of a warmer sun, that once
burned on the white walls of the palace of Phoenicia and the leaping
flame of the Temple of the God of Healing, shone upon them; and through
the veil of those sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless sovereignty
of a proud and patrician womanhood.

Alone, his head sank down upon his hands; he gave reins to the fiery
scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn seized him with every
moment that seared the words of the letter deeper and deeper down into
his brain. Until this he had never known what it was to suffer; until
this his languid creeds had held that no wise man feels strongly, and
that to glide through life untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it
is politic. Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately
as a barbarian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its
dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his light
philosophies.

"Oh, God!" he thought, "if it were anything--anything--except Disgrace!"



In a miserable den, an hour or so before--there are miserable dens even
in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads
are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be
content with a shakedown--two men sat in consultation. Though the
chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive
wines and liqueurs. Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected
this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity.
One of them was the "welsher," Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter
man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a
Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the
"welsher," heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a
gloating malignity. Excitement and the fire of very strong wines,
of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in
exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him
in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of
success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his
teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have
furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of
delighted tyranny.

"That precious Guards' swell!" he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth
time. "I've paid him out at last! He won't take a 'walk over' again in
a hurry. Cuss them swells! They allays die so game; it ain't half a go
after all, giving 'em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under
it all, and never show they are down, even when their backers throw up
the sponge. You can't make 'em give in, not even when they're mortal
hit; that's the crusher of it."

"Vell, vhat matter that ven you have hit 'em?" expostulated the more
philosophic Jew.

"Why, it is a fleecing of one," retorted the welsher savagely, even amid
his successes. "A clear fleecing of one. If one gets the better of a
dandy chap like that, and brings him down neat and clean, one ought
to have the spice of it. One ought to see him wince and--cuss 'em
all!--that's just what they'll never do. No! not if it was ever so. You
may pitch into 'em like Old Harry, and those d----d fine gentlemen will
just look as if they liked it. You might strike 'em dead at your feet,
and it's my belief, while they was cold as stone they'd manage to look
not beaten yet. It's a fleecing of one--a fleecing of one!" he growled
afresh; draining down a great draught of brandy-heated Roussillon to
drown the impatient conviction which possessed him that, let him triumph
as he would, there would ever remain, in that fine intangible sense
which his coarse nature could feel, though he could not have further
defined it, a superiority in his adversary he could not conquer; a
difference between him and his prey he could not bridge over.

The Jew laughed a little.

"Vot a child you are, you Big Ben! Vot matter how he look, so long as
you have de success and pocket de monish?"

Big Ben gave a long growl, like a mastiff tearing to reach a bone just
held above him.

"Hang the blunt! The yellows ain't a quarter worth to me what it 'ud be
to see him just look as if he knew he was knocked over. Besides, laying
again' him by that ere commission's piled up hatsful of the ready, to
be sure; I don't say it ain't; but there's two thou' knocked off for
Willon, and the fool don't deserve a tizzy of it. He went and put the
paint on so thick that, if the Club don't have a flare-up about the
whole thing----"

"Let dem!" said the Jew serenely. "Dey can do vot dey like; dey von't
get to de bottom of de vell. Dat Villon is sharp; he vill know how to
keep his tongue still; dey can prove nothing; dey may give de sack to a
stable-boy, or dey may think themselves mighty bright in seeing a mare's
nest, but dey vill never come to us."

The welsher gave a loud, hoarse guffaw of relish and enjoyment.

"No! We know the ins and outs of Turf Law a trifle too well to be caught
napping. A neater thing weren't ever done, if it hadn't been that the
paint was put a trifle too thick. The 'oss should have just run ill, and
not knocked over, clean out o' time like that. However, there ain't no
odds a-crying over spilt milk. If the Club do come a inquiry, we'll show
'em a few tricks that'll puzzle 'em. But it's my belief they'll let it
off on the quiet; there ain't a bit of evidence to show the 'oss was
doctored, and the way he went stood quite as well for having been
knocked off his feed and off his legs by the woyage and sich like. And
now you go and put that swell to the grindstone for Act 2 of the comedy;
will yer?"

Ezra Baroni smiled, where he leaned against the table, looking over some
papers.

"Dis is a delicate matter; don't you come putting your big paw in
it--you'll spoil it all."

Ben Davis growled afresh:

"No, I ain't a-going. You know as well as me I can't show in the thing.
Hanged if I wouldn't almost lief risk a lifer out at Botany Bay for the
sake o' wringing my fine-feathered bird myself, but I daren't. If he
was to see me in it, all 'ud be up. You must do it. Get along; you look
uncommon respectable. If your coat-tails was a little longer, you might
right and away be took for a parson."

The Jew laughed softly, the welsher grimly, at the compliment they paid
the Church; Baroni put up his papers into a neat Russia letter book.
Excellently dressed, without a touch of flashiness, he did look
eminently respectable--and lingered a moment.

"I say, dear child; vat if de Marquis vant to buy off and hush up? Ten
to von he vill; he care no more for monish than for dem macaroons, and
he love his friend, dey say."

Ben Davis took his legs off the table with a crash, and stood
up, flushed, thirstily eager, almost aggressive in his peremptory
excitement.

"Without wringing my dainty bird's neck? Not for a million paid out o'
hand! Without crushing my fine gentleman down into powder? Not for all
the blunt of every one o' the Rothschilds! Curse his woman's face! I've
got to keep dark now; but when he's crushed, and smashed, and ruined,
and pilloried, and drove out of this fine world, and warned off of all
his aristocratic race-courses, then I'll come in and take a look at him;
then I'll see my brilliant gentleman a worn-out, broken-down swindler, a
dying in the bargain!"

The intense malignity, the brutal hungry lust for vengeance that
inspired the words, lent their coarse vulgarity something that was
for the moment almost tragical in its strength; almost horrible in its
passion. Ezra Baroni looked at him quietly, then without another word
went out--to a congenial task.

"Dat big child is a fool," mused the subtler and gentler Jew. "Vengeance
is but de breath of de vind; it blow for you one day, it blow against
you de next; de only real good is monish."



The Seraph had ridden back from Iffesheim to the Bad in company with
some Austrian officers, and one or two of his own comrades. He had left
the Course late, staying to exhaust every possible means of inquiry as
to the failure of Forest King, and to discuss with other members of the
Newmarket and foreign jockey clubs the best methods--if method there
were--of discovering what foul play had been on foot with the horse.
That there was some, and very foul too, the testimony of men and angels
would not have dissuaded the Seraph; and the event had left him most
unusually grave and regretful.

The amount he had lost himself, in consequence, was of not the slightest
moment to him, although he was extravagant enough to run almost to the
end even of his own princely tether in money matters; but that "Beauty"
should be cut down was more vexatious to him than any evil accident that
could have befallen himself, and he guessed pretty nearly the terrible
influence the dead failure would have on his friend's position.

True, he had never heard Cecil breathe a syllable that hinted at
embarrassment; but these things get known with tolerable accuracy about
town, and those who were acquainted, as most people in their set were,
with the impoverished condition of the Royallieu exchequer, however
hidden it might be under an unabated magnificence of living, were well
aware also that none of the old Viscount's sons could have any safe
resources to guarantee them from as rapid a ruin as they liked to
consummate. Indeed, it had of late been whispered that it was probable,
despite the provisions of the entail, that all the green wealth and
Norman Beauty of Royallieu itself would come into the market. Hence the
Seraph, the best-hearted and most generous-natured of men, was worried
by an anxiety and a despondency which he would never have indulged, most
assuredly, on his own account, as he rode away from Iffesheim after the
defeat of his Corps' champion.

He was expected to dinner with one of the most lovely of foreign
Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterward to the Vaudeville, at
the pretty golden theater, where a troupe from the Bouffes were playing;
but he felt anything but in the mood for even her bewitching and--in
an marriageable sense--safe society, as he stopped his horse at his own
hotel, the Badischer Hof.

As he swung himself out of saddle, a well-dressed, quiet, rather
handsome little man drew near respectfully, lifting his hat--it was M.
Baroni. The Seraph had never seen the man in his life that he knew of,
but he was himself naturally frank, affable, courteous, and never given
to hedging himself behind the pale of his high rank; provided you did
not bore him, you might always get access to him easily enough--the Duke
used to tell him, too easily.

Therefore, when Ezra Baroni deferentially approached with, "The Most
Noble the Marquis of Rockingham, I think?" the Seraph, instead of
leaving the stranger there discomfited, nodded and paused with his
inconsequent good nature; thinking how much less bosh it would be if
everybody could call him, like his family and his comrades, "Rock."

"That is my name," he answered. "I do not know you. Do you want anything
of me?"

The Seraph had a vivid terror of people who "wanted him," in the
subscription, not the police, sense of the word; and had been the victim
of frauds innumerable.

"I wished," returned Baroni respectfully, but with sufficient
independence to conciliate his auditor, whom he saw at a glance cringing
subservience would disgust, "to have the opportunity of asking your
lordship a very simple question."

The Seraph looked a little bored, a little amused.

"Well, ask it, my good fellow; you have your opportunity!" he said
impatiently, yet good-humored still.

"Then would you, my lord," continued the Jew with his strong
Hebrew-German accent, "be so good as to favor me by saying whether this
signature be your own?"

The Jew held before him a folded paper, so folded that one line only was
visible, across which was dashed in bold characters, "Rockingham."

The Seraph put up his eye-glass, stopped, and took a steadfast look;
then shook his head.

"No; that is not mine; at least, I think not. Never made my R half a
quarter so well in my life."

"Many thanks, my lord," said Baroni quietly. "One question more and we
can substantiate the fact. Did your lordship indorse any bill on the
15th of last month?"

The Seraph looked surprised, and reflected a moment. "No, I didn't," he
said after a pause. "I have done it for men, but not on that day; I was
shooting at Hornsey Wood most of it, if I remember right. Why do you
ask?"

"I will tell you, my lord, if you grant me a private interview."

The Seraph moved away. "Never do that," he said briefly; "private
interviews," thought he, acting on past experience, "with women always
mean proposals, and with men always mean extortion."

Baroni made a quick movement toward him.

"An instant, my lord! This intimately concerns yourself. The steps of an
hotel are surely not the place in which to speak of it?"

"I wish to hear nothing about it," replied Rock, putting him aside;
while he thought to himself regretfully, "That is 'stiff,' that bit
of paper; perhaps some poor wretch is in a scrape. I wish I hadn't so
wholly denied my signature. If the mischief's done, there's no good in
bothering the fellow."

The Seraph's good nature was apt to overlook such trifles as the Law.

Baroni kept pace with him as he approached the hotel door, and spoke
very low.

"My lord, if you do not listen, worse may befall the reputation both of
your regiment and your friends."

The Seraph swung round; his careless, handsome face set stern in an
instant; his blue eyes grave, and gathering an ominous fire.

"Step yonder," he said curtly, signing the Hebrew toward the grand
staircase. "Show that person to my rooms, Alexis."

But for the publicity of the entrance of the Badischer Hof the mighty
right arm of the Guardsman might have terminated the interview then
and there, in different fashion. Baroni had gained his point, and
was ushered into the fine chambers set apart for the future Duke of
Lyonnesse. The Seraph strode after him, and as the attendant closed
the door and left them alone in the first of the great lofty suite, all
glittering with gilding, and ormolu, and malachite, and rose velvet, and
Parisian taste, stood like a tower above the Jew's small, slight form;
while his words came curtly, and only by a fierce effort through his
lips.

"Substantiate what you dare to say, or my grooms shall throw you out of
that window! Now!"

Baroni looked up, unmoved; the calm, steady, undisturbed glance sent a
chill over the Seraph; he thought if this man came but for purposes of
extortion, and were not fully sure that he could make good what he said,
this was not the look he would give.

"I desire nothing better, my lord," said Baroni quietly, "though I
greatly regret to be the messenger of such an errand. This bill, which
in a moment I will have the honor of showing you, was transacted by my
house (I am one of the partners of a London discounting firm), indorsed
thus by your celebrated name. Moneys were lent on it, the bill was made
payable at two months' date; it was understood that you accepted it;
there could be no risk with such a signature as yours. The bill was
negotiated; I was in Leyden, Lubeck, and other places at the period; I
heard nothing of the matter. When I returned to London, a little less
than a week ago, I saw the signature for the first time. I was at once
aware that it was not yours, for I had some paid bills, signed by you,
at hand, with which I compared it. Of course, my only remedy was to seek
you out, although I was nearly certain, before your present denial, that
the bill was a forgery."

He spoke quite tranquilly still, with a perfectly respectful regret,
but with the air of a man who has his title to be heard, and is acting
simply in hie own clear right. The Seraph listened, restless, impatient,
sorely tried to keep in the passion which had been awakened by the hint
that this wretched matter could concern or attaint the honor of his
corps.

"Well! speak out!" he said impatiently. "Details are nothing. Who drew
it? Who forged my name, if it be forged? Quick! give me the paper."

"With every trust and every deference, my lord, I cannot let the bill
pass out of my own hands until this unfortunate matter be cleared up--if
cleared up it can be. Your lordship shall see the bill, however, of
course, spread here upon the table; but first, let me warn you, my Lord
Marquis, that the sight will be intensely painful to you.

"Very painful, my lord," added Baroni impressively. "Prepare yourself
for--"

Rock dashed his hand down on the marble table with a force that made the
lusters and statuettes on it ring and tremble.

"No more words! Lay the bill there."

Baroni bowed and smoothed out upon the console the crumpled document,
holding it with one hand, yet leaving visible with the counterfeited
signature one other, the name of the forger in whose favor the bill was
drawn; that other signature was--"Bertie Cecil."

"I deeply regret to deal you such a blow from such a friend, my lord,"
said the Jew softly. The Seraph stooped and gazed--one instant of
horrified amazement kept him dumb there, staring at the written paper as
at some ghastly thing; then all the hot blood rushed over his fair,
bold face; he flung himself on the Hebrew, and, ere the other could have
breath or warning, tossed him upward to the painted ceiling and hurled
him down again upon the velvet carpet, as lightly as a retriever will
catch up and let fall a wild duck or a grouse, and stood over Baroni
where he lay.

"You hound!"

Baroni, lying passive and breathless with the violence of the shock and
the surprise, yet kept, even amid the hurricane of wrath that had tossed
him upward and downward as the winds toss leaves, his hold upon the
document, and his clear, cool, ready self-possession.

"My lord," he said faintly, "I do not wonder at your excitement,
aggressive as it renders you; but I cannot admit that false which I know
to be a for--"

"Silence! Say that word once more, and I shall forget myself and hurl
you out into the street like the dog of a Jew you are!"

"Have patience an instant, my lord. Will it profit your friend and
brother-in-arms if it be afterward said that when this charge was
brought against him, you, my Lord Rockingham, had so little faith in his
power to refute it that you bore down with all your mighty strength in a
personal assault upon one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end
to the evidence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and
by--what will look legally, my lord, like--an attempt to coerce me into
silence and to obtain the paper from my hands by violence?"

Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken with quiet
confidence, with admirable acumen; they were the very words to lash
the passions of his listener into unendurable fire, yet to chain them
powerless down; the Guardsman stood above him, his features flushed and
dark with rage, his eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working
under his tawny, leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown
himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much
carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed
in the coils of subtlety--the desperate disadvantage at which Right
is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of
Wrong--held the Seraph in their net now. He saw his own rashness, he saw
how his actions could be construed till they cast a slur even on the man
he defended; he saw how legally he was in error, how legally the
gallant vengeance of an indignant friendship might be construed into
consciousness of guilt in the accused for whose sake the vengeance fell.

He stood silent, overwhelmed with the intensity of his own passion,
baffled by the ingenuity of a serpent-wisdom he could not refute.

Ezra Baroni saw his advantage. He ventured to raise himself slightly.

"My lord, since your faith in your friend is so perfect, send for him.
If he be innocent, and I a liar, with a look I shall be confounded."

The tone was perfectly impassive, but the words expressed a world. For
a moment the Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a look that made him
feel nearer his death than he had been near to it in all his days; but
Rockingham restrained himself from force.

"I will send for him," he said briefly; in that answer there was more of
menace and of meaning than in any physical action.

He moved and let Baroni rise; shaken and bruised, but otherwise little
seriously hurt, and still holding, in a tenacious grasp, the crumpled
paper. He rang; his own servant answered the summons.

"Go to the Stephanien and inquire for Mr. Cecil. Be quick; and request
him, wherever he be, to be so good as to come to me instantly--here."

The servant bowed and withdrew; a perfect silence followed between these
two so strangely assorted companions; the Seraph stood with his back
against the mantelpiece, with every sense on the watch to catch every
movement of the Jew's, and to hear the first sound of Cecil's approach.
The minutes dragged on; the Seraph was in an agony of probation and
impatience. Once the attendants entered to light the chandeliers and
candelabra; the full light fell on the dark, slight form of the Hebrew,
and on the superb attitude and the fair, frank, proud face of the
standing Guardsman; neither moved--once more they were left alone.

The moments ticked slowly away one by one, audible in the silence. Now
and then the quarter chimed from the clock; it was the only sound in the
chamber.



CHAPTER XI.

FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE.

The door opened--Cecil entered.

The Seraph crossed the room, with his hand held out; not for his life
in that moment would he have omitted that gesture of friendship.
Involuntarily he started and stood still one instant in amaze; the next,
he flung thought away and dashed into swift, inconsequent words.

"Cecil, my dear fellow! I'm ashamed to send for you on such a blackguard
errand. Never heard of such a swindler's trick in all my life; couldn't
pitch the fellow into the street because of the look of the thing, and
can't take any other measure without you, you know. I only sent for you
to expose the whole abominable business, never because I believe----Hang
it! Beauty, I can't bring myself to say it even! If a sound thrashing
would have settled the matter, I wouldn't have bothered you about it,
nor told you a syllable. Only you are sure, Bertie, aren't you, that
I never listened to this miserable outrage on us both with a second's
thought there could be truth in it? You know me? you trust me too well
not to be certain of that?"

The incoherent address poured out from his lips in a breathless torrent;
he had never been so excited in his life; and he pleaded with as
imploring an earnestness as though he had been the suspected criminal,
not to be accused with having one shadow of shameful doubt against his
friend. His words would have told nothing except bewilderment to one who
should have been a stranger to the subject on which he spoke; yet Cecil
never asked even what he meant. There was no surprise upon his face,
no flush of anger, no expression of amaze or indignation; only the look
which had paralyzed Rock on his entrance; he stood still and mute.

The Seraph looked at him, a great dread seizing him lest he should have
seemed himself to cast this foul thing on his brother-in-arms; and in
that dread all the fierce fire of his freshly-loosened passion broke its
bounds.

"Damnation! Cecil, can't you hear me! A hound has brought against you
the vilest charge that ever swindlers framed: an infamy that he deserves
to be shot for, as if he were a dog. He makes me stand before you as if
I were your accuser; as if I doubted you; as if I lent an ear one second
to this loathsome lie. I sent for you to confront him, and to give him
up to the law. Stand out, you scoundrel, and let us see how you dare
look at us now!"

He swung round at the last words, and signed to Baroni to rise from the
couch were he sat. The Jew advanced slowly, softly.

"If your lordship will pardon me, you have scarcely made it apparent
what the matter is for which the gentleman is wanted. You have scarcely
explained to him that it is on a charge of forgery."

The Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a light like a lion's, and his
right hand clinched hard.

"By my life! If you say that word again you shall be flung in the street
like the cur you are, let me pay what I will for it! Cecil, why don't
you speak?"

Bertie had not moved; not a breath escaped his lips. He stood like a
statue, deadly pale in the gaslight; when the figure of Baroni rose
up and came before him, a great darkness stole on his face--it was a
terrible bitterness, a great horror, a loathing disgust; but it was
scarcely criminality, and it was not fear. Still he stood perfectly
silent--a guilty man, any other than his loyal friend would have said:
guilty, and confronted with a just accuser. The Seraph saw that look,
and a deadly chill passed over him, as it had done at the Jew's first
charge--not doubt; such heresy to his creeds, such shame to his
comrade and his corps could not be in him; but a vague dread hushed his
impetuous vehemence. The dignity of the old Lyonnesse blood asserted its
ascendency.

"M. Baroni, make your statement. Later on Mr. Cecil can avenge it."

Cecil never moved; once his eyes went to Rockingham with a look of
yearning, grateful, unendurable pain; but it was repressed instantly; a
perfect passiveness was on him. The Jew smiled.

"My statement is easily made, and will not be so new to this gentleman
as it was to your lordship. I simply charge the Honorable Bertie Cecil
with having negotiated a bill with my firm for 750 pounds on the 15th of
last month, drawn in his own favor, and accepted at two months' date
by your lordship. Your signature you, my Lord Marquis, admit to be a
forgery--with that forgery I charge your friend!"

"The 15th!"

The echo of those words alone escaped the dry, white lips of Cecil; he
showed no amaze, no indignation; once only, as the charge was made, he
gave in sudden gesture, with a sudden gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in
his eyes, that his comrade thought and hoped that with one moment more
the Jew would be dashed down at his feet with the lie branded on his
mouth by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged honor. The action
was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, more hopeless because more
resigned than any sign of pain or of passion, returned either by force
of self-control or by the stupor of despair.

The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he could not
believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. His dearest friend
stood mute beneath the charge of lowest villainy--stood powerless before
the falsehoods of a Jew extortioner!

"Bertie! Great Heaven!" he cried, well-nigh beside himself, "how can
you stand silent there? Do you hear--do you hear aright? Do you know
the accursed thing this conspiracy has tried to charge you with? Say
something, for the love of God! I will have vengeance on your slanderer,
if you take none."

He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang in his own
imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted gentleman, the
instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous denial, the fire of scorn, the
lightning flash of fury--all that he gave himself, all that must be so
naturally given by a slandered man under the libel that brands him with
disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting
of one sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on the
course of his friend's conduct as he would upon his own, and a ghastly
terror sent a pang to his heart.

Still--Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed anguish
on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an unnatural calm
upon him; yet he lifted his head with a gesture haughty for the moment
as any action that his defender could have wished.

"I am not guilty," he said simply.

The Seraph's hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp almost ere
the words were spoken.

"Beauty, Beauty! Never say that to me. Do you think I can ever doubt
you?"

For a moment Cecil's head sank; the dignity with which he had spoken
remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and his denial faded.

"No; you cannot; you never will."

The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in a dream. Ezra
Baroni, standing calmly there with the tranquility that an assured power
alone confers, smiled slightly once more.

"You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we can find it so.
Your proofs?"

"Proof? I give you my word."

Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued.

"We men of business, sir, are--perhaps inconveniently for
gentlemen--given to a preference in favor of something more substantial.
Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your acquaintance; it is a pity
for you that your friend's name should have been added to the bond you
placed with us. Business men's pertinacity is a little wearisome, no
doubt, to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all
the same I must persist--how can you disprove this charge?"

The Seraph turned on him with a fierceness of a bloodhound.

"You dog! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will
double-throng you till you cannot breathe!"

Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not resist the
pleasure of braving and of torturing the "aristocrats."

"I don't doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but neither do I
doubt the force of the law to make you account for any brutality of the
prize-ring your lordship may please to exert on me."

The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet.

"We waste words on that wretch," he said abruptly to Cecil. "Prove his
insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him later on."

"Precisely what I said, my lord," murmured Baroni. "Let Mr. Cecil prove
his innocence."

Into Bertie's eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He turned them
on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the heart; yet the abhorrent
thought crossed him--was it thus that men guiltless looked?

"Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7:50 on the evening of the 15th. It
was long over business hours, but my partner to oblige him stretched a
point," pursued the soft, bland, malicious voice of the German Jew. "If
he was not at our office--where was he? That is simple enough."

"Answered in a moment!" said the Seraph, with impetuous certainty.
"Cecil!--to prove this man what he is, not for an instant to satisfy
me--where were you at that time on the 15th?"

"The 15th!"

"Where were you?" pursued his friend. "Were you at mess? At the clubs?
Dressing for dinner?--where--where? There must be thousands of ways of
remembering--thousands of people who'll prove it for you?"

Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. He could
not speak--a woman's reputation lay in his silence.

"Can't you remember?" implored the Seraph. "You will think--you must
think!"

There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness
with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was
forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp.

Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes--both his accuser and his
friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue were paralyzed;
he was bound by his word of honor; he was weighted with a woman's
secret.

"Don't look at me so, Bertie, for mercy's sake! Speak! Where were you?"

"I cannot tell you; but I was not there."

The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but
his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the
butterfly pleasure of a summer-day love.

"Cannot tell me!--cannot? You mean you have forgotten!"

"I cannot tell you; it is enough."

There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer;
its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman's
reputation--a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler's word, a
Lovelace's smile!--that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself
from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of
honor.

Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy.

"I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil 'cannot tell.' As it happens, my
partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I
specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the
honor of showing you--"

"Let me see it."

The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced
his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.

Baroni smiled.

"It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner
we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less
mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both
you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician
science of fist-attack."

He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence
to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that
juncture so utterly at his mercy.

"You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?" thundered
Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. "Do you judge the world by
your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or,
as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand."

The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He
bowed with that tact which never forsook him.

"I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis," he said, as he spread out
the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.

Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the
paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense
cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight,
in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or--to hold in all
utterance that might be on his lips.

"Well?" asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew not what to
believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery
of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which
drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should
have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath
such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of
his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph's fearless expectance, when
he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure
and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false
accuser.

"Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that
bill, Mr. Cecil?" asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra
Baroni.

"I do. I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that
document until to-night."

The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in
his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks
fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was
haggard as by a night's deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his
forehead--it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly
unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed
into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.

"And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation
of the early evening hours of the 15th? Unfortunate!"

"I do; but in your account of them you lie!"

There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. Under
it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; and a fear of
the man he accused smote him, more deep, more keen than that with which
the sweeping might of the Seraph's fury had moved him. He knew now why
Ben Davis had hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that
slept under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of "the d----d Guards'
swell."

What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest sign.

"As a matter of course you deny it!" he said, with a polite wave of his
hand. "Quite right; you are not required to criminate yourself. I wish
sincerely we were not compelled to criminate you."

The Seraph's grand, rolling voice broke in; he had stood chafing,
chained, panting in agonies of passion and of misery.

"M. Baroni!" he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his anger and his
bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of either law or fact, "you
have heard his signature and your statements alike denied once for
all by Mr. Cecil. Your document is a libel and a conspiracy, like your
charge; it is false, and you are swindling; it is an outrage, and you
are a scoundrel; you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion;
not a sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accusation you dare
to make true, I am the only one whom it can concern, since it is my name
which is involved. Were it true--could it possibly be true--I should
forbid any steps to be taken in it; I should desire it ended once and
forever. It shall be so now, by God!"

He scarcely knew what he was saying; yet what he did say, utterly as it
defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so gallant a ring, had so
kingly a wrath, that it awed and impressed even Baroni in the instant of
its utterance.

"They say that those fine gentlemen fight like a thousand lions when
they are once roused," he thought. "I can believe it."

"My lord," he said softly, "you have called me by many epithets, and
menaced me with many threats since I have entered this chamber; it is
not a wise thing to do with a man who knows the law. However, I can
allow for the heat of your excitement. As regards the rest of your
speech, you will permit me to say that its wildness of language is only
equaled by the utter irrationality of your deductions and your absolute
ignorance of all legalities. Were you alone concerned and alone the
discoverer of this fraud, you could prosecute or not as you please;
but we are subjects of its imposition, ours is the money that he
has obtained by that forgery, and we shall in consequence open the
prosecution."

"Prosecution?" The echo rang in an absolute agony from his hearer; he
had thought of it as, at its worst, only a question between himself and
Cecil.

The accused gave no sigh, the rigidity and composure he had sustained
throughout did not change; but at the Seraph's accent the hunted and
pathetic misery which had once before gleamed in his eyes came there
again; he held his comrade in a loyal and exceeding love. He would have
let all the world stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend
should cast even a look of contempt.

"Prosecution!" replied Baroni. "It is a matter of course, my lord, that
Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very wise; the law specially
cautions the accused to say nothing to criminate themselves. But we
waste time in words; and, pardon me, if you have your friend's interest
at heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly
useless opposition to an inevitable line of action. I must attest Mr.
Cecil; but I am willing--for I know to high families these misfortunes
are terribly distressing--to conduct everything with the strictest
privacy and delicacy. In a word, if you and he consult his interests,
he will accompany me unresistingly; otherwise I must summon legal force.
Any opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical
force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his
relatives and position, to spare him."

A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows on an insult
that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too hideously shameful for
the thoughts to grasp it as reality.

In the first moment of Baroni's words Cecil's eyes had gleamed again
with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been
worse to face even than his comrade's wrath; it died, however, well-nigh
instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its
motive. He was simply, as he had been throughout, passive--so passive
that even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, looked at
him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that singular, unbroken
calm. It perplexed him--the first thing which had ever done so in his
own peculiar paths of finesse and of intrigue.

The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were the judge
and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and blind under this
unutterable shame, which seemed to net them both in such close and
hopeless meshes. He, heir to one of the greatest coronets in the world,
must see his friend branded as a common felon, and could do no more to
aid or to avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in
the pine woods! His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke:

"Cecil, tell me--what is to be done? This infamous outrage cannot pass!
cannot go on! I will send for the Duke, for--"

"Send for no one."

Bertie's voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man exhausted by a
long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. Its composure fell on
Rockingham's tempestuous grief and rage with a sickly, silencing
awe, with a terrible sense of some evil here beyond his knowledge and
ministering, and of an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend
and to avenge--the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known.

"Pardon me, my lord," interposed Baroni, "I can waste time no more. You
must be now convinced yourself of your friend's implication in this very
distressing affair."

"I!" The Seraph's majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn blazed from his
azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing to him. "I! If you dare
hint such a damnable shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with
as little remorse as I would a kite's. I believe in his guilt? Forgive
me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word! I believe in it? I would as
soon believe in my own disgrace--in my father's dishonor!"

"How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil's total inability
to tell us know he spent the hours between six and nine on the 15th?"

"Unable? He is not unable; he declines! Bertie, tell me what you did
that one cursed evening. Whatever it was, wherever it was, say it for my
sake, and shame this devil."

Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle-tubes
aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the man he loved
best on earth. He staggered slightly, as if he were about to fall, and
a faint white foam came on his lips; but he recovered himself almost
instantly. It was so natural to him to repress every emotion that it was
simply old habit to do so now.

"I have answered," he said very low, each word a pang--"I cannot."

Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite, significant gesture.

"In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you follow me
quietly, sir, or must force be employed?"

"I will go with you."

The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own as it was
given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that of any fear was its
spring; that some cause beyond the mere abhorrence of "a scene" was at
the root of the quiescence.

"It must be so," said Cecil huskily to his friend. "This man is right,
so far as he knows. He is only acting on his own convictions. We cannot
blame him. The whole is--a mystery, an error. But, as it stands, there
is no resistance."

"Resistance! By God! I would resist if I shot him dead, or shot myself.
Stay--wait--one moment! If it be an error in the sense you mean, it must
be a forgery of your name as of mine. You think that?"

"I did not say so."

The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once the suspicion
crept in on him--was this guilt? Yet even now the doubt would not be
harbored by him.

"Say so--you must mean so! You deny them as yours; what can they be but
forgeries? There is no other explanation. I think the whole matter a
conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong--let that pass. If it
be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has
been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment.
Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the
matter further, unless they find out the delinquent. See here"--he went
to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, swept
out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from the book, threw
it down before Baroni--"here! fill it up as you like, and I will sign it
in exchange for the forged sheet."

Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adoration that excluded
every other passion; that blank check, that limitless carte blanche,
that vast exchequer from which to draw!--it was a sore temptation.
He thought wistfully of the welsher's peremptory forbiddance of
all compromise--of the welsher's inexorable command to "wring the
fine-feathered bird," lose whatever might be lost by it.

Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leaned forward, took the check and
tore it in two.

"God bless you, Rock," he said, so low that it only reached the Seraph's
ear, "but you must not do that."

"Beauty, you are mad!" cried the Marquis passionately. "If this
villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as much as I--tenfold
more than I. If this Jew chooses to sell the paper to me, naming his
own compensation, whose affair is it except his and mine? They have been
losers, we indemnify them. It rests with us to find out the criminal. M.
Baroni, there are a hundred more checks in that book; name your price,
and you shall have it; or, if you prefer my father's, I will send to him
for it. His Grace will sign one without a question of its errand, if I
ask him. Come! your price?"

Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was strong in the
austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of social duty.

"You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, my lord," he
said politely. "I am glad such friendship exists on earth. But you
really ask me what is not in my power. In the first place, I am but one
of the firm, and have no authority to act alone; in the second, I
most certainly, were I alone, should decline totally any pecuniary
compromise. A great criminal action is not to be hushed up by any
monetary arrangement. You, my Lord Marquis, may be ignorant in the
Guards of a very coarse term used in law, called 'compounding a felony.'
That is what you tempt me to now."

The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew's blood run
cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to speak; Cecil arrested
him with that singular impassiveness, that apathy of resignation which
had characterized his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief
moments.

"Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own justification.
I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully's
brawl; they have the law with them. Let it take its course."

The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind--the room
seemed to reel with him.

"Oh, God! that you----"

He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his friend, one of his
own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like the blackest thief
in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple!

Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning--infinitely
gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs. He hesitated a
moment, then he stretched out his hand.

"Will you take it--still?"

Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in both of the
Seraph's.

"Take it? Before all the world--always, come what will."

His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear as the
ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion in it. He had
forgotten the Hebrew's presence; he had forgotten all save his friend
and his friend's extremity. Cecil did not answer; if he had done so, all
the courage, all the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike
sustained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand
closed fast in his companion's, his eyes met his once in a look of
gratitude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he
turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity.

"M. Baroni, I am ready."

"Wait!" cried Rockingham. "Where you go I come."

The Hebrew interposed demurely.

"Forgive me, my lord--not now. You can take what steps you will as
regards your friend later on; and you may rest assured he will be
treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot
accompany him now. I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I
now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount
Royallieu--not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards--not the
friend of one so distinguished as yourself--but as simply an arrested
forger."

Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as
he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the
moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life. He put his hand
above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards
off a blow.

"Gentlemen," and his teeth chattered as he spoke, "one sign of violence,
and I shall summon legal force."

Cecil caught the Seraph's lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance.
His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard
whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.

"We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go--they must do what they
will. My reckoning must wait, and my justification. One word only. Take
the King and keep him for my sake."

Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out to his fate,
and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his arms
where he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in
all his life, felt the hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the
passion of a woman mastered and unmanned him--he would sooner a thousand
times have laid his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for
this.

Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright eyes of the
Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single sign of any effort
to evade him would have been arrested by him in an instant with
preconcerted skill. He looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in
his prisoner's mind. Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went to his
doom; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance.
The Hebrew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rockingham, who
beheld this thing but on its surface. Baroni was to him only the agent
of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate that closed him in, netting
him tight with the web of his own past actions; no more than the
irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew's sight and knowledge
a just sentence. He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than
the conscience of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the
instruments of his chastisement.

Was he guilty?

Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so as he
passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance with that dead
resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid look set on his features,
and gazing almost in stupefaction out from the dark hazel depths of eyes
that women had loved for their luster, their languor, and the softness
of their smile.

They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had given his consent
to follow the bill-discounter without resistance, and he had no thought
to break his word; he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of
this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and
his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine
of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel,
waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an
archduke's dinner, to a princess' entertainment; he looked at them with
a vague, strange sense of unreality--these things of the life from which
he was now barred forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden
was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, branded, and
outlawed, and dishonored from all place in the world that he had led,
and been caressed by and beguiled with for so long.

To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all that was highest
and gayest and fairest in Europe at the banquet of a Prince--and he went
by his captor's side, a convicted criminal.

Once out in the air, the Hebrew laid his hand on his arm. He started--it
was the first sign that his liberty was gone! He restrained himself from
all resistance still, and passed onward, down where Baroni motioned him
out of the noise of the carriages, out of the glare of the light, into
the narrow, darkened turning of a side street. He went passively; for
this man trusted to his honor.

In the gloom stood three figures, looming indistinctly in the shadow
of the houses. One was a Huissier of the Staats-Procurator, beside whom
stood the Commissary of Police of the district; the third was an English
detective. Ere he saw them their hands were on his shoulders, and the
cold chill of steel touched his wrists. The Hebrew had betrayed him, and
arrested him in the open street. In an instant, as the ring of the rifle
rouses the slumbering tiger, all the life and the soul that were in him
rose in revolt as the icy glide of the handcuffs sought their hold on
his arms. In an instant, all the wild blood of his race, all the pride
of his breeding, all the honor of his service, flashed into fire and
leaped into action. Trusted, he would have been true to his accuser;
deceived, the chains of his promise were loosened, and all he thought,
all he felt, all he knew were the lion impulses, the knightly instincts,
the resolute choice to lose life rather than to lose freedom, of a
soldier and a gentleman. All he remembered was that he would fight to
the death rather than be taken alive; that they should kill him where he
stood, in the starlight, rather than lead him in the sight of men as a
felon.

With the strength that lay beneath all the gentle languor of his habits
and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields of his boyhood, he
wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had closed, and with the single
straightening of his left arm felled the detective to earth like a
bullock, with a crashing blow that sounded through the stillness like
some heavy timber stove in; flinging himself like lightning on the
Huissier, he twisted out of his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs,
and wrestling with him was woven for a second in that close-knit
struggle which is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle for life and
death. The German was a powerful and firmly built man; but Cecil's
science was the finer and the most masterly. His long, slender delicate
limbs seemed to twine and writhe around the massive form of his
antagonist like the coils of a cobra; they rocked and swayed to and fro
on the stones, while the shrill, shrieking voice of Baroni filled the
night with its clamor. The viselike pressure of the stalwart arms of his
opponent crushed him in till his ribs seemed to bend and break under the
breathless oppression, the iron force; but desperation nerved him, the
Royallieu blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for the first
time in his careless life; his skill and his nerve were unrivaled,
and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off him, and lifting him
up--he never knew how--as he would have lifted a log of wood, hurled
him down in the white streak of moonlight that alone slanted through the
peaked roofs of the crooked by-street.

The cries of Baroni had already been heard; a crowd, drawn by their
shrieking appeals, were bearing toward the place in tumult. The Jew had
the quick wit to give them, as call-word, that is was a croupier who
had been found cheating and fled; it sufficed to inflame the whole mob
against the fugitive. Cecil looked round him once--such a glance as a
Royal gives when the gaze-hounds are panting about him and the fangs are
in his throat; then, with the swiftness of the deer itself, he dashed
downward into the gloom of the winding passage at the speed which had
carried him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old green Eton meadows.
There was scarce a man in the Queen's Service who could rival him for
lightness of limb, for power of endurance in every sport of field and
fell, of the moor and the gymnasium; and the athletic pleasures of
many a happy hour stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his
terrible extremity.

Flight!--for the instant the word thrilled through him with a loathing
sense. Flight!--the craven's refuge, the criminal's resource. He wished
in the moment's agony that they would send a bullet through his brain as
he ran, rather than drive him out to this. Flight!--he felt a coward and
a felon as he fled; fled from every fairer thing, from every peaceful
hour, from the friendship and good will of men, from the fame of his
ancient race, from the smile of the women that loved him, from all that
makes life rich and fair, from all that men call honor; fled, to leave
his name disgraced in the service he adored; fled, to leave the world
to think him a guilty dastard who dared not face his trial; fled, to bid
his closest friend believe him low sunk in the depths of foulest felony,
branded forever with a criminal's shame--by his own act, by his own
hand. Flight!--it has bitter pangs that make brave men feel cowards
when they fly from tyranny and danger and death to a land of peace and
promise; but in his flight he left behind him all that made life worth
the living, and went out to meet eternal misery; renouncing every hope,
yielding up all his future.

"It is for her sake--and his," he thought; and without a moment's pause,
without a backward look he ran, as the stag runs with the bay of the
pack behind it, down into the shadows of the night.

The hue and cry was after him; the tumult of a crowd's excitement,
raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on his steps, joined with the
steadier and keener pursuit of men organized for the hunter's work, and
trained to follow the faintest track, the slightest clew. The moon was
out, and they saw him clearly, though the marvelous fleetness of his
stride had borne him far ahead in the few moments' start he had gained.
He heard the beat of their many feet on the stones, the dull thud of
their running, the loud clamor of the mob, the shrill cries of the
Hebrew offering gold with frantic lavishness to whoever should stop
his prey. All the breathless excitation, all the keen and desperate
straining, all the tension of the neck-and-neck struggle that he had
known so often over the brown autumn country of the Shires at home, he
knew now, intensified to horror, made deadly with despair, changed into
a race for life and death.

Yet, with it the wild blood in him woke; the recklessness of peril,
the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his levity and languor
heated his veins and spurred his strength; he was ready to die if they
chose to slaughter him; but for his freedom he strove as men will strive
for life; to distance them, to escape them, he would have breathed his
last at the goal; they might fire him down, if they would, but he swore
in his teeth to die free.

Some Germans in his path, hearing the shouts that thundered after him
in the night, drew their mule-cart across the pent-up passage-way down
which he turned, and blocked the narrow road. He saw it in time; a
second later, and it would have been instant death to him at the pace he
went; he saw it, and gathered all the force and nervous impetus in his
frame to the trial, as he came rushing downward along the slope of the
lane, with his elbows back, and his body straight, as prize-runners run.
The wagon, sideways, stretched across--a solid barrier, heaped up with
fir boughs brought for firing from the forests; the mules stood abreast,
yoked together. The mob following saw too, and gave a hoot and yell of
brutal triumph; their prey was in their clutches; the cart barred his
progress, and he must double like a fox faced with a stone wall.

Scarcely!--they did not know the man with whom they had to deal--the
daring and the coolness that the languid surface of indolent fashion had
covered. Even in the imminence of supreme peril, of breathless jeopardy,
he measured with unerring eye the distance and the need; rose as lightly
in the air as Forest King had risen with him over fence and hedge; and
with a single, running leap cleared the width of the mules' backs, and
landing safely on the farther side, dashed on; scarcely pausing for
breath. The yell that hissed in his wake, as the throng saw him escape,
by what to their slow Teutonic instincts seemed a devil's miracle, was
on his ear like the bay of the slot-hounds to the deer. They might kill
him, if they could; but they should never take him captive.

And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear; shining down in the
summer light, as though in love with the beauty of earth! He looked up
once; the stars seemed reeling round him in disordered riot; the chill
face of the moon looked unpitying as death. All this loveliness was
round him; this glory of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil
planet, and there was no help for him.

A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the distance; he
had left the brilliance of the town behind him, and was now in its
by-streets and outskirts. The sound seemed to thrill him to the bone; it
was like the echo of the lost life he was leaving forever.

He saw, he felt, he heard, he thought; feeling and sense were quickened
in him as they had never been before, yet he never slackened his pace
save once or twice, when he paused for breath; he ran as swiftly, he ran
as keenly, as ever stag or fox had run before him; doubling with their
skill, taking the shadow as they took the covert; noting with their
rapid eye the safest track; outracing with their rapid speed the pursuit
that thundered in his wake.

The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well-nigh out of the
town, with the open country and forest lying before him. The people whom
he met rushed out of his path; happily for him they were few, and were
terrified, because they thought him a madman broken loose from his
keepers. He never looked back; but he could tell that the pursuit was
falling farther and farther behind him, that the speed at which he went
was breaking the powers of his hunters; fresh throngs added indeed to
the first pursuers as they tore down through the starlight night, but
none had the science with which he went, the trained, matchless skill
of the university foot-race. He left them more and more behind him each
second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it seemed, had lasted
bare three minutes. If the night were but dark! He felt that pitiless
luminance glistening bright about him everywhere; shining over all the
summer world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. The
silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground; one hour
of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black rain of an autumn
storm, and he could have made for shelter as the stag makes for it
across the broad, brown Highland water.

Before him stretched indeed the gloom of the masses of pine, the upward
slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the Black Forest; but they
were like the mirage to a man who dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace
he went, he could not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his
brain and pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed
girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath in with
loud gasping spasms; he knew that in a little space his speed must
slacken--he knew it by the roar, like the noise of water, that was
rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like a hand's hard grip, that
seemed above his heart.

But he would go till he died; go till they fired on him; go, though the
skies felt swirling round like a sea of fire, and the hard, hot earth
beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his feet struck it flying.

The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and high-peaked
gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across his road; a shadow black
and rayless, darker for the white glisten of the moon around. Built more
in the Swiss than the German style, a massive balcony of wood ran round
it, upon and beneath which in its heavy shade was an impenetrable gloom,
while the twisted wooden pillars ran upward to the gallery, loggia-like.
With rapid perception and intuition he divined rather than saw these
things, and, swinging himself up with noiseless lightness, he threw
himself full-length down on the rough flooring of the balcony. If
they passed he was safe, for a brief time more at least; if they found
him--his teeth clinched like a mastiff's where he lay--he had the
strength in him still to sell his life dearly.

The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamors that floated up
in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew that they had tracked him.
He heard the tramp of their feet as they came under the loggia; he
heard the click of the pistols--they were close upon him at last in the
blackness of night.



CHAPTER XII.

THE KING'S LAST SERVICE.

"Is he up there?" asked a voice in the darkness.

"Not likely. A cat couldn't scramble up that woodwork," answered a
second.

"Send a shot, and try," suggested a third.

There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the veranda. He
heard the words as the thronging mob surged, and trampled, and swore,
and quarreled, beneath him, in the blackness of the gloom; balked of
their prey, and savage for some amends. There was a moment's pause--a
hurried, eager consultation; then he heard the well-known sound of a
charge being rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod; there
was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second in his sight; a
ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush, and bedded itself in the
timber, a few inches above his uncovered hair. A dead silence followed;
then the muttering of many voices broke out afresh.

"He's not there, at any rate," said one, who seemed the chief; "he
couldn't have kept as still as that with a shot so near him. He's made
for the open country and the forest, I'll take my oath."

Then the trending of many feet trampled their way out from beneath the
loggia; their voices and their rapid steps grew fainter and fainter as
they hurried away through the night. For a while, at least, he was safe.

For some moments he lay prostrated there; the rushing of the blood on
his brain, the beating of his heart, the panting of his breath, the
quivering of his limbs after the intense muscular effort he had gone
through, mastered him and flung him down there, beaten and powerless.
He felt the foam on his lips and he thought with every instant that the
surcharged veins would burst; hands of steel seemed to crush in upon his
chest, knotted cords to tighten in excruciating pain about his loins; he
breathed in short, convulsive gasps; his eyes were blind, and his head
swam. A dreaming fancy that this was death vaguely came on him, and he
was glad it should be so.

His eyelids closed unconsciously, weighed down as by the weight of lead;
he saw the starry skies above him no more, and the distant noise of the
pursuit waxed duller and duller on his ear; then he lost all sense and
memory--he ceased even to feel the night air on his face. How long he
lay there he never knew; when consciousness returned to him all was
still; the moon was shining down clear as the day, the west wind was
blowing softly among his hair. He staggered to his feet and leaned
against the timber of the upper wall; the shelving, impenetrable
darkness sloped below; above were the glories of a summer sky at
midnight, around him the hills and woods were bathed in the silver
light; he looked, and he remembered all.

He had escaped his captors; but for how long? While yet there were some
hours of the night left, he must find some surer refuge, or fall into
their hands again. Yet it was strange that in this moment his own
misery and his own peril were less upon him than a longing to see once
more--and for the last time--the woman for whose sake he suffered this.
Their love had had the lightness and the languor of their world, and had
had but little depth in it; yet, in that hour of his supreme sacrifice
to her, he loved her as he had not loved in his life.

Recklessness had always been latent in him, with all his serenity and
impassiveness; a reckless resolve entered him now--reckless to madness.
Lightly and cautiously, though his sinews still ached, and his nerves
still throbbed with the past strain, he let himself fall, hand over
hand, as men go down a rope, along the woodwork to the ground. Once
touching earth, off he glided, swiftly and noiselessly, keeping in the
shadow of the walls all the length of the streets he took, and shunning
every place where any sort of tumult could suggest the neighborhood of
those who were out and hunting him down. As it chanced, they had taken
to the open country; he passed on unquestioned, and wound his way to the
Kursaal. He remembered that to-night there was a masked ball, at which
all the princely and titled world of Baden were present; to which he
would himself have gone after the Russian dinner; by the look of the
stars he saw that it must be midnight or past; the ball would be now at
its height.

The dare-devil wildness and the cool quietude that were so intimately
and intricately mingled in his natare could alone have prompted and
projected such a thought and such an action as suggested themselves
to him now; in the moment of his direst extremity, of his utter
hopelessness, of his most imminent peril, he went--to take a last look
at his mistress! Baden, for aught he knew, might be but one vast network
to mesh in and to capture him; yet he ran the risk with the dauntless
temerity that had ever lain underneath the indifferentism and the
indolence of his habits.

Keeping always in the shadow, and moving slowly, so as to attract no
notice from those he passed, he made his way deliberately, straight
toward the blaze of light where all the gayety of the town was centered;
he reckoned, and rightly, as it proved, that the rumor of his story,
the noise of his pursuit, would not have penetrated here as yet; his
own world would be still in ignorance. A moment, that was all he
wanted, just to look upon a woman's beauty; he went forward daringly and
tranquilly to the venture. If any had told him that a vein of romance
was in him, he would have stared and thought them madmen; yet something
almost as wild was in his instinct now. He had lost so much to keep her
honor from attainder; he wished to meet the gaze of her fair eyes once
more before he went out to exile.

In one of the string of waiting carriages he saw a loose domino lying
on the seat; he knew the liveries and the footmen, and he signed them to
open the door. "Tell Count Carl I have borrowed these," he said to the
servant, as he sprang into the vehicle, slipped the scarlet-and-black
domino on, took the mask, and left the carriage. The man touched his hat
and said nothing; he knew Cecil well, as an intimate friend of his
young Austrian master. In that masquerade guise he was safe; for the few
minutes, at least, which were all he dared take.

He went on, mingled among the glittering throng, and pierced his way
to the ballroom, the Venetian mask covering his features; many spoke to
him, by the scarlet-and-black colors they took him for the Austrian; he
answered none, and treaded his way among the blaze of hues, the joyous
echoes of the music, the flutter of the silk and satin dominoes, the
mischievous challenge of whispers. His eyes sought only one; he soon saw
her, in the white and silver mask-dress, with the spray of carmine-hued
eastern flowers, by which he had been told, days ago, to recognize her.
A crowd of dominoes were about her, some masked, some not. Her eyes
glanced through the envious disguise, and her lips were laughing. He
approached her with all his old tact in the art d'arborer le cotillon;
not hurriedly, so as to attract notice, but carefully, so as to glide
into a place near her.

"You promised me this waltz," he said very gently in her ear. "I have
come in time for it."

She recognized him by his voice, and turned from a French prince to
rebuke him for his truancy, with gay raillery and much anger.

"Forgive me, and let me have this one waltz--please do!" She glanced at
him a moment, and let him lead her out.

"No one has my step as you have it, Bertie," she murmured, as they
glided into the measure of the dance.

She thought his glance fell sadly on her as he smiled.

"No?--but others will soon learn it."

Yet he had never treaded more deftly the maze of the waltzers, never
trodden more softly, more swiftly, or with more science, the polished
floor. The waltz was perfect; she did not know it was also a farewell.
The delicate perfume of her floating dress, the gleam of the scarlet
flower-spray, the flash of the diamonds studding her domino, the
fragrance of her lips as they breathed so near his own; they haunted him
many a long year afterward.

His voice was very calm, his smile was very gentle, his step, as he
swung easily through the intricacies of the circle, was none the less
smooth and sure for the race that had so late strained his sinews to
bursting; the woman he loved saw no change in him; but as the waltz drew
to its end, she felt his heart beat louder and quicker on her own; she
felt his hand hold her own more closely, she felt his head drooped over
her till his lips almost touched her brow;--it was his last embrace;
no other could be given here, in the multitude of these courtly
crowds. Then, with a few low-murmured words that thrilled her in their
utterance, and echoed in her memory for years to come, he resigned
her to the Austrian Grand Duke who was her next claimant, and left her
silently--forever.

Less heroism has often proclaimed itself, with blatant trumpet to the
world--a martyrdom.

He looked back once as he passed from the ballroom--back to the sea
of colors, to the glitter of light, to the moving hues, amid which
the sound of the laughing, intoxicating music seemed to float; to the
glisten of the jewels and the gold and the silver--to the scene, in a
word, of the life that would be his no more. He looked back in a long,
lingering look, such as a man may give the gladness of the earth before
the gates of a prison close on him; then he went out once more into the
night, threw the domino and the mask back again into the carriage, and
took his way, alone.

He passed along till he had gained the shadow of a by-street, by a sheer
unconscious instinct; then he paused, and looked round him--what could
he do? He wondered vaguely if he were not dreaming; the air seemed to
reel about him, and the earth to rock; the very force of control he
had sustained made the reaction stronger; he began to feel blind and
stupefied. How could he escape? The railway station would be guarded
by those on the watch for him; he had but a few pounds in his pocket,
hastily slipped in as he had won them, "money-down," at ecarte that day;
all avenues of escape were closed to him, and he knew that his limbs
would refuse to carry him with any kind of speed farther. He had only
the short, precious hours remaining of the night in which to make
good his flight--and flight he must take to save those for whom he had
elected to sacrifice his life. Yet how? and where?

A hurried, noiseless footfall came after him; Rake's voice came
breathless on his ear, while the man's hand went up in the unforgotten
soldier's salute--

"Sir! no words. Follow me, and I'll save you."

The one well-known voice was to him like water in a desert land; he
would have trusted the speaker's fidelity with his life. He asked
nothing, said nothing, but followed rapidly and in silence; turning and
doubling down a score of crooked passages, and burrowing at the last
like a mole in a still, deserted place on the outskirts of the
town, where some close-set trees grew at the back of stables and
out-buildings.

In a streak of the white moonlight stood two hunters, saddled; one was
Forest King. With a cry, Cecil threw his arms round the animal's neck;
he had no thought then except that he and the horse must part.

"Into saddle, sir! quick as your life!" whispered Rake. "We'll be far
away from this d----d den by morning."

Cecil looked at him like a man in stupor--his arm still over the gray's
neck.

"He can have no stay in him! He was dead-beat on the course."

"I know he was, sir; but he ain't now; he was pisined; but I've a trick
with a 'oss that'll set that sort o' thing--if it ain't gone too far,
that is to say--right in a brace of shakes. I doctored him; he's hisself
agen; he'll take you till he drops."

The King thrust his noble head closer in his master's bosom, and made a
little murmuring noise, as though he said, "Try me!"

"God bless you, Rake!" Cecil said huskily. "But I cannot take him, he
will starve with me. And--how did you know of this?"

"Begging your pardon, your honor, he'll eat chopped furze with you
better than he'll eat oats and hay along of a new master," retorted Rake
rapidly, tightening the girths. "I don't know nothing, sir, save that I
heard you was in a strait; I don't want to know nothing; but I sees them
cursed cads a-runnin' of you to earth, and thinks I to myself, 'Come
what will, the King will be the ticket for him.' So I ran to your room
unbeknown, packed a little valise, and got out the passports; then
back again to the stables, and saddled him like lightning, and got 'em
off--nobody knowing but Bill there. I seed you go by into the Kursaal,
and laid in wait for you, sir. I made bold to bring Mother o' Pearl for
myself."

And Rake stopped, breathless and hoarse with passion and grief that he
would not utter. He had heard more than he said.

"For yourself?" echoed Cecil. "What do you mean? My good fellow, I am
ruined. I shall be beggared from to-night--utterly. I cannot even help
you or keep you; but Lord Rockingham will do both for my sake."

The ci-devant soldier struck his heel into the earth with a fiery oath.

"Sir, there ain't time for no words. Where you goes I go. I'll follow
you while there's a drop o' blood in me. You was good to me when I was
a poor devil that everyone scouted; you shall have me with you to the
last, if I die for it. There!"

Cecil's voice shook as he answered. The fidelity touched him as
adversity could not do.

"Rake, you are a noble fellow. I would take you, were it possible;
but--in an hour I may be in a felon's prison. If I escape that, I shall
lead a life of such wretchedness as--"

"That's not nothing to me, sir."

"But it is much to me," answered Cecil. "As things have turned--life
is over with me, Rake. What my own fate may be I have not the faintest
notion--but let it be what it will, it must be a bitter one. I will not
drag another into it."

"If you send me away, I'll shoot myself through the head, sir; that's
all."

"You will do nothing of the kind. Go to Lord Rockingham, and ask him
from me to take you into his service. You cannot have a kinder master."

"I don't say nothing agen the Marquis, sir," said Rake doggedly; "he's
a right-on generous gentleman, but he aren't you. Let me go with you, if
it's just to rub the King down. Lord, sir! you don't know what straits
I've lived in--what a lot of things I can turn my hand to--what a one
I am to fit myself into any rat-hole, and make it spicy. Why, sir, I'm
that born scamp, I am--I'm a deal happier on the cross and getting my
bread just anyhow, than I am when I'm in clover like you've kept me."

Rake's eyes looked up wistfully and eager as a dog's when he prays to
be let out of kennel to follow the gun; his voice was husky and agitated
with a strong excitement. Cecil stood a moment, irresolute, touched and
pained at the man's spaniel-like affection--yet not yielding to it.

"I thank you from my heart, Rake," he said at length, "but it must not
be. I tell you my future life will be beggary--"

"You'll want me anyways, sir," retorted Rake, ashamed of the choking in
his throat. "I ask your pardon for interrupting, but every second's that
precious like. Besides, sir, I've got to cut and run for my own sake.
I've laid Willon's head open, down there in the loose box; and when he's
come to himself a pretty hue and cry he'll raise after me. He painted
the King, that's what he did; and I told him so, and I give it to
him--one--two--amazing! Get into saddle, sir, for the Lord's sake! And
here, Bill--you run back, shut the door, and don't let nobody know the
'osses are out till the morning. Then look like a muff as you are, and
say nothing!"

The stable-boy stared, nodded assent, and sloped off. Rake threw himself
across the brown mare.

"Now, sir! a steeple-chase for our lives! We'll be leagues away by the
day-dawn, and I've got their feed in the saddle-bags, so that they'll
bait in the forests. Off, sir, for God's sake, or the blackguards will
be down on you again!"

As he spoke the clamor and tread of men of the town racing to the chase
were wafted to them on the night wind, drawing nearer and nearer; Rake
drew the reins tight in his hand in fury.

"There they come--the d----d beaks! For the love of mercy, sir, don't
check now. Ten seconds more and they'll be on you; off, off!--or by the
Lord Harry, sir, you'll make a murderer of me, and I'll kill the first
man that lays his hand on you!"

The blaze of bitter blood was in the ex-Dragoon's fiery face as the moon
shone on it, and he drew out one of his holster pistols, and swung round
in his saddle, facing the narrow entrance of the lane; ready to shoot
down the first of the pursuit whose shadow should darken the broad
stream of white light that fell through the archway.

Cecil looked at him, and paused no more; but vaulted into the old
familiar seat, and Forest King bore him away through the starry night,
with the brown mare racing her best by his side. Away--through the
sleeping shadows, through the broad beams of the moon, through the
odorous scent of the crowded pines, through the soft breaking gray
of the dawn; away--to mountain solitudes and forest silence, and the
shelter of lonely untracked ravines, and the woodland lairs they must
share with wolf and boar; away--to flee with the flight of the hunted
fox, to race with the wakeful dread of the deer; away--to what fate, who
could tell?

Far and fast they rode through the night, never drawing rein. The horses
laid well to their work; their youth and their mettle were roused, and
they needed no touch of spur, but neck-and-neck dashed down through the
sullen gray of the dawn and the breaking flush of the first sunrise.
On the hard, parched earth, on the dew-laden moss, on the stretches of
wayside sward, on the dry white dust of the ducal roads, their hoofs
thundered, unfollowed, unechoed; the challenge of no pursuit stayed
them, and they obeyed the call that was made on their strength with good
and gallant willingness. Far and fast they rode, happily knowing
the country well; now through the darkness of night, now through the
glimmering daybreak. Tall walls of fir-crowned rocks passed by their
eyes, all fused and dim; gray piles of monastic buildings, with the dull
chimes tolling the hour, flashed on their sight to be lost in a moment;
corn-lands yellowing for the sickle, fields with the sheaves set-up,
orchards ruddy with fruit, and black barn-roofs lost in leafy nests;
villages lying among their hills like German toys caught in the hollow
of a guarding hand; masses of forests stretching wide, somber and silent
and dark as a tomb; the shine of water's silvery line where it flowed
in a rocky channel--they passed them all in the soft gray of the waning
night, in the white veil of the fragrant mists, in the stillness of
sleep and of peace. Passed them, racing for more than life, flying with
the speed of the wind.

"I failed him to-day through my foes and his," Forest King thought, as
he laid his length out in his mighty stride. "But I love him well; I
will save him to-night." And save him the brave brute did. The grass
was so sweet and so short, he longed to stop for a mouthful; the brooks
looked so clear, he longed to pause for a drink; renewed force and
reviving youth filled his loyal veins with their fire; he could have
thrown himself down on that mossy turf, and had a roll in its thyme and
its lichens for sheer joy that his strength had come back. But he would
yield to none of these longings; he held on for his master's sake, and
tried to think, as he ran, that this was only a piece of play--only a
steeple-chase, for a silver vase and a lady's smile, such as he and his
rider had so often run for, and so often won, in those glad hours of the
crisp winter noons of English Shires far away. He turned his eyes on the
brown mare's, and she turned hers on his; they were good friends in the
stables at home, and they understood one another now. "If I were what
I was yesterday, she wouldn't run even with me," thought the King; but
they were doing good work together, and he was too true a knight and
too true a gentleman to be jealous of Mother o' Pearl, so they raced
neck-and-neck through the dawn; with the noisy clatter of water-mill
wheels, or the distant sound of a woodman's ax, or the tolling bell of
a convent clock, the only sound on the air save the beat of the flying
hoofs.

Away they went, mile on mile, league on league, till the stars faded
out in the blaze of the sun, and the tall pines rose out of the gloom.
Either his pursuers were baffled and distanced, or no hue and cry was
yet after him; nothing arrested them as they swept on, and the silent
land lay in the stillness of morning ere toil and activity awakened. It
was strangely still, strangely lonely, and the echo of the gallop seemed
to beat on the stirless, breathless solitude. As the light broke and
grew clearer and clearer, Cecil's face in it was white as death as he
galloped through the mists, a hunted man, on whose head a price was set;
but it was quite calm still, and very resolute--there was no "harking
back" in it.

They had raced nigh twenty English miles by the time the chimes of a
village were striking six o'clock; it was the only group of dwellings
they had ventured near in their flight; the leaded lattices were thrust
open with a hasty clang, and women's heads looked out as the iron tramp
of the hunters' feet struck fire from the stones. A few cries were
raised; one burgher called them to know their errand; they answered
nothing, but traversed the street with lightning speed, gone from sight
almost ere they were seen. A league farther on was a wooded bottom, all
dark and silent, with a brook murmuring through it under the leafy shade
of lilies and the tangle of water-plants; there Cecil checked the King
and threw himself out of saddle.

"He is not quite himself yet," he murmured, as he loosened the girths
and held back the delicate head from the perilous cold of the water to
which the horse stretched so eagerly; he thought more of Forest King
than he thought, even in that hour, of himself. He did all that was
needed with his own hands; fed him with the corn from the saddle-bags,
cooled him gently, led him to drink a cautious draught from the bubbling
little stream, then let him graze and rest under the shade of the
aromatic pines and the deep bronze leaves of the copper beeches; it
was almost dark, so heavy and thickly laced were the branches, and
exquisitely tranquil in the heart of the hilly country, in the peace of
the early day, with the rushing of the forest brook the sole sound that
was heard, and the everlasting sighing of the pine-boughs overhead.

Cecil leaned a while silently against one of the great gnarled trunks,
and Rake affected to busy himself with the mare; in his heart was a
tumult of rage, a volcano of curiosity, a pent-up storm of anxious
amaze, but he would have let Mother o' Pearl brain him with a kick of
her iron plates rather than press a single look that should seem like
doubt, or seem like insult in adversity to his fallen master.

Cecil's eyes, drooped and brooding, gazed a long half-hour down in
silence into the brook bubbling at his feet; then he lifted his head and
spoke--with a certain formality and command in his voice, as though he
gave an order on parade.

"Rake, listen, and do precisely what I bid you; neither more nor less.
The horses cannot accompany me, nor you either; I must go henceforth
where they would starve, and you would do worse. I do not take the King
into suffering, nor you into temptation."

Rake, who at the tone had fallen unconsciously in to the attitude of
"attention," giving the salute with his old military instinct, opened
his lips to speak in eager protestation; Cecil put up his hand.

"I have decided; nothing you can say will alter me. We are near a
by-station now; if I find none there to prevent me, I shall get away by
the first train; to hide in these woods is out of the question. You
will return by easy stages to Baden, and take the horses at once to Lord
Rockingham. They are his now. Tell him my last wish was that he should
take you into his service; and he will be a better master to you than I
have ever been. As for the King"--his lips quivered, and his voice shook
a little, despite himself--"he will be safe with him. I shall go into
some foreign service--Austrian, Russian, Mexican, whichever be open
to me. I would not risk such a horse as mine to be sold, ill-treated,
tossed from owner to owner, sent in his old age to a knacker's yard, or
killed in a skirmish by a cannon-shot. Take both him and the mare back,
and go back yourself. Believe me, I thank you from my heart for your
noble offer of fidelity, but accept it I never shall."

A dead pause came after his words; Rake stood mute; a curious
look--half-dogged, half-wounded, but very resolute--had come on his
face. Cecil thought him pained, and spoke with an infinite gentleness:

"My good fellow, do not regret it, or fancy I have no gratitude to you.
I feel your loyalty deeply, and I know all you would willingly suffer
for me; but it must not be. The mere offer of what you would do had been
quite testimony enough of your truth and your worth. It is impossible
for me to tell you what has so suddenly changed my fortunes; it is
sufficient that for the future I shall be, if I live, what you were--a
private soldier in an army that needs a sword. But let my fate be what
it will, I go to it alone. Spare me more speech, and simply obey my last
command."

Quiet as the words were, there was a resolve in them not to be disputed;
an authority not to be rebelled against. Rake stared, and looked at
him blankly; in this man who spoke to him with so subdued but so
irresistible a power of command, he could scarcely recognize the gay,
indolent, indulgent, pococurante Guardsman, whose most serious anxiety
had been the set of a lace tie, the fashion of his hunting dress, or the
choice of the gold arabesques for his smoking-slippers.

Rake was silent a moment; then his hand touched his cap again.

"Very well, sir," and without opposition or entreaty, he turned to
resaddle the mare.

Our natures are oddly inconsistent. Cecil would not have taken the man
in to exile, and danger, and temptation, and away from comfort and an
honest life, for any consideration; yet it gave him something of a
pang that Rake was so soon dissuaded from following him, and so easily
convinced of the folly of his fidelity. But he had dealt himself a far
deadlier one when he had resolved to part forever from the King. He
loved the horse better than he loved anything--fed from his hand in
foalhood, reared, broken, and trained under his own eye and his own
care, he had had a truer welcome from those loving, lustrous eyes than
all his mistresses ever gave him. He had had so many victories, so many
hunting-runs, so many pleasant days of winter and of autumn, with Forest
King for his comrade and companion! He could better bear to sever from
all other things than from the stable-monarch, whose brave heart never
failed him, and whose honest love was always his.

He stretched his hand out with his accustomed signal; the King lifted
his head where he grazed, and came to him with the murmuring noise of
pleasure he always gave at his master's caress, and pressed his
forehead against Cecil's breast, and took such tender heed, such earnest
solicitude, not to harm him with a touch of the mighty fore hoofs, as
those only who care for and know horses well will understand in its
relation.

Cecil threw his arm over his neck, and leaned his own head down on it,
so that his face was hidden. He stood motionless so many moments, and
the King never stirred, but only pressed closer and closer against
his bosom as though he knew that this was his eternal farewell to his
master. But little light came there, the boughs grew so thickly; and it
was still and solitary as a desert in the gloom of the meeting trees.

There have been many idols--idols of gold, idols of clay--less pure,
less true than the brave and loyal-hearted beast from whom he parted
now.

He stood motionless a while longer, and where his face was hidden, the
gray silken mane of the horse was wet with great, slow tears that forced
themselves through his closed eyes; then he laid his lips on the King's
forehead, as he might have touched the brow of the woman he loved; and
with a backward gesture of his hand to his servant, plunged down into
the deep slope of netted boughs and scarce penetrable leafage, that
swung back into their places, and shrouded him from sight with their
thick, unbroken screen.

"He's forgot me right and away in the King," murmured Rake, as he led
Forest King away slowly and sorrowfully, while the hunter pulled and
fretted to force his way to his master. "Well, it's only natural like.
I've cause to care for him, and plenty on it; but he ain't no sort of
reason to think about me."

That was the way the philosopher took his wound.

Alone, Cecil flung himself full-length down on the turf beneath the
beech woods; his arms thrown forward, his face buried in the grass, all
gay with late summer forest blossoms; for the first time the whole might
of the rain that had fallen on his was understood by him; for the first
time it beat him down beneath it, as the overstrained tension of nerve
and of self-restraint had their inevitable reaction. He knew what this
thing was which he had done--he had given up his whole future.

Though he had spoken lightly to his servant of his intention to enter
a foreign army, he knew himself how few the chances were that he could
ever do so. It was possible that Rockingham might so exert his influence
that he would be left unpursued, but unless this chanced so (and Baroni
had seemed resolute to forego no part of his demands), the search for
him would be in the hands of the law, and the wiles of secret police and
of detectives' resources spread too far and finely over the world for
him to have a hope of ultimate escape.

If he sought France, the Extradition Treaty would deliver him up;
Russia--Austria--Prussia were of equal danger; he would be identified,
and given up to trial. Into the Italian service he knew many a scoundrel
was received unquestioned; and he might try the Western world; though he
had no means to pay the passage, he might work it; he was a good sailor.
Yachts had been twice sunk under him, by steamers, in the Solent and the
Spezzia, and his own schooner had once been fired at by mistake for a
blockade runner, when he had brought to, and given them a broadside from
his two shotted guns before he would signal them their error.

As these things swept, disordered and aimless, through his mind, he
wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the
Guards' champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed
and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had
seamanship enough to be taken before the mast, or could stand before
the tambour-major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the same
flag!

For a while he lay like a drunken man, heavy and motionless, his brow
resting on his arm, his face buried in the grass; he had parted more
easily with the woman he loved than he had parted with Forest King. The
chimes of some far-off monastery, or castle-campanile, swung lazily in
the morning stillness; the sound revived him, and recalled to him how
little time there was if he would seek the flight that had begun on
impulse and was continued in a firm, unshrinking resolve; he must go on,
and on, and on; he must burrow like a fox, hide like a beaten cur; he
must put leagues between him and all who had ever known him; he must
sink his very name, and identity, and existence, under some impenetrable
obscurity, or the burden he had taken up for others' sake would be
uselessly borne. There must be action of some sort or other, instant and
unerring.

"It don't matter," he thought, with the old idle indifference, oddly
becoming in that extreme moment the very height of stoic philosophy,
without any thought or effort to be such; "I was going to the bad of my
own accord; I must have cut and run for the debts, if not for this; it
would have been the same thing, anyway, so it's just as well to do it
for them. Life's over, and I'm a fool that I don't shoot myself."

But there was too imperious a spirit in the Royallieu blood to let him
give in to disaster and do this. He rose slowly, staggering a little,
and feeling blinded and dazzled with the blaze of the morning sun as
he went out of the beech wood. There were the marks of the hoofs on the
damp, dewy turf; his lips trembled a little as he saw them--he would
never rid the horse again!

Some two miles, more or less, lay between him and the railway. He was
not certain of his way, and he felt a sickening exhaustion on him;
he had been without food since his breakfast before the race. A
gamekeeper's hut stood near the entrance of the wood; he had much
recklessness in him, and no caution. He entered through the half-open
door, and asked the keeper, who was eating his sausage and drinking his
lager, for a meal.

"I'll give you one if you'll bring me down that hen-harrier," growled
the man in south German; pointing to the bird that was sailing far off,
a mere speck in the sunny sky.

Cecil took the rifle held out to him, and without seeming even to pause
to take aim, fired. The bird dropped like a stone through the air into
the distant woods. There was no tremor in his wrist, no uncertainty in
his measure. The keeper stared; the shot was one he had thought beyond
any man's range, and he set food and drink before his guest with a
crestfallen surprise, oddly mingled with veneration.

"You might have let me buy my breakfast, without making me do murder,"
said Bertie quietly, as he tried to eat. The meal was coarse--he could
scarcely touch it; but he drank the beer down thirstily, and took a
crust of bread. He slipped his ring, a great sapphire graven with his
crest, off his finger, and held it out to the man.

"That is worth fifty double-Fredericks. Will you take it in exchange for
your rifle and some powder and ball?"

The German stared again, open-mouthed, and clinched the bargain eagerly.
He did not know anything about gems, but the splendor of this dazzled
his eye, while he had guns more than enough, and could get many others
at his lord's cost. Cecil fastened a shot-belt round him, took a
powder-flask and cartridge-case, and with a few words of thanks, went on
his way.

Now that he held the rifle in his hand, he felt ready for the work
that was before him; if hunted to bay, at any rate he could now have a
struggle for his liberty. The keeper stood bewildered, gazing blankly
after him down the vista of pines.

"Hein! Hein!" he growled, as he looked at the sapphire
sparkling in his broad, brown palm; "I never saw such a
with-lavishness-wasteful-and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gentleman! I
wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take his own life, belikes;
ach, Gott! He will take his own life!"

But Cecil had not bought it for that end--though he had called himself
a fool for not sending a bullet through his brain, to quench in eternal
darkness this ruined and wretched life that alone remained to him. He
walked on through the still summer dawn, with the width of the country
stretching sun-steeped around him. The sleeplessness, the excitement,
the misery, the wild running of the past night had left him strengthless
and racked with pain, but he knew that he must press onward or be
caught, sooner or later, like netted game in the poacher's silken
mesh. Where to go, what to do, he knew no more than if he were a child;
everything had always been ready to his hand; the only thought required
of him had been how to amuse himself and avoid being bored; now thrown
alone on a mighty calamity, and brought face to face with the severity
and emergency of exertion, he was like a pleasure-boat beaten under
high billows, and driven far out to sea by the madness of a raging
nor'wester. He had no conception what to do; he had but one resolve--to
keep his secret; if, to do it, he killed himself with the rifle his
sapphire ring had bought.

Carelessly daring always, he sauntered now into the station for which he
had made, without a sign on him that could attract observation; he
wore still the violet velvet Spanish-like dress, the hessians, and the
broad-leafed felt hat with an eagle's feather fastened in it, that he
had worn at the races; and with the gun in his hand there was nothing
to distinguish him from any tourist "milor," except that in one hand he
carried his own valise. He cast a rapid glance around; no warrant
for his apprehension, no announcement of his personal appearance had
preceded him here; he was safe--safe in that; safer still in the fact
that the train rushed in so immediately on his arrival there, that the
few people about had no time to notice or speculate upon him. The coupe
was empty, by a happy chance; he took it, throwing his money down with
no heed that when the little he had left was once expended he would be
penniless, and the train whirled on with him, plunging into the heart of
forest and mountain, and the black gloom of tunnels, and the golden seas
of corn-harvest. He was alone; and he leaned his head on his hands, and
thought, and thought, and thought, till the rocking, and the rushing,
and the whirl, and the noise of the steam on his ear and the giddy
gyrations of his brain in the exhaustion of overstrung exertion,
conquered thought. With the beating of the engine seeming to throb like
the great swinging of a pendulum through his mind, and the whirling
of the country passing by him like a confused phantasmagoria, his eyes
closed, his aching limbs stretched themselves out to rest, a heavy
dreamless sleep fell on him, the sleep of intense bodily fatigue, and he
knew no more.

Gendarmes awoke him to see his visa. He showed it them by sheer
mechanical instinct, and slept again in that dead weight of slumber the
moment he was alone. When he had taken his ticket, and they had asked
him to where it should be, he had answered to their amaze, "to the
farthest place it goes," and he was borne on now unwitting where it
went; through the rich champaign and the barren plains; through the
reddening vintage and over the dreary plateaux; through antique cities,
and across broad, flowing rivers; through the cave of riven rocks,
and above nestling, leafy valleys; on and on, on and on, while he knew
nothing, as the opium-like sleep of intense weariness held him in it
stupor.

He awoke at last with a start; it was evening; the stilly twilight was
settling over all the land, and the train was still rushing onward,
fleet as the wind. His eyes, as they opened dreamily, fell on a face
half obscured in the gleaming; he leaned forward, bewildered and
doubting his senses.

"Rake!"

Rake gave the salute hurriedly and in embarrassment.

"It's I, sir!--yes, sir."

Cecil thought himself dreaming still.

"You! You had my orders?"

"Yes, sir, I had your orders," murmured the ex-soldier, more confused
than he had ever been in the whole course of his audacious life, "and
they was the first I ever disobeyed--they was. You see, sir, they was
just what I couldn't swallow nohow--that's the real, right-down fact!
Send me to the devil, Mr. Cecil, for you, and I'll go at the first
bidding, but leave you just when things are on the cross for you, damn
me if I will!--beggin' your pardon, sir!"

And Rake, growing fiery and eloquent, dashed his cap down on the floor
of the coupe with an emphatic declaration of resistance. Cecil looked
at him in silence; he was not certain still whether this were not a
fantastic folly he was dreaming.

"Damn me if I will, Mr. Cecil! You won't keep me--very well; but you
can't prevent me follerin' of you, and foller you I will; and so there's
no more to be said about it, sir; but just to let me have my own lark,
as one may say. You said you'd go to the station, I went there; you
took your ticket, I took my ticket. I've been travelling behind you till
about two hours ago, then I looked at you; you was asleep sir. 'I don't
think my master's quite well,' says I to Guard; 'I'd like to get in
there along of him.' 'Get in with you, then,' says he (only we was
jabbering that willainous tongue o' theirs), for he sees the name on my
traps is the same as that on your traps--and in I get. Now, Mr.
Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don't think I'm a insolent,
ne'er-do-well for having been and gone and disobeyed you; but you
was good to me when I was sore in want of it; you was even good to my
dog--rest his soul, the poor beast! There never were a braver!--and
stick to you I will till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it's
only being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight; if I was to leave
you I should become a bad 'un again, right and away. Don't send me from
you, sir, as you took mercy on me once!"

Rake's voice shook a little toward the close of his harangue, and in
the shadows of evening light, as the train plunged through the gathering
gloom, his ruddy, bright, bronzed face looked very pale and wistful.

Cecil stretched out his hand to him in silence that spoke better than
words.

Rank hung his head.

"No, sir; you're a gentleman, and I've been an awful scamp! It's enough
honor for me that you would do it. When I'm more worth it, perhaps--but
that won't never be."

"You are worth it now, my gallant fellow." His voice was very low; the
man's loyalty touched him keenly. "It was only for yourself, Rake, that
I ever wished you to leave me."

"God bless you, sir!" said Rake passionately; "them words are better
nor ten tosses of brandy! You see, sir, I'm so spry and happy in a wild
life, I am, and if so be as you go to them American parts as you spoke
on, why I know 'em just as well as I know Newmarket Heath, every bit!
They're terrible rips in them parts; kill you as soon as look at you; it
makes things uncommon larky out there, uncommon spicy. You aren't never
sure but what there's a bowie knife a-waiting for you."

With which view of the delights of Western life, Rake, "feeling like
a fool," as he thought himself, for which reason he had diverged into
Argentine memories, applied himself to the touching and examining of the
rifle with that tenderness which only gunnery love and lore produce.

Cecil sat silent a while, his head drooped down on his hands, while the
evening deepened to night. At last he looked up.

"The King? Where is he?"

Rake flushed shamefacedly under his tanned skin.

"Beggin' your pardon, sir; behind you."

"Behind me?"

"Yes, sir; him and the brown mare. I couldn't do nothing else with 'em
you see, sir, so I shipped him along with us; they don't care for the
train a bit, bless their hearts! And I've got a sharp boy a-minding
of 'em. You can easily send 'em on to England from Paris if you're
determined to part with 'em; but you know the King always was fond of
drums and trumpets and that like. You remember, sir, when he as a colt
we broke him into it and taught him a bit of maneuvering; 'cause, till
you find what pace he had in him, you'd thought of making a charger of
him. He loves the noise of soldiering--he do; and if he thought you was
going away without him, he'd break his heart, Mr. Cecil, sir. It was all
I could do to keep him from follerin' of you this morning; he sawed my
arms off almost."

With which, Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of unpardonable
disobedience and outrageous interference, hung his head over the gun; a
little anxious and a good deal ashamed.

Cecil smiled a little, despite himself.

"Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid; you are terribly
insubordinate!"

He had not the heart to say more; the man's fidelity was too true to be
returned with rebuke; and stronger than all surprise and annoyance was a
strange mingling of pain and pleasure in him to think that the horse he
loved so well was still so near him, the comrade of his adversity as he
had been the companion of his happiest hours.

"These things will keep him a few days," he thought, as he looked at his
hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in each of his wristband-studs.
HE would have pawned every atom he had about him to have had the King
with him a week longer.

The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a coming tempest
drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward through the thickening
darkness, through the spectral country--it was like his life, rushing
headlong down into impenetrable gloom. The best, the uttermost, that he
could look for was a soldier's grave, far away under some foreign soil.



A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in her own
boudoir in her Baden suite; she was going to dine with an Archduchess of
Russia, and the splendid jewels of her House glittered through the black
shower of her laces, and crowned her beautiful glossy hair, her delicate
imperial head. In her hands was a letter--oddly written in pencil on a
leaf torn out of a betting book, but without a tremor or a change in
the writing itself. And as she stood a shiver shook her frame; in the
solitude of her lighted and luxurious chamber her cheek grew pale, her
eyes grew dim.

"To refute the charge," ran the last words of what was at best but a
fragment, "I must have broken my promise to you, and have compromised
your name. Keeping silence myself, but letting the trial take place,
law-inquiries so execrable and so minute, would soon have traced through
others that I was with you that evening. To clear myself I must have
attainted your name with public slander, and drawn the horrible ordeal
on you before the world. Let me be thought guilty. It matters little.
Henceforth I shall be dead to all who know me, and my ruin would have
exiled me without this. Do not let an hour of grief for me mar your
peace, my dearest; think of me with no pain, Beatrice; only with some
memory of our past love. I have not strength yet to say--forget me; and
yet,--if it be for your happiness,--blot out from your remembrance all
thought of what we have been to one another; all thought of me and of my
life, save to remember now and then that I was dear to you."

The words grew indistinct before her sight, they touched the heart of
the world-worn coquette, of the victorious sovereign, to the core;
she trembled greatly as she read them. For--in her hands was his fate.
Though no hint of this was breathed in his farewell letter, she knew
that with a word she could clear him, free him, and call him back from
exile and shame, give him once more honor and guiltlessness in the sight
of the world. With a word she could do this; his life was in the balance
that she held as utterly as though it were now hers to sign, or to
destroy, his death-warrant. It rested with her to speak and to say he
had no guilt.

But to do this she must sacrifice herself. She stood mute, irresolute,
a shudder running through her till her diamonds shook in the light; the
heavy tears stole slowly down, one by one, and fell upon the blurred
and blackened paper; her heart ached with an exceeding bitterness.
Then shudderingly still, and as though there were a coward crime in the
action, her hand unclosed and let the letter fall into the spirit flame
of a silver lamp, burning by; the words that were upon it merited a
better fate, a fonder cherishing, but--they would have compromised her.
She let them fall, and burn, and wither. With them she gave up his life
to its burden of shame, to its fate of exile.

She would hear his crime condemned, and her lips would not open; she
would hear his name aspersed, and her voice would not be raised; she
would know that he dwelt in misery, or died under foreign suns
unhonored and unmourned, while tongues around her would babble of his
disgrace--and she would keep her peace.

She loved him--yes; but she loved better the dignity in which the world
held her, and the diamonds from which the law would divorce her if their
love were known.

She sacrificed him for her reputation and her jewels; the choice was
thoroughly a woman's.



CHAPTER XIII.

IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS.

The red-hot light of the after-glow still burned on the waters of the
bay, and shed its Egyptian-like luster on the city that lies in the
circle of the Sahel, with the Mediterranean so softly lashing with its
violet waves the feet of the white, sloping town. The sun had sunk down
in fire--the sun that once looked over those waters on the legions of
Scipio and the iron brood of Hamilcar, and that now gave its luster on
the folds of the French flags as they floated above the shipping of the
harbor, and on the glitter of the French arms, as a squadron of the army
of Algeria swept back over the hills to their barracks. Pell-mell in its
fantastic confusion, its incongruous blending, its forced mixture of two
races--that will touch, but never mingle; that will be chained together,
but will never assimilate--the Gallic-Moorish life of the city poured
out; all the coloring of Haroun al Raschid scattered broadcast among
Parisian fashion and French routine. Away yonder, on the spurs and tops
of the hills, the green sea-pines seemed to pierce the transparent air;
in the Cabash old, dreamy Arabian legends, poetic as Hafiz, seem still
to linger here and there under the foliage of hanging gardens or the
picturesque curves of broken terraces; in the distance the brown, rugged
Kabyl mountains lay like a couched camel, and far off against the golden
haze a single palm rose, at a few rare intervals, with its drooped,
curled leaves, as though to recall, amid the shame of foreign
domination, that this was once the home of Hannibal; the Africa that had
made Rome tremble.

In the straight, white boulevards, as in the winding ancient streets;
under the huge barn-like walls of barracks, as beneath the marvelous
mosaics of mosques; the strange bizarre conflict of European and
Oriental life spread its panorama. Staff officers, all aglitter with
crosses, galloped past; mules, laden with green maize and driven by
lean, brown Bedouins, swept past the plate-glass windows of bonbon
shops; grave, white-bearded sheiks drank petits verres in the
guinguettes; sapeurs, Chasseurs, Zouaves, cantinieres--all the varieties
of French military life--mingled with jet-black Soudans, desert kings
wrathful and silent, Eastern women shrouded in haick and serroual,
eagle-eyed Arabs flinging back snow-white burnous, and handling
ominously the jeweled halts of their cangiars. Alcazar chansons rang out
from the cafes, while in their midst stood the mosque, that had used
to resound with the Muezzin. Bijou-blondine and Bebee La-la and all
the sister-heroines of demi-monde dragged their voluminous Paris-made
dresses side by side with Moorish beauties, who only dared show the
gleam of their bright black eyes through the yashmak; the reverberes
were lit in the Place du Gouvernement, and a group fit for the days
of Solyman the Magnificent sat under the white marble beauty of the
Mohammedan church. "Rein n'est sacre pour un sapeur!" was being sung
to a circle of sous-officiers, close in the ear of a patriarch serenely
majestic as Abraham; gaslights were flashing, cigar shops were
filling, newspapers were being read, the Rigolboche was being danced,
commis-voyageurs were chattering with grisettes, drums were beating,
trumpets were sounding, bands were playing, and, amid it all, grave
men were dropping on their square of carpet to pray, brass trays of
sweetmeats were passing, ostrich eggs were dangling, henna-tipped
fingers were drawing the envious veil close, and noble Oriental shadows
were gliding to and fro through the open doors of the mosques, like
a picture of the "Arabian Nights," like a poem of dead Islamism--in a
word, it was Algiers at evening.

In one of the cafes there, a mingling of all the nations under the
sun was drinking demi-tasses, absinthe, vermouth, or old wines, in the
comparative silence that had succeeded to a song, sung by a certain
favorite of the Spahis, known as Loo-Loo-j'n-m'en soucie guere, from
Mlle. Loo-Loo's well-known habits of independence and bravado, which
last had gone once so far as shooting a man through the chest in the
Rue Bab-al-Oued, and setting all the gendarmes and sergents-de-ville at
defiance afterward. Half a dozen of that famous regiment the Chasseurs
d'Afrique were gathered together, some with their feet resting on the
little marble-topped tables, some reading the French papers, all
smoking their inseparable companions--the brules-gueles; fine, stalwart,
sun-burned fellows, with faces and figures that the glowing colors of
their uniform set off to the best advantage.

"Loo-Loo was in fine voice to-night," said one.

"Yes; she took plenty of cognac before she sang; that always clears her
voice," said a second.

"And I think that did her spirits good, shooting that Kabyl," said a
third. "By the way, did he die?"

"N'sais pas, Loo-Loo's a good aim."

"Sac a papier, yes! Rire-pour-tout taught her."

"Ah! There never was a shot like Rire-pour-tout. When he went out, he
always asked his adversary, 'Where will you like it? your lungs, your
heart, your brain? It is quite a matter of choice;'--and whichever
they chose, he shot there. Le pauvre Rire-pour-tout! He was always
good-natured."

"And did he never meet his match?" asked a sous-officier of the line.

The speaker looked down on the piou-piou with superb contempt, and
twisted his mustaches. "Monsieur! how could he? He was a Chasseur."

"But if he never met his match, how did he die?" pursued the irreverent
piou-piou--a little wiry man, black as a berry, agile as a monkey, tough
and short as a pipe-stopper.

The magnificent Chasseur laughed in his splendid disdain. "A piou-piou
never killed him, that I promise you. He spitted half a dozen of you
before breakfast, to give him a relish. How did Rire-pour-tout die? I
will tell you."

He dipped his long mustaches into a beaker of still champagne. Claude,
Viscomte de Chanrellon, though in the ranks, could afford those
luxuries.

"He died this way, did Rire-pour-tout! Dieu de Dieu! a very good way
too. Send us all the like when our time comes! We were out yonder" (and
he nodded his handsome head outward to where the brown, seared
plateaux and the Kabyl mountains lay). "We were hunting Arabs, of
course--pot-shooting, rather, as we never got nigh enough to their main
body to have a clear charge at them. Rire-pour-tout grew sick of it.
'This won't do,' he said; 'here's two weeks gone by, and I haven't
shot anything but kites and jackals. I shall get my hand out.' For
Rire-pour-tout, as the army knows, somehow or other, generally potted
his man every day, and he missed it terribly. Well, what did he do? He
rode off one morning and found out the Arab camp, and he waved a white
flag for a parley. He didn't dismount, but he just faced the Arabs and
spoke to their Sheik. 'Things are slow,' he said to them. 'I have come
for a little amusement. Set aside six of your best warriors, and I'll
fight them one after another for the honor of France and a drink of
brandy to the conqueror.' They demurred; they thought it unfair to him
to have six to one. 'Ah!' he laughs, 'you have heard of Rire-pour-tout,
and you are afraid!' That put their blood up: they said they would fight
him before all his Chasseurs. 'Come, and welcome,' said Rire-pour-tout;
'and not a hair of your beards shall be touched except by me.' So the
bargain was made for an hour before sunset that night. Mort de Dieu!
that was a grand duel!"

He dipped his long mustaches again into another beaker of still. Talking
was thirsty work; the story was well known in all the African army, but
the piou-piou, having served in China, was new to the soil.

"The General was ill-pleased when he heard it, and half for arresting
Rire-pour-tout; but--sacre!--the thing was done; our honor was involved;
he had engaged to fight these men, and engaged for us to let them go in
peace afterward; there was no more to be said, unless we had looked like
cowards, or traitors, or both. There was a wide, level plateau in front
of our camp, and the hills were at our backs--a fine field for the
duello; and, true to time, the Arabs filed on to the plain, and fronted
us in a long line, with their standards, and their crescents, and their
cymbals and reed-pipes, and kettle-drums, all glittering and sounding.
Sac a papier! There was a show, and we could not fight one of them! We
were drawn up in line--Horse, Foot, and Artillery--Rire-pour-tout all
alone, some way in advance; mounted, of course. The General and the
Sheik had a conference; then the play began. There were six Arabs
picked out--the flower of the army--all white and scarlet, and in
their handsomest bravery, as if they came to an aouda. They were fine
men--diable!--they were fine men. Now the duel was to be with
swords; these had been selected; and each Arab was to come against
Rire-pour-tout singly, in succession. Our drums rolled the pas de
charge, and their cymbals clashed; they shouted 'Fantasia!' and the
first Arab rode at him. Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went
his steel through the Bedouin's lung, before you could cry hola!--a
death-stroke, of course; Rire-pour-tout always killed: that was his
perfect science. Another and another and another came, just as fast as
the blood flowed. You know what the Arabs are--vous autres? How they
wheel and swerve and fight flying, and pick up their saber from the
ground, while their horse is galloping ventre a terre, and pierce you
here and pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks? You
know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after another, more like
devils than men. Mort de Dieu! it was a magnificent sight! He was gashed
here and gashed there; but they could never unseat him, try how they
would; and one after another he caught them sooner or later, and sent
them reeling out of their saddles, till there was a great red lake of
blood all round him, and five of them lay dead or dying down in
the sand. He had mounted afresh twice, three horses had been killed
underneath him, and his jacket all hung in strips where the steel had
slashed it. It was grand to see, and did one's heart good; but--ventre
bleu!--how one longed to go in too.

"There was only one left now--a young Arab, the Sheik's son, and down he
came like the wind. He thought with the shock to unhorse Rire-pour-tout,
and finish him then at his leisure. You could hear the crash as they
met, like two huge cymbals smashing together. Their chargers hit and
tore at each other's manes; they were twined in together there as if
they were but one man and one beast; they shook and they swayed and they
rocked; the sabers played about their heads so quick that it was like
lightning, as they flashed and twirled in the sun; the hoofs trampled up
the sand till a yellow cloud hid their struggle, and out of it all you
could see was the head of a horse tossing up and spouting with foam,
or a sword-blade lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled down
a little, the sand mist cleared away, the Arab's saddle was empty--but
Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock. The old Chief bowed his head. 'It is
over! Allah is great!' And he knew his son lay there dead. Then we broke
from the ranks, and we rushed to the place where the chargers and men
were piled like so many slaughtered sheep. Rire-pour-tout laughed such
a gay, ringing laugh as the desert never had heard. 'Vive la France!' he
cried. 'And now bring me my toss of brandy.' Then down headlong out of
his stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse; and when we lifted him
up there were two broken sword-blades buried in him, and the blood
was pouring fast as water out of thirty wounds and more. That was how
Rire-pour-tout died, piou-piou; laughing to the last. Sacre bleu! It was
a splendid end; I wish I were sure of the like."

And Claude de Chanrellon drank down his third beaker, for overmuch
speech made him thirsty.

The men around him emptied their glasses in honor of the dead hero.

"Rire-pour-tout was a croc-mitaine," they said solemnly, with almost a
sigh; so tendering by their words the highest funeral oration.

"You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose?" asked a voice in
very pure French. The speaker was leaning against the open door of the
cafe; a tall, lightly built man, dressed in a velvet shooting tunic,
much the worse for wind and weather, a loose shirt, and jack-boots
splashed and worn out.

"When we are at it, monsieur," returned the Chasseur. "I only wish we
had more."

"Of course. Are you in need of recruits?"

"They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves," smiled Chanrellon,
surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, with a keen sense of
its symmetry and its sinew. "Still, a good sword brings its welcome. Do
you ask seriously, monsieur?"

The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little piou-piou
drowning his mortification in some curacoa, the idlers reading the
"Akbah" or the "Presse," the Chasseurs lounging over their drink, the
ecarte players lost in their game, all looked up at the newcomer. They
thought he looked a likely wearer of the dead honors of Rire-pour-tout.

He did not answer the question literally, but came over from the doorway
and seated himself at the little marble table opposite Claude, leaning
his elbows on it.

"I have a doubt," he said. "I am more inclined to your foes."

"Dieu de Dieu!" exclaimed Chanrellon, pulling at his tawny mustaches. "A
bold thing to say before five Chasseurs."

He smiled, a little contemptuously, a little amusedly.

"I am not a croc-mitaine, perhaps; but I say what I think, with little
heed of my auditors, usually."

Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. "He is a
croc-mitaine," he thought. "He is not to be lost."

"I prefer your foes," went on the other, quite quietly, quite
listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of
French soldiers. "In the first place, they are on the losing side; in
the second, they are the lords of the soil; in the third, they live as
free as air; and in the fourth, they have undoubtedly the right of the
quarrel!"

"Monsieur!" cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on their swords,
fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily up from under the long
lashes of his lids, and went on, as though they had not spoken.

"I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours,
Rire-pour-tout, did, but I don't think it's worth while," he said
carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. "Brawling's bad
style; we don't do it. I was saying, I like your foes best; mere matter
of taste; no need to quarrel over it--that I see. I shall go into
their service or into yours, monsieur--will you play a game of dice to
decide?"

"Decide?--but how?"

"Why--this way," said the other, with the weary listlessness of one who
cares not two straws how things turn. "If I win, I go to the Arabs; if
you win, I come to your ranks."

"Mort de Dieu! it is a droll gambling," murmured Chanrellon. "But--if
you win, do you think we shall let you go off to our enemies? Pas si
bete, monsieur!"

"Yes, you will," said the other quietly. "Men who knew what honor meant
enough to redeem Rire-pour-tout's pledge of safety to the Bedouins, will
not take advantage of an openly confessed and unarmed adversary."

A murmur of ratification ran through his listeners.

Chanrellon swore a mighty oath.

"Pardieu, no. You are right. If you want to go, you shall go. Hola
there! bring the dice. Champagne, monsieur? Vermouth? Cognac?"

"Nothing, I thank you."

He leaned back with an apathetic indolence and indifference oddly at
contrast with the injudicious daring of his war-provoking words and
the rough campaigning that he sought. The assembled Chasseurs eyed him
curiously; they liked his manner and they resented his first speeches;
they noted every particular about him--his delicate white hands, his
weather-worn and travel-stained dress, his fair, aristocratic features,
his sweeping, abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless way;
and they were uncertain what to make of him.

The dice were brought.

"What stakes, monsieur?" asked Chanrellon.

"Ten napoleons a side--and--the Arabs."

He set ten napoleons down on the table; they were the only coins he had
in the world; it was very characteristic that he risked them.

They threw the main--two sixes.

"You see," he murmured, with a half smile, "the dice know it is a drawn
duel between you and the Arabs."

"C'est un drole, c'est un brave!" muttered Chanrellon; and they threw
again.

The Chasseur cast a five; his was a five again.

"The dice cannot make up their minds," said the other listlessly, "they
know you are Might and the Arabs are Right."

The Frenchmen laughed; they could take a jest good-humoredly, and alone
amid so many of them, he was made sacred at once by the very length of
odds against him.

They rattled the boxes and threw again--Chanrellon's was three; his two.

"Ah!" he murmured. "Right kicks the beam and loses; it always does, poor
devil!"

The Chasseur leaned across the table, with his brown, fearless sunny
eyes full of pleasure.

"Monsieur! never lament such good fortune for France. You belong to us
now; let me claim you!"

He bowed more gravely than he had borne himself hitherto.

"You do me much honor; fortune has willed it so. One word only in
stipulation."

"Chanrellon assented courteously.

"As many as you choose."

"I have a companion who must be brigaded with me, and I must go on
active service at once."

"With infinite pleasure. That doubtless can be arranged. You shall
present yourself to-morrow morning; and for to-night, this is not the
season here yet; and we are triste a faire fremir; still I can show you
a little fun, though it is not Paris!"

But he rose and bowed again.

"I thank you, not to-night. You shall see me at your barracks with the
morning."

"Ah, ah! monsieur!" cried the Chasseur eagerly, and a little annoyed.
"What warrant have we that you will not dispute the decree of the dice,
and go off to your favorites, the Arabs?"

He turned back and looked full in Chanrellon's face his own eyes a
little surprised, and infinitely weary.

"What warrant? My promise."

Then, without another syllable, he lounged slowly out through the
soldiers and the idlers, and disappeared in the confused din and
chiar-oscuro of the gas-lit street without, through the press
of troopers, grisettes, merchants, beggars, sweetmeat-sellers,
lemonade-sellers, curacoa sellers, gaunt Bedouins, negro boys, shrieking
muleteers, laughing lorettes, and glittering staff officers.

"That is done!" he murmured to his own thoughts. "Now for life under
another flag!"

Claude de Chanrellon sat mute and amazed a while, gazing at the open
door; then he drank a fourth beaker of champagne and flung the emptied
glass down with a mighty crash.

"Ventre bleu! Whoever he is, that man will eat fire, bons garcons!"



CHAPTER XIV.

"DE PROFUNDIS" BEFORE "PLUNGING."

Three months later it was guest-night in the messroom of a certain
famous light cavalry regiment, who bear the reputation of being the
fastest corps in the English service. Of a truth, they do "plunge" a
little too wildly; and stories are told of bets over ecarte in their
anteroom that have been prompt extinction forever and aye to the losers,
for they rarely play money down, their stakes are too high, and moderate
fortunes may go in a night with the other convenient but fatal system.
But, this one indiscretion apart, they are a model corps for blood,
for dash, for perfect social accord, for the finest horseflesh in the
kingdom, and the best president at a mess-table that ever drilled the
cook to matchlessness, and made the ice dry, and the old burgundies, the
admired of all newcomers.

Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had a couple of
hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were showing the Ridings
that they could "go like birds," and were using up their second horses
with every day out, in the first of the season. A cracker over the best
of the ground with the York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate
things quick as lightning, and both closed with a kill, had filled the
day; and they were dining with a fair quantity of county guests, and all
the splendor of plate, and ceremony, and magnificent hospitalities which
characterize those beaux sabreurs wheresoever they go. At one part of
the table a discussion was going on but they drank singularly little;
it was not their "form" ever to indulge in that way; and the Chief, as
dashing a sabreur as ever crossed a saddle, though lenient to looseness
in all other matters, and very young for his command, would have been
down like steel on "the boys," had any of them taken to the pastime of
overmuch drinking in any shape.

"I can't get the rights of the story," said one of the guests, a hunting
baronet, and M. F. H. "It's something very dark, isn't it?"

"Very dark," assented a tall, handsome man, with a habitual air of the
most utterly exhausted apathy ever attained by the human features, but
who, nevertheless, had been christened, by the fiercest of the warrior
nations of the Punjaub, as the Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil
One, so terrible had the circling sweep of one back stroke of his, when
he was quite a boy, become to them.

"Guard cut up fearfully rough," murmured one near him, known as "the
Dauphin." "Such a low sort of thing, you know; that's the worst of it.
Seraph's name, too."

"Poor old Seraph! He's fairly bowled over about it," added a third.
"Feels it awfully--by Jove, he does! It's my belief he paid those Jew
fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit slackened."

"So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a cracker by it. I
dare say! Jews always do," muttered a fourth. "First Life would have
given Beauty a million sooner than have him do it. Horrible thing for
the Household."

"But is he dead?" pursued their guest.

"Beauty? Yes; smashed in that express, you know."

"But there was no evidence?"

"I don't know what you call evidence," murmured "the Dauphin." "Horses
are sent to England from Paris; clearly shows he went to Paris.
Marseilles train smashes; twenty people ground into indistinguishable
amalgamation; two of the amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage
alone; only traps in carriage with them, Beauty's traps, with name clear
on the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things inside; two men
ground to atoms, but traps safe; two men, of course Beauty and servant;
man was a plucky fellow, sure, to stay with him."

And having given the desired evidence in lazy little intervals of
speech, he took some Rhenish.

"Well--yes; nothing could be more conclusive, certainly," assented the
Baronet, resignedly convinced. "It was the best thing that could
happen under the unfortunate circumstances; so Lord Royallieu thinks, I
suppose. He allowed no one to wear mourning, and had his unhappy son's
portrait taken down and burned."

"How melodramatic!" reflected Leo Charteris. "Now what the deuce can
it hurt a dead man to have his portrait made into a bonfire? Old lord
always did hate Beauty, though. Rock does all the mourning; he's cut up
no end; never saw a fellow so knocked out of time. Vowed at first he'd
sell out, and go into the Austrian service; swore he couldn't stay in
the Household, but would get a command of some Heavies, and be changed
to India."

"Duke didn't like that--didn't want him shot; nobody else, you see, for
the title. By George! I wish you'd seen Rock the other day on the Heath;
little Pulteney came up to him."

"What Pulteney?--Jimmy, or the Earl?"

"Oh, the Earl! Jimmy would have known better. These new men never know
anything. 'You purchased that famous steeple-chaser of his from Mr.
Cecil's creditors, didn't you!' asks Pulteney. Rock just looks him over.
Such a look, by George! 'I received Forest King as my dead friend's last
gift.' Pulteney never takes the hint--not he. On he blunders: 'Because,
if you were inclined to part with him, I want a good new hunting strain,
with plenty of fencing power, and I'd take him for the stud at any
figure you liked.' I thought the Seraph would have knocked him down--I
did, upon my honor! He was red as this wine in a second with rage, and
then as white as a woman. 'You are quite right,' he says quietly, and
I swear each word cut like a bullet, 'you do want a new strain with
something like breeding in it, but--I hardly think you'll get it for
the three next generations. You must learn to know what it means first.'
Then away he lounges. By Jove! I don't think the Cotton-Earl will forget
this Cambridgeshire in a hurry, or try horse-dealing on the Seraph
again."

Laughter loud and long greeted the story.

"Poor Beauty," said the Dauphin, "he'd have enjoyed that. He always
put down Pulteney himself. I remember his telling me he was on duty at
Windsor once when Pulteney was staying there. Pulteney's always horribly
funked at Court; frightened out of his life when he dines with any
royalties; makes an awful figure too in a public ceremony; can't walk
backward for any money, and at his first levee tumbled down right in the
Queen's face. Now at the Castle one night he just happened to come down
a corridor as Beauty was smoking. Beauty made believe to take him for a
servant, took out a sovereign, and tossed it to him. 'Here, keep a still
tongue about my cigar, my good fellow!' Pulteney turned hot and cold,
and stammered out God knows what, about his mighty dignity being
mistaken for a valet. Bertie just laughed a little, ever so softly, 'Beg
your pardon--thought you were one of the people; wouldn't have done it
for worlds; I know you're never at ease with a sovereign!' Now Pulteney
wasn't likely to forget that. If he wanted the King, I'll lay any money
it was to give him to some wretched mount who'd break his back over a
fence in a selling race."

"Well, he won't have him; Seraph don't intend to have the horse ever
ridden or hunted at all."

"Nonsense!"

"By Jove, he means it! nobody's to cross the King's back; he wants
weight-carriers himself, you know, and precious strong ones too. The
King's put in stud at Lyonnesse. Poor Bertie! Nobody ever managed a
close finish as he did at the Grand National--last but two--don't you
remember?"

"Yes; waited so beautifully on Fly-by-Night, and shot by him like
lightning, just before the run-in. Pity he went to the bad!"

"Ah, what a hand he played at ecarte; the very best of the French
science."

"But reckless at whist; a wild game there--uncommonly wild. Drove Cis
Delareux half mad one night at Royallieu with the way he threw his
trumps out. Old Cis dashed his cards down at last, and looked him
full in the face. 'Beauty, do you know, or do you not know, that a
whist-table is not to be taken as you take a timber in a hunting-field,
on the principle of clear it or smash it?' 'Faith!' said Bertie, 'clear
it or smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a trifle too
energetic for me.'"

"The deuce, he's had enough of 'smashing' at last! I wish he hadn't come
to grief in that style; it's a shocking bore for the Guards--such an
ugly story."

"It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did--best
possible taste."

"Only thing he could do."

"Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always wondered he
stopped for the row."

"Oh, never thought it would turn up; trusted to a fluke."

He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, but who held in
polite society the title of Lord Kergenven, drank some hock slowly,
and murmured as his sole quota to the conversation, very lazily and
languidly:

"Bet you he isn't dead at all."

"The deuce you do? And why?" chorused the table; "when a fellow's body's
found with all his traps round him!"

"I don't believe he's dead," murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous
eyes.

"But why? Have you heard anything?"

"Not a word."

"Why do you say he's alive, then?"

My lord lifted his brows ever so little.

"I think so, that's all."

"But you must have a reason, Ker?"

Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped
out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following:

"It don't follow one has reasons for anything; pray don't get logical.
Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, central France; perhaps
you don't know their work? It's uncommonly queer. Break up the Alps into
little bits, scatter 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set
a killing pack to hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for
coming to grief; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, you'll
get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don't get flattened
under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger.
Uncommonly good sport."

Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie
and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency
sherry.

"Hang it, Ker!" cried the Dauphin. "What's that to do with Beauty?"

My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under
his black lashes, that said mutely, "Do I, who hate talking, ever talk
wide of any point?"

"Why, this," he murmured. "He was with us down at Veille-roc--Louis
D'Auvrai's place, you know; and we were out after an old boar--not too
old to race; but still tough enough to be likely to turn and trust
to his tusks if the pace got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the
finish. We hadn't found till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to
the work, and the November day was short, of course; the pack got on the
slot of a roebuck too, and were off the boar's scent in a little while,
running wild. Altogether we got scattered, and in the forest it grew
almost as dark as pitch; you followed just as you could, and could
only guide yourself by your ear when the hounds gave cry, or the horns
sounded. On you blundered, hit or miss, headlong down the rocks and
through the branches; horses warmed wonderfully to the business,
scrambled like cats, slid down like otters, kept their footing where
nobody'd have thought anything but a goat could stand. Our hunting
bloods wouldn't live an hour in a French forest. You see we just look
for pace and strength in the shoulders; we don't much want anything
else--except good jumping power. What a lot of fellows--even in the
crack packs--will always funk water! Horses will fly, but they can't
swim. Now, to my fancy, a clever beast ought to take even a swelling bit
of water like a duck. How poor Standard breasted rivers till that fool
staked him!"

He dropped more walnuts into his wine, wistfully recalling a mighty hero
of Leicestershire fame, that had given him many a magnificent day out,
and had been the idol of his stables, till in his twelfth year the noble
old sorrel had been killed by a groom's recklessness; recklessness
that met with such chastisement as told how and why the hill-tribes'
sobriquet had been given to the hand that would lie so long in indolent
rest, to strike with such fearful force when once raised.

"Well," he went on once more, "we were all of us scattered; scarcely two
kept together anywhere; where the pack was, where the boar was, where
the huntsmen were, nobody knew. Now and then I heard the hounds giving
tongue at the distance, and I rode after that to the best of my science;
and uncommonly bad was the best. That forest work perplexes one, after
the grass-country. You can't view the beauties two minutes together; and
as for sinning by overriding 'em, you're very safe not to do that! At
last I heard a crashing sound, loud and furious; I thought they had got
him to bay at last. There was a great oak thicket as hard as iron, and
as close as a net, between me and the place; the boughs were all twisted
together, God knows how, and grew so low down that the naked branches
had to be broken though at every step by the horse's fore hoofs, before
he could force a step. We did force it somehow at last, and came into
a green, open space, where there were fewer trees, and the moon was
shining in; there, without a hound near, true enough was the boar
rolling on the ground, and somebody rolling under him. They were locked
in so close they looked just like one huge beast, pitching here and
there, as you've seen the rhinos wallow in Indian jheels. Of course, I
leveled my rifle, but I waited to get a clear aim; for which was man
and which was boar, the deuce a bit could I tell; just as I had pointed,
Beauty's voice called out to me; 'Keep your fire, Ker! I want to have
him myself.' It was he that was under the brute. Just as he spoke they
rolled toward me, the boar foaming and spouting blood, and plunging his
tusks into Cecil; he got his right arm out from under the beast,
and crushed under there as he was, drew it free, with the knife well
gripped; then down he dashed it three times into the veteran's hide,
just beneath the ribs; it was the coup de grace; the boar lay dead, and
Beauty lay half dead too; the blood rushing out of him where the tusks
had dived. Two minutes, though, and a draught of my brandy brought him
all round; and the first words he spoke were, 'Thanks Ker; you did as
you would be done by--a shot would have spoilt it all.' The brute had
crossed his path far away from the pack, and he had flung himself out
of saddle and had a neck-and-neck struggle. And that night we played
baccarat by his bedside to amuse him; and he played just as well as
ever. Now this is why I don't think he's dead; a fellow who served a
wild boar like that won't have let a train knock him over. And I don't
believe he forged that stiff, though all the evidence says so; Beauty
hadn't a touch of the blackguard in him."

With which declaration of his views, Kergenven lapsed into immutable
silence and slumberous apathy, from whose shelter nothing could tempt
him afresh; and the Colonel, with all the rest, lounged into the
anteroom, where the tables were set, and began "plunging" in earnest
at sums that might sound fabulous, were they written here. The players
staked heavily; but it was the gallery who watched around, making their
bets, and backing their favorites, that lost on the whole the most.

"Horse Guards have heard of the plunging; think we're going too fast,"
murmured the Chief to Kergenven, his Major, who lifted his brows, and
murmured back with the demureness of a maiden:

"Tell 'em it's our only vice; we're models of propriety."

Which possibly would not have been received with the belief desirable by
the skeptics of Pall Mall.

So the De Profundis was said over Bertie Cecil; and "Beauty of the
Brigades" ceased to be named in the service, and soon ceased to be even
remembered. In the steeple-chase of life there is no time to look back
at the failures, who have gone down over a "double and drop," and fallen
out of the pace.



CHAPTER XV.

"L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU."

"Did I not say he would eat fire?"

"Pardieu! C'est un brave."

"Rides like an Arab."

"Smokes like a Zouave."

"Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep--ah--h----h!
magnificent!"

"And dances like an Aristocrat; not like a tipsy Spahi!"

The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the circle
of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of inimitable
canteen-slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker who had perched astride
on a broken fragment of wall, with her barrel of wine set up on end on
the stones in front of her, and her six soldiers, her gros bebees, as
she was given maternally to calling them, lounging at their ease on the
arid, dusty turf below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though
her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was cut as
short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular feature in it. But
then--regularity! who wanted it, who would have thought the most
pure classic type a change for the better, with those dark, dancing,
challenging eyes; with that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny,
so mignon, and those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never
so handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not
seldom a short pipe itself?

She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she
was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a
Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss off her brandy or her
vermouth like a trooper; she would on occasion clinch her little brown
hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice; she was
an enfant de Paris and had all its wickedness at her fingers; she would
sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and
she would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest
giant of a Cuirassier there. And yet with all that, she was not wholly
unsexed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance of youth, and
had not left a certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a
vivandiere's uniform, and had been born in a barrack, and meant to die
in a battle; it was the blending of the two that made her piquante, made
her a notoriety in her own way; known at pleasure, and equally, in the
Army of Africa as "Cigarette," and "L'Amie du Drapeau."

"Not like a tipsy Spahi!" It was a cruel cut to her gros bebees, mostly
Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the foot of the wall,
singing the praises--with magnanimity beyond praise--of a certain
Chasseur d'Afrique.

"Ho, Cigarette!" growled a little Zouave, known as Tata Leroux. "That is
the way thou forsakest thy friends for the first fresh face."

"Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, Tata!"
responded Cigarette, with a puff of her namesake; the repartee of the
camp is apt to be rough. "He is Bel-a-faire-peur, as you nickname him."

"A woman's face!" growled the injured Tata; whose own countenance was of
the color and well-nigh of the flatness of one of the red bricks of the
wall.

"Ouf!" said the Friend of the Flag, with more expression in that single
exclamation than could be put in a volume. "He does woman's deeds, does
he? He has woman's hands, but they can fight, I fancy? Six Arabs to his
own sword the other day in that skirmish! Superb!"

"Sapristi! And what did he say, this droll, when he looked at them
lying there? Just shrugged his shoulders and rode away. 'I'd better have
killed myself; less mischief, on the whole!' Now who is to make anything
of such a man as that?"

"Ah! he did not stop to cut their gold buttons off, and steal their
cangiars, as thou wouldst have done, Tata? Well! he has not learned la
guerre," laughed Cigarette. "It was a waste; he should have brought me
their sashes, at least. By the way--when did he join?"

"Ten--twelve--years ago, or thereabouts."

"He should have learned to strip Arabs by this time, then," said
the Amie du Drapeau, turning the tap of her barrel to replenish the
wine-cup; "and to steal from them too, living or dead. Thou must take
him in hand, Tata!"

Tata laughed, considering that he had received a compliment.

"Diable! I did a neat thing yesterday. Out on the hills, there, was
a shepherd; he'd got two live geese swinging by their feet. They were
screeching--screeching--screeching!--and they looked so nice and so
plump that I could smell them, as if they were stewing in a casserole,
till I began to get as hungry as a gamin. A lunge would just have cut
the question at once; but the orders have got so strict about petting
the natives I thought I wouldn't have any violence, if the thing would
go nice and smoothly. So I just walked behind him, and tripped him up
before he knew where he was--it was a picture! He was down with his face
in the sand before you could sing Tra-la-la! Then I just sat upon him;
but gently--very gently; and what with the sand and the heat, and the
surprise, and, in truth, perhaps, a little too, my own weight, he was
half suffocated. He had never seen me; he did not know what it was that
was sitting on him; and I sent my voice out with a roar--'I am a demon,
and the fiend hath bidden me take him thy soul to-night!' Ah! how he
began to tremble, and to kick, and to quiver. He thought it was the
devil a-top of him; and he began to moan, as well as the sand would let
him, that he was a poor man, and an innocent, and the geese were the
only things he ever stole in all his life. Then I went through a little
pantomime with him, and I was very terrible in my threats, and he was
choking and choking with the sand, though he never let go of the geese.
At last I relented a little, and told him I would spare him that once,
if he gave up the stolen goods, and never lifted his head for an
hour. Sapristi! How glad he was of the terms! I dare say my weight was
unpleasant; so the geese made us a divine stew that night, and the last
thing I saw of my man was his lying flat as I left him, with his face
still down in the sand-hole."

Cigarette nodded and laughed.

"Pretty fair, Tata; but I have heard better. Bah! a grand thing
certainly, to fright a peasant, and scamper off with a goose!"

"Sacre bleu!" grumbled Tata, who was himself of opinion that his exploit
had been worthy of the feats of Harlequin; "thy heart is all gone to the
Englishman."

Cigarette laughed saucily and heartily, tickled at the joke. Sentiment
has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a black-eyed wine-seller
perched astride on a wall, and dispensing bandy-dashed wine to half a
dozen sun-baked Spahis.

"My heart is a reveil matin, Tata; it wakes fresh every day. An
Englishman! Why dost thou think him that?"

"Because he is a giant," said Tata.

Cigarette snapped her fingers:

"I have danced with grenadiers and cuirassiers quite as tall, and twice
as heavy. Apres?"

"Because he bathes--splash! Like any water-dog."

"Because he is silent."

"Because he rises in his stirrups."

"Because he likes the sea."

"Because he knows boxing."

"Because he is so quiet, and blazes like the devil underneath."

Under which mass of overwhelming proofs of nationality the Amie du
Drapeau gave in.

"Yes, like enough. Besides, the other one is English. One of the
Chasseurs d'Afrique tells me that the other one waits on him like a
slave when he can--cleans his harness, litters his horse, saves him all
the hard work, when he can do it without being found out. Where did they
come from?"

"They will never tell."

Cigarette tossed her nonchalant head, with a pout of her cherry lips,
and a slang oath.

"Paf!--they will tell it to me!"

"Thou mayest make a lion tame, a vulture leave blood, a drum beat its
own rataplan, a dead man fire a musket; but thou wilt never make an
Englishman speak when he is bent to be silent."

Cigarette launched a choice missile of barrack slang and an array
of metaphors, which their propounder thought stupendous in their
brilliancy.

"When you stole your geese, you did but take your brethren home!
Englishmen are but men. Put the wine in their head, make them whirl in
a waltz, promise them a kiss, and one turns such brains as they have
inside out, as a piou-piou turns a dead soldier's wallet. When a woman
is handsome, she is never denied. He shall tell me where he comes from.
I doubt that it is from England! See here--why not! first, he never
says God-damn; second, he don't eat his meat raw; third, he speaks very
soft; fourth, he waltzes so light, so light! fifth, he never grumbles in
his throat like an angry bear; sixth, there is no fog in him. How can he
be English with all that?"

"There are English, and English," said the philosophic Tata, who piqued
himself on being serenely cosmopolitan.

Cigarette blew a contemptuous puff of smoke.

"There was never one yet that did not growl! Pauvres diables! If they
don't use their tusks, they sit and sulk!--an Englishman is always
boxing or grumbling--the two make up his life."

Which view of Anglo-rabies she had derived from a profound study of
various vaudevilles, in which the traditional God-damn was pre-eminent
in his usual hues; and having delivered it, she sprang down from her
wall, strapped on her little barrel, nodded to her gros bebees, where
they lounged full-length in the shadow of the stone wall, and left them
to resume their game at Boc, while she started on her way, as swift and
as light as a chamois, singing, with gay, ringing emphasis that echoed
all down the hot and silent air.

Hers was a dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its youth, loving
plunder, and mischief, and mirth; caring for nothing; and always ready
with a laugh, a song, a slang repartee, or a shot from the dainty
pistols thrust in her sash, that a general of division had given her,
whichever best suited the moment. She had never shed tears in her life.

Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who, a spoiled child
of the Army from her birth, with a heart as bronzed as her cheek;
yet with odd, stray, nature-sown instincts here and there, of a
devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace that nothing could
kill--Cigarette was the pet of the Army of Africa, and was as lawless as
most of her patrons.

She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier because it
had been a soldier's "loot"; she would wear the gold plunder off dead
Arabs' dress, and never have a pang of conscience with it; she would
dance all night long, when she had a chance, like a little Bacchante;
she would shoot a man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the
world. She had had a thousand lovers, from handsome marquises of the
Guides to tawny, black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had
never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and the
sight of her own arch, defiant face, with its scarlet lips and its short
jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished cuirass, that
served her for a mirror. She was more like a handsome, saucy boy than
anything else under the sun, and yet there was that in the pretty,
impudent, little Friend of the Flag that was feminine with it
all--generous and graceful amid all her boldness, and her license, her
revelries, and the unsettled life she led in the barracks and the camps,
under the shadow of the eagles.

Away she went down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of
the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah; the hilts of the tiny pistols
glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning sunlight pouring
down unheeded on the brave, bright hawk eyes that had never, since they
first opened to the world, drooped or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or
the gaze of a lover; for the menace of death, or the presence of war.

Of course, she was a little Amazon; of course, she was a little
Guerrilla; of course, she did not know what a blush meant; of course,
her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as her mutinous mischief was
in its act; but she was "bon soldat," as she was given to say, with a
toss of her curly head; and she had some of the virtues of soldiers.
Soldiers had been about her ever since she first remembered having
a wooden casserole for a cradle, and sucking down red wine through a
pipe-stem. Soldiers had been her books, her teachers, her models, her
guardians, and, later on, her lovers, all the days of her life. She had
had no guiding-star, except the eagles on the standards; she had had no
cradle-song, except the rataplan and the reveille; she had had no
sense of duty taught her, except to face fire boldly, never to betray a
comrade, and to worship but two deities, "la Gloire" and "la France."

Yet there were tales told in the barrack-yards and under canvas of the
little Amie du Drapeau that had a gentler side. Of how softly she would
touch the wounded; of how deftly she would cure them. Of how carelessly
she would dash through under a raking fire, to take a draught of water
to a dying man. Of how she had sat by an old Grenadier's death-couch, to
sing to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at Chalons, and
she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of how she had ridden twenty
leagues on a saddleless Arab horse, to fetch the surgeon of the Spahis
to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of shot-wounds. Of how she had sent
every sou of her money to her mother, so long as that mother lived--a
brutal, drunk, vile-tongued old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes,
as the sole maternal attention, when she was but an infant. These things
were told of Cigarette, and with a perfect truth. She was a thorough
scamp, but a thorough soldier, as she classified herself. Her own sex
would have seen no good in her; but her comrades-at-arms could and did.
Of a surety, she missed virtues that women prize; but, not less of a
surety, had she caught some that they miss.

Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a greyhound, light as
a hare; glancing here and glancing there as she bounded over the
picturesque desolation of the Cashbah; it was just noon, and there were
few could brave the noon-heat as she did; it was very still; there was
only from a little distance the roll of the French kettle-drums where
the drummers of the African regiments were practicing. "Hola!" cried
Cigarette to herself, as her falcon-eyes darted right and left, and,
like a chamois, she leaped down over the great masses of Turkish ruins,
cleared the channel of a dry water-course, and alighted just in front
of a Chasseur d'Afrique, who was sitting alone on a broken fragment
of white marble, relic of some Moorish mosque, whose delicate columns,
crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, against the deep
intense blue of the cloudless sky.

He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in
the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all
the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover,
had seen hot and stern service. He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so
after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for
his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very
soft--for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, "a woman's face"--a
long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he
leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform,
with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his
knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb
cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every
sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel. She glanced at his hands,
which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that
fall to a private of Chasseurs.

"Beau lion!" she thought, "and noble, whatever he is."

But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian
regiments; she had known so many of them--those gilded butterflies of
the Chaussee d'Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche,
who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons
of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a
sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night.

She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a challenge to wine.

"Ah, ha! Tata Leroux says you are English; by the faith, he must be
right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight!
Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad
wines--not I! I know better than to drink them myself."

He started and rose; and, before he took the little wooden drinking-cup,
bowed to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance; a bow
that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection of grace.

"Ah, ma belle, is it you?" he said wearily. "You do me much honor."

Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine-barrel.
She was not used to that style of salutation. She half liked it--half
resented it. It made her wish, with an impatient scorn for the wish,
that she knew how to read and had not her hair cut short like a boy's--a
weakness the little vivandiere had never been visited with before.

"Morbleu!" she said pettishly. "You are too fine for us mon brave. In
what country, I should wonder, does one learn such dainty ceremony as
that?"

"Where should one learn courtesies, if not in France?" he answered
wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the night before at a
guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, for it was almost the
first time he had been in the city since the night when he had
thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons and the Bedouins to Claude de
Chanrellon; but his thoughts were far from her in this moment.

"Ouf! You have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue!" cried
Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment than that. From
generals and staff officers, as from drummers and trumpeters, she was
accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious as sugared chocolate, and
ardent as flirtation, with a barrack flavor about it, commonly is; she
would, as often as not, to be sure, finish it with the butt-end of her
pistol, or the butt-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for
all that, she liked it, and resented its omission. "They say you are
English, but I don't believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the
double L's too well. A Spaniard?"

"Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so?"

She laughed. "A Greek, then?"

"Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards?"

"An Austrian? You waltz like a White Coat!"

He shook his head.

She stamped her little foot into the ground--a foot fit for a model,
with its shapely military boot; spurred, too, for Cigarette rode like a
circus-rider.

"Say what you are, then, at once."

"A soldier of France. Can you wish me more?"

For the first time her eyes flashed and softened--her one love was the
tricolor.

"True!" she said simply. "But you were not always a soldier of France?
You joined, they say, twelve years ago. What were you before then?"

She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her elbows on
the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him with all the frank
curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imaginable, as she launched the
question point-blank.

"Before!" he said slowly. "Well--a fool."

"You belonged in the majority, then!" said Cigarette, with a piquance
made a thousand times more piquant by the camp slang she spoke in.
"You should not have had to come into the ranks, mon ami;
majorities--specially that majority--have very smooth sailing
generally!"

He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him.

"Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Bah! one is never young, and always young in camps. Young? Pardieu!
When I was four I could swear like a grenadier, plunder like a prefet,
lie like a priest, and drink like a bohemian."

Yet--with all that--and it was the truth, the brow was so open under the
close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under the sun-tan, the mouth
so rich and so arch in its youth!

"Why did you come into the service?" she went on, before he had a chance
to answer her. "You were born in the Noblesse--bah! I know an aristocrat
at a glance! Now many of those aristocrats come; shoals of them; but it
is always for something. They all come for something; most of them
have been ruined by the lionnes, a hundred million of francs gone in
a quarter! Ah, bah! what blind bats the best of you are! They have
gambled, or bet, or got into hot water, or fought too many duels or
caused a court scandal, or something; all the aristocrats that come to
Africa are ruined. What ruined you, M. l'Aristocrat?"

"Aristocrat? I am none. I am a Corporal of the Chasseurs."

"Diable! I have known a Duke a Corporal! What ruined you?"

"What ruins most men, I imagine--folly."

"Folly, sure enough!" retorted Cigarette, with scornful acquiescence.
She had no patience with him. He danced so deliciously, he looked so
superb, and he would give her nothing but these absent answers. "Wisdom
don't bring men who look as you look into the ranks of the volunteers
for Africa. Besides, you are too handsome to be a sage!"

He laughed a little.

"I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty to be a cynic."

"A what?" She did not know the word. "Is that a good cigar you have?
Give me one. Do women smoke in your old country?"

"Oh, yes--many of them."

"Where is it, then?"

"I have no country--now."

"But the one you had?"

"I have forgotten I ever had one."

"Did it treat you ill, then?"

"Not at all."

"Had you anything you cared for in it?"

"Well--yes."

"What was it? A woman?"

"No--a horse."

He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more figures
slowly in the sand.

"Ah!"

She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she would only have
laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than
complimentary in her estimate of her own sex.

"There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew," she went on softly,
"loved a horse like that;--he would have died for Cossack--but he was
a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what I like to play myself. Well,
one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone;
and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left. Staked and
lost the horse! He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in
his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once--twice--thrice--and
shot himself through the heart."

"Poor fellow!" murmured the Chasseur d'Afrique, in his chestnut beard.

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; "he
had gambled away a good deal too," she thought. "It is always the same
old story with them."

"Your cigars are good, mon lion," she said impatiently, as she sprang
up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing
out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the
vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon.
"Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is! If you had
been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn
with you in the cancan!"

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow's, the
Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her
advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost
speed, singing all the louder out of bravado. "To have nothing more
to say to me after dancing with me all night!" thought Cigarette, with
fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis
had ever experienced.

She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that momentary
wish that she knew how to read and looked less like a boy--just because
a Chasseur with white hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow!
She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history,
and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those
cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. "Let him take
care!" muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white
teeth; so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight
before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol. "Let him take
care! If he offend me there are five hundred swords that will thrust
civility into him, five hundred shots that will teach him the cost of
daring to provoke Cigarette!"

En route through the town her wayward way took the pretty brunette
Friend of the Flag as many devious meandering as a bird takes in a
summer's day flight, when it stops here for a berry, there for a
grass seed, here to dip its beak into cherries, there to dart after
a dragon-fly, here to shake its wings in a brook, there to poise on a
lily-bell.

She loitered in a thousand places, for Cigarette knew everybody; she
chatted with a group of Turcos, she emptied her barrel for some
Zouaves, she ate sweetmeats with a lot of negro boys, she boxed a little
drummer's ear for slurring over the "r'lin tintin" at his practice, she
drank a demi-tasse with some officers at a cafe; she had ten minutes'
pistol-shooting, where she beat hollow a young dandy of the Guides who
had come to look at Algiers for a week, and made even points with one
of the first shots of the "Cavalry a pied," as the Algerian antithesis
runs. Finally she paused before the open French window of a snow-white
villa, half-buried in tamarisk and orange and pomegranate, with the
deep-hued flowers glaring in the sun, and a hedge of wild cactus
fencing it in; through the cactus she made her way as easily as a rabbit
burrows; it would have been an impossibility to Cigarette to enter by
any ordinary means; and balancing herself lightly on the sill for a
second, stood looking in at the chamber.

"Ho, M. le Marquis! the Zouaves have drunk all my wine up; fill me my
keg with yours for once--the very best burgundy, mind. I'm half afraid
your cellar will hurt my reputation."

The chamber was very handsome, hung and furnished in the very best Paris
fashion, and all glittering with amber and ormolu and velvets; in it
half a dozen men--officers of the cavalry--were sitting over their noon
breakfast, and playing at lansquenet at the same time. The table was
crowded with dishes of every sort, and wines of every vintage; and the
fragrance of their bouquet, the clouds of smoke, and the heavy scent of
the orange blossom without, mingled together in an intense perfume. He
whom she addressed, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, laughed, and looked up.

"Ah, is it thee, my pretty brunette? Take what thou wantest out of the
ice pails."

"The best growths?" asked Cigarette, with the dubious air and caution of
a connoisseur.

"Yes!" said M. le Marquis, amused with the precautions taken with his
cellar, one of the finest in Algiers. "Come in and have some breakfast,
ma belle. Only pay the toll."

Where he sat between the window and the table he caught her in his arms
and drew her pretty face down; Cigarette, with the laugh of a saucy
child, whisked her cigar out of her mouth and blew a great cloud of
smoke in his eyes. She had no particular fancy for him, though she had
for his wines; shouts of mirth from the other men completed the Marquis'
discomfiture, as she swayed away from him, and went over to the other
side of the table, emptying some bottles unceremoniously into her
wine-keg; iced, ruby, perfumy claret that she could not have bought
anywhere for the barracks.

"Hola!" cried the Marquis, "thou art not generally so coy with thy
kisses, petite."

Cigarette tossed her head.

"I don't like bad clarets after good! I've just been with your Corporal,
'Bel-a-faire-peur'; you are no beauty after him, M. le Colonel."

Chateauroy's face darkened; he was a colossal-limbed man, whose bone was
iron, and whose muscles were like oak-fibers; he had a dark, keen head
like an eagle's; the brow narrow, but very high, looking higher because
the close-cut hair was worn off the temples; thin lips hidden by heavy
curling mustaches, and a skin burned black by long African service.
Still he was fairly handsome enough not to have muttered so heavy an
oath as he did at the vivandiere's jest.

"Sacre bleu! I wish my corporal were shot! One can never hear the last
of him."

Cigarette darted a quick glance at him. "Oh, ho; jealous, mon brave!"
thought her quick wits. "And why, I wonder?"

"You haven't a finer soldier in your Chasseurs, mon cher; don't wish him
shot, for the good of the service," said the Viscount de Chanrellon, who
had now a command of his own in the Light Cavalry of Algiers. "Pardieu!
If I had to choose whether I'd be backed by 'Bel-a-faire-peur,' or by
six other men in a skirmish, I'd choose him, and risk the odds."

Chateauroy tossed off his burgundy with a contemptuous impatience.

"Diable! That is the exaggerated nonsense one always hears about this
fellow--as if he were a second Roland, or a revivified Bayard! I see
nothing particular in him, except that he's too fine a gentleman for the
ranks."

"Fine? ah!" laughed Cigarette. "He made me bow this morning like a
chamberlain; and his beard is like carded silk, and he has such woman's
hands, mon Dieu! But he is a croc-mitaine, too."

"Rather!" laughed Claude de Chanrellon, as magnificent a soldier himself
as ever crossed swords. "I said he would eat fire the very minute he
played that queer game of dice with me years ago. I wish I had him
instead of you, Chateauroy; like lightning in a charge; and yet the very
man for a dangerous bit of secret service that wants the softness of a
panther. We all let our tongues go too much, but he says so little--just
a word here, a word there--when one's wanted--no more; and he's the
devil's own to fight."

The Marquis heard the praise of his Corporal, knitting his heavy brows;
it was evident the private was no favorite with him.

"The fellow rides well enough," he said, with an affectation of
carelessness; "there--for what I see--is the end of his marvels. I wish
you had him, Claude, with all my soul."

"Oh, ha!" cried Chanrellon, wiping the Rhenish off his tawny mustaches,
"he should have been a captain by this if I had. Morbleu! He is a
splendid sabreur--kills as many men to his own sword as I could myself,
when it comes to a hand-to-hand fight; breaks horses in like magic;
rides them like the wind; has a hawk's eye over open country; obeys like
clockwork; what more can you want?"

"Obeys! Yes!" said the Colonel of Chasseurs, with a snarl. "He'd obey
without a word if you ordered him to walk up to a cannon's mouth, and
be blown from it; but he gives you such a d----d languid grand seigneur
glance as he listens that one would think he commanded the regiment."

"But he's very popular with your men, too?"

"Monsieur, the worst quality a corporal can have. His idea of
maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and give them
tobacco."

"Pardieu! Not a bad way, either, with our French fire-eaters. He knows
them that he has to deal with; that brave fellow. Your squadrons would
go to the devil after him."

The Colonel gave a grim laugh.

"I dare say nobody knows the way better."

Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne by great
glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another's soup, pulling
the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with a relish, and devouring
truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, did not lose a word, and
catching the inflection of Chateauroy's voice, settled with her own
thoughts that "Bel-a-faire-peur" was not a fair field or a smooth course
with his Colonel. The weather-cock heart of the little "Friend of the
Flag" veered round, with her sex's common custom, to the side that was
the weakest.

"Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!" she cried, while she ate M. le Colonel's
foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be
expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the
better spiced by being stolen "by the rules of war"--"whatever else
your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ha! I know the
aristocrats--I do! Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is
so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such
diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and
nonchalant. Give me the aristocrats--the real thing, you know. Not the
ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread--but the
old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur."

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a
sore point in him. He was of the First Empire Nobility, and he was
weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless iron-nerved soldier, to be
discontented with the great fact that his father had been a hero of
the Army of Italy, and scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because
impatient of the minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to
have his first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a
postilion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais.

"Ah, my brunette!" he answered with a rough laugh, "have you taken
my popular Corporal for your lover? You should give your old friends
warning first, or he may chance to get an ugly spit on a saber."

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne. She felt
for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her brown, clear
cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such lovers as these.

"Ma foi!" she said coolly. "He would be more likely to spit than be
spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to see him in a duel; there
is not a prettier sight in the world when both men have science. As for
fighting for me! Morbleau! I will thank nobody to have the impudence to
do it, unless I order them out. Coqueline got shot for me, you remember;
he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that
they disfigured him terribly--it was quite a pity. I said then I would
have no more handsome men fight about me. You may, if you like, M. le
Black Hawk."

Which title she gave with a saucy laugh, hitting with a chocolate bonbon
the black African-burnt visage of the omnipotent chief she had the
audacity to attack. High or low, they were all the same to Cigarette.
She would have "slanged" the Emperor himself with the self-same
coolness, and the Army had given her a passport of immunity so wide that
it would have fared ill with anyone who had ever attempted to bring the
vivandiere to book for her uttermost mischief.

"By the way!" she went on, quick as thought, with her reckless,
devil-may-care gayety. "One thing! Your Corporal will demoralize the
army of Africa, monsieur!"

"He shall have an ounce of cold lead before he does. What in?"

"He will demoralize it," said Cigarette, with a sagacious shake of her
head. "If they follow his example we shan't have a Chasseur, or a Spahi,
or a Piou-piou, or a Sapeur worth anything--"

"Sacre! What does he do?" The Colonel's strong teeth bit savagely
through his cigar; he would have given much to have been able to find
a single thing of insubordination or laxity of duty in a soldier who
irritated and annoyed him, but who obeyed him implicitly, and was one of
the most brilliant "fire-eaters" of his regiment.

"He won't only demoralize the army," pursued the Cigarette, with
vivacious eloquence, "but if his example is followed, he'll ruin the
Prefets, close the Bureaux, destroy the Exchequer, beggar all the
officials, make African life as tame as milk and water, and rob you, M.
le Colonel, of your very highest and dearest privilege!"

"Sacre bleu!" cried her hearers, as their hands instinctively sought
their swords; "what does he do?"

Cigarette looked at them out of her arch black lashes.

"Why, he never thieves from the Arabs! If the fashion comes in, adieu to
our occupation. Court-martial him, Colonel!"

With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curls back of her
temples, and launched herself into lansquenet with all the ardor of
a gambler and the vivacity of a child; her eyes flashing, her cheeks
flushing, her little teeth set, her whole soul in a whirl of the game,
made all the more riotous by the peals of laughter from her comrades
and the wines that were washed down like water. Cigarette was a terrible
little gamester, and had gaming made very easy to her, for it was the
creed of the Army that her losses never counted, but her gains were paid
to her often double or treble. Indeed, so well did she play, and so
well did the goddess of hazard favor her, that she might have grown a
millionaire on the fruits of her dice and her cards, but for this fact,
that whatever the little Friend of the Flag had in her hands one
hour was given away the next, to the first wounded soldier, or ailing
veteran, or needy Arab woman that required the charity.

As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the Jockey Club; but
Cigarette was never the richer for it. "Bah!" she would say, when they
told her of her heedlessness, "money is like a mill, no good standing
still. Let it turn, turn, turn, as fast as ever it can, and the more
bread will come from it for the people to eat."

The vivandiere was by instinct a fine political economist.



Meanwhile, where she had left him among the stones of the ruined mosque,
the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-a-faire-peur, in a double sense,
because of his "woman's face," as Tata Leroux termed it, and because
of the terror his sword had become through North Africa, sat motionless
with his right arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust into
the sand; the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce, burning glare on
the chestnut masses of his beard and the bright glitter of his uniform.

He was a dashing cavalry soldier, who had had a dozen wounds cut over
his body by the Bedouin swords, in many and hot skirmishes; who had
waited through sultry African nights for the lion's tread, and had
fought the desert-king and conquered; who had ridden a thousand miles
over the great sand waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept
under the stars with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his
hand, all through the night; who had served, and served well, in fierce,
arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and in close
discipline; who had blent the verve, the brilliance, the daring, the
eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of the French Chasseur, with
something that was very different, and much more tranquil.

Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French Service, he sat
alone here in the shadow of the column, thoughtful, motionless, lost in
silence.

In his left hand was a Galignani, six months old, and his eye rested on
a line in the obituary:

"On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. Denzil,
Viscount Royallieu; aged 90."



CHAPTER XVI.

CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.

Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen altars of
Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile,
and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-like
rings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath
beguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment,
lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and
chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian
saluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco of
the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine dice
are rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange are
trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose
gardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla
laid down dominion.

And here--in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in the
Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirrored
sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athens
and the gold of Spain--here Cigarette danced the cancan!

A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Pique
where feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam,
with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under
columned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was written
where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along
porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its
impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician
warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods
bear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry
to Rome was quoted.

The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent of
Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that towered
in youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silvered
with age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian
hordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners,
flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie
flaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes
of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton's
heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license,
heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the
purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once
dishonored and adored.

Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets,
under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they
had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the
Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer.
And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light
feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who
never remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb.

It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried
mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an
imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches
of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel
wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the
Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed
into brightness under the jets of flame--trumpery, yet trumpery which,
thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did not
vulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor was bare
and well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy
odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu. Riotous
music pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silvery
ring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack slang,
camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly.
Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes,
and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humor
prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had
just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult
of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and
grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women
stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.

She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had danced
till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in the
saddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, who
never gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing now
like a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a
long summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then,
when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, on
the green space before a tent full of general officers, on the bare
floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or as
here in the music-hall of a Cafe.

Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend
of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of
soldiers--war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff with
wounds--she would do it till they forgot their ills and got as
intoxicated with it as with champagne. For her gros bebees, if they
were really in want of it, she would do anything. She would flout a
star-covered general, box the ears of a brilliant aid, send killing
missiles of slang at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refuse
point-blank a Russian grand duke; but to "mes enfants," as she was given
to calling the rough tigers and grisly veterans of the Army of Africa,
Cigarette was never capricious; however mischievously she would rally,
or contemptuously would rate them, when they deserved it.

And she was dancing for them now.

Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with a
scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her gay
little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look like a
fuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, on its
delicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild grace of an
Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl--as untutored and instinctive
in her as its song to a bird, as its swiftness to a chamois. To see
Cigarette was like drinking light, fiery wines, whose intoxication was
gay as mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa,
all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the caprices
of her sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering,
circling, whirling; glancing like a saber's gleam, tossing like a
flower's head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an arrow,
darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an instant
resting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lily
rests on the water's breast--Cigarette en Bacchante no man could resist.

When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium,
she did with her beholders what she would. The famous Cachucha,
that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontifical
vestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets and
the gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible,
more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It
was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.

All her heart was in it--that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk
and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child,
which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes,
with which she laced her dashing little uniform.

In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil
under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia,
in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the
earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of
black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the
Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves,
Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life
seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her
little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in those
tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch
the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it
afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.

So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famous
group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back
from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the
floor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she
beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her
impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators were
renowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the ear
of Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of the
day of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men who
had the salient features of all the varied species that make up the
soldiers of Africa.

There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped round
his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a
pestilence--the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis;
brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once
back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for
forage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but to
the service a slave, and in the combat a lion.

There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive
beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to
neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences,
but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal
adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled
unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.

There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest,
happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing the
camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of the
battalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press on
laughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and
as full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.

There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for that
unceremonious slang phrase--a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blas
and the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand and
the wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an
African, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; with
a purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his men
through the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd
over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yet
who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt,
and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on the
loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of
David for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club
life.

There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, with
a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; a
veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdog
his lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; brief
as Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or the
chastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word--"Fire."

There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highest
repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speed
that could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood alone
once the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them
back, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and his
pantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framing
a matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare as
a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden
treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron of
couscoussou to a tom-cat.

There was Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from
the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic
expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a
born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion,
the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his
graceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradise
was a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven was a duel
with an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but with the Italian
laziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the sun, and with such
episodes of romance, mischief, love, and deviltry in his twenty-five
years of existence as would leave behind them all the invention of
Dumas, pere ou fils.

All these and many more like them were the spectators of Cigarette's
ballet; applauding with the wild hurrah of the desert, with the clashing
of spurs, with the thunder of feet, with the demoniac shrieks of
irrepressible adoration and delight.

And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the ring of
familiar faces, and glance from them with an impatient disappointment
as she danced; her gros bebees were not enough for her. She wanted a
Chasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and she
shook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and
went on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless
abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawk
that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, and
wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.

L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses-marais. He
was in the house; she knew it; had she not seen him drinking with some
others, or rather paying for all, but taking little himself, just as she
entered? He was in the house, this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur--and was
not here to see her dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars;
the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amie
du Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Bataillons to
fantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Algiers to Oran, in the
Champagne of Messieurs les Generaux as in the Cric of the Loustics round
a camp-fire!

He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden ledge of a
narrow window in an inner room, from which, one by one, some Spahis and
some troopers of his own tribu, with whom he had just been drinking such
burgundies and brandies as the place could give, had sloped away, one by
one, under the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction,
however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were emptied;
bottles more in number and higher in cost than was prudent in a corporal
who had but his pay, and that scant enough to keep himself, and who had
known what it was to find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a
luxury beyond all reach, and to have to sell his whole effects up to the
last thing in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dying
of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African fever.

But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the reckless life
of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, brotherly fellowship
that bound the soldiers of each battalion, or each squadron, so closely
in a fraternity of which every member took as freely as he gave; its
gay, careless carpe diem camp-philosophy--the unconscious philosophy of
men who enjoyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because they
knew they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its swift and
vivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one hour rich as a king
in loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to be
the next day famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urging
their sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, glad to
sell a cartouche if they dared so break regimental orders, or to rifle
a hen-roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; changing
everything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and driven to
pay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched grass to keep
their beasts alive through the sickliness of a sirocco.

All these taught no caution to any nature normally without it; and
the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom they named
Bel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had bound his red waist-sash
about his loins, and the officers of the bureau had looked over the new
volunteer, murmuring admiringly in their teeth "This gallant will do
great things!" had been that all he had was given, free as the winds, to
any who asked or needed.

The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own
manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country,
a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and
poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in
the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out
by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one
reproach, that made his fellow soldiers impatient and suspicious of
him, was that he refused any share in those rough arguments of blows
and lunges with which they were accustomed to persuade every victim
they came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or drink, or
riches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skins
of brandy and coins hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappy
as to own in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin
was as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let him
be ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an eccentricity,
and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which not even his daring
and his popularity could wholly procure him pardon.

But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness with which
his pay was lent, given, or spent in the very moment of its receipt. If
a man of his tribu wanted anything, he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur would
offer his last sous to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would sell
the last trifle he possessed to get enough to assist his comrade. It
was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of his
lawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and made
them forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habit
of solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a
fraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and the
sentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.

One of those moods was on him now.

He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had
laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them
at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and
the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in
while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the
fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of
the casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his
teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and
clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.

The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow
leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven
stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the
dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,
stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry
sky above its four high walls.

He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him;
there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrack
or bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded
the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the
hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the
sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his
future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on
which he gazed.

Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-ground
for the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructor
had watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, "This is no raw
recruit,--this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than
we can teach. He has served before now--served in some emperor's picked
guard!"

And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign,
the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendid
soldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, of
exploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array
of military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by
unnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had only
slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stood
now--a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique--a step only just accorded
him because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number in
countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside any
longer.

The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man--his Chief.

Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could come
into actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the great
man to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged him
from all advancement. His thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at an
inspection, the accidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript
had furnished pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent
opprobrium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in his
saddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage than
the blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze of his
forehead. His thoughts were on it now.

"There are many losses that are bitter enough," he mused; "but there is
not one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!"

A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrill
violins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook him
from his reverie.

"They are bons enfants," he thought, with a half smile, as he listened;
"they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever
were in that old world of mine."

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of
Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing to
exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the
Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her
mother tongue.

"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been
drinking at his expense, you rascal?"

The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.

"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere;
"you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your
children, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draught
of brandy!"

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence
was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs
at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared
forth a defiance.

"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He
kills women--he kills women with his lady's grace!"

"He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat
them with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do,
Barbe-Grise," retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the
absent. "White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other
people's pockets as yours are!"

This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the
screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom
the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was
getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the
infinite glee of the whole ballroom.

"Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.

"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twist
cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours;
but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if
they could touch such canaille."

"Canaille?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. "If you were but a man!"

"What would you do to me, brigand?" screamed Cigarette, in fits of
laughter. "Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you
last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?"

A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she
had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy
young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him,
and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.

"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror of
women--this soldier aristocrat!"

The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of
laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.
Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his
eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of
glass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and
singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.

At the sound o