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 Vivandieres 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.
Berties 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 boys 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 himby 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; lookhis eyes are unclosing now. Could you do me the favor to go to his lordship? His grief made him perfectly wildso dangerous to his life at his age. We could only persuade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the plea of Mr. Berkeleys 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 favorites 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 boys 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 Peers 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 ityou 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 hawks eyes flashed their glittering fire. You are like the man I cursed living and curse dead. You look at me with Alan Berties eyes, you speak to me with Alan Berties voice; I loved your mother, I worshiped her; butyou are his son, not mine!
The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The blood flushed Berties 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 fathers, 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!
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 mothers 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 Ladys 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 enemys lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at the jails of St. Georges, or of St. Pauls, 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. Stephens; and one mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enough and false enough to his colors to meditate deserting to the enemys camp, and giving himself up at St. Georgesbecause a fellow once hanged is let alone, you know!
The Household were very hard pressed through the seasona crowded and brilliant one; and Cecil was in request most of all. Bertie, somehow or other, was the fashionmarvelous 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 evenings 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 girls 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 seconds 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 earthquakegone 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 Lords, 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. Youre horribly imprudent!
Not a bit of it, rejoined Beauty serenely. That is the superior wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbors wifeshe cant 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 couldnt make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran away with me each time!