I couldnt help it, pleaded the lad, with coaxing and almost piteous apology. I backed Grosvenors play, and you know hes always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldnt tell hed go a crowner and have such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, Bertie? I darent 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 couldnt sell her in a minute
Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lads 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, theres 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 Terrails, and tossed the whole across the room to the boy.
There you are, young one! But dont borrow of any but your own people again, Berk. We dont do that. No, no!no thanks! Shut up all that. If ever you get in a hole, Ill take you out if I can. Good-bywill you go to the Lords? Better notnothing to see, and still less to hear. All stale. Thats the only comfort for uswe 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 brothers 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 anothers 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 dont believe Ive left myself money enough to take Willon and Rake and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I shouldnt have kept enough to take my own ticket with!that would be no end of a sell. On my word I dont know how much theres left on the dressing-table. Well! I cant help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I cant have Berks 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 boys 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 chargers 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; its 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 dEss for an hour before we come up, might do a little good. Ill 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 Majestys 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. Stephens, 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 butchers tray was pressed against his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of Cecils 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 Rakes 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-Zus 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 hunters 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; its the whip who carries you off to a division just when youve sat down to your turbot; its the ten seconds by which you miss the train; its the dust that gets in your eyes as you go down to Epsom; its the pretty little rose note that went by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from madame; its the dog that always will run wild into the birds; its the cook who always will season the white soup wrongit 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 Lines nothing half so bad as this; one day in a London mob beats a years campaigning; whats 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 Demireps last novel, a bath well dashed with eau de cologne, and some glasses of Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him a little; but he was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy, and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the Duchess of Lydiard-Tregoze, where the prettiest French Countess of her time asked him if anything was the matter.
Yes! said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melancholy in what the woman called his handsome Spanish eyes, I have had a great misfortune; we have been on duty all day!
He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though his temper was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition of a villa, prescribed Crème de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession, with a considerable amount of pine-apple ice at three oclock 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 believehe 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 Viscounts 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 tailors bill, and post obits had long ago forestalled the few hundred a year that, under his mothers settlements, would come to him at the Viscounts 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 studs 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 Guardsmans (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 demurenessor consummate impudence, whichever you like. Were playing Solitaire. Interesting game. Queer fix, though, the balls in thats left all alone in the middle, dont 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 Beautys 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 himnever thought about himknew, 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 eventof a great contest to be met when the day should breakof 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.