Under Two Flags

CHAPTER VII

AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was once—only once!”

“Ah, by Jove! And what saved you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: