LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAICN 823 D374U 1867a v.l The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN ftUR * «"7* MAY 1 ♦ 1978 iJUNl5 1978 % . DEC 2 6 \995 m 21 m mzo im AU629; im APR 2 zoos L161 — O-1096 7 UNDER TWO FLAGS , A STORY OF THE HOUSEHOLD AND THE DESERT. By OUIDA, AUTHOR or " STRATrrMOEE," " CHANDOS," " IDALIA," &C. " Ccur ^aiKant sc fait Xlogaame. IX THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON : CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1807. LONDON : PRINTED BT C. VrillTING. BEALFOKT HOUSE, STRAND. S2 3 V.I ' COLONEL POULETT CAMERON, C.B., K.C.T. «&S., &c., 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 OE LOCHIEL," THIS STORY OF A SOLDIER'S LIFE I S DEDICATED IK Ik \ SINCERE F K I E X D S H 1 P. AVIS AU LECTEUR. This Story was originally written for a military periodical. It has been fortunate enough to re- ceive 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 follow the idiomatic and special meaning attached to those 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. Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2010 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/undertwoflagssto01ouid CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER I. PAGE Beauty of the Brigades" 1 CHAPTER II. The Loose Box, and the Tabagie 22 CHAPTER III. The Soldier's Blue Riband 41 CHAPTER IV. Love a la Mode 74 CHAPTER V. Under the Keeper's Tree . . .' . . . 95 CHAPTER VI. The End OP A Ringing Run 110 CHAPTER VII. After a Richivjond Dinner 127 YIll CONTENTS. CHAPTER VIII. PAGE A Stag Hunt au Clair de la Lune . . . .160 CHAPTER IX. The Painted Bit 182 CHAPTER X. " Petite Reine" 199 CHAPTER XL EoR A Woman's Sake 230 CHAPTER XII. The King's last Service 262 CHAPTER XIII. In the Cafe of the Chasseurs 296 CHAPTER XIV. " De Profundis" BEFORE "Plunging" .... 310 UNDER TWO FLAGS. CHAPTER I. " 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 First Life Guards, with that article of hunting toggery suspended in his right hand as he paused, before going up-stairs, to deliver his opinions- vnth characteristic weight and vivacity to the stud- groom, " he is uncommon particular about 'em ; and if his leathers ain't 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 ain't denying that, specially when you've jacks, and moccasins, and moor boots, and Russia-leather crickets, and turf hacks, and Hythe boots, and waterproofs, and all manner of varnish things for dress, that none of the boys will do right VOL. I. B 2 UXDEE TWO FLAGS. unless YOU look after 'em yourself. But is it likely tliat 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 Y\diat a piece of work it is to get 'em all of a colour, and how like they are to come mottled, and ho^Y 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 Ydll to make 'em cut a shine oYcr the country! How should he know? I don't com- plain of that ; bless you, he never thinks. It's ' do this, Rake,' ' do that,' and he never remember 't isn'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 neither ; 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 bouglit 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, '^ BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES . 3 rather more iuxuriouslv accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie Cecil was never behind his fel- lows in anything ; besides, he was one of the " cracks" of the Household, and women sent him pretty things enough to fill the Palais Eoyal. The dressing-table was littered with Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered bottles, and all the perfumes of Araby represented by Breidenbach and Rimmel. The dressing-case was of silver, with the name studded on the lid in turquoises ; the brushes, boot- jacks, boot-trees, whip-stands, were of ivory and tor- toiseshell ; a couple of tiger-skins were on the hearth, with a retriever and blue gi'eyhound in }X)Ssession ; above the mantelpiece were crossed swords in all the varieties of gilt, gold, silver, ivor\', aluminum, chiselled and embossed hilts ; and on the w^alls were a few per- fect French pictures, vrith. the portraits of a greyhound dravrn by Landseer, of a steeple-chaser by Harry Hall, one or two of Herring's hunters, and two or tlu'ee fair women in crayons. The hangings of the room were silken and rose-coloured, 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 despatched to various destinations, and velvet and silk bags for bank-notes, cigars, or vesu- vians, embroidered by feminine fingers, and as useless as those pretty fingers themselves. On the softest of b2 4 UNDER TWO FLAGS. sofas, half dressed, and liaviiig half an hour before splashed like a water dog out of the bath, as big as a small pond, in the dressing-chamber beyond, was the Hon. Bertie himself, second son of Viscount Royal- lieu, known generally in the Brigades as " Beauty." The appellative, gained at Eton, was in no way un- deserved. 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, thorough-bred, languid, non- chalant, with a certain latent recklessness under the impassive 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 chesnut ; 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 tlie handsomest man in all the Household Regiments — not even ex- cepting that splendid golden-haired Colossus, his oldest friend and closest comrade, known as " the Seraph." He looked now at the tops that Rake swung in his hand and shook his head. " Better, Rake, but not right yet. Cath you get that tawny colour 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 favour it much the most," laughed Cecil to himself, floating fresh clouds of turkish about him. "Willonup?" " 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 stations 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 ; Pake 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 111 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, b UNDER TWO FLAGS. to St. Jolin's Wood : and that white bouquet to ]\Irs. 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 m 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 Guenevere wants him. I'll take him down vrith me. But first put me into harness. Rake ; it's getting late." Mui'muring which multiplicity of directions, for Rake to catch as he could, in the sof tiest aiid sleepiest of tones, Bertie Cecil di-ank a glass of curacoa, put his tall lithe limbs indolently off liis sofa, and sur- rendered himself to the mart\Tdom of cuirass and gorget, standing six feet one without his spm-red jacks, but light-built and full of gi^ace as a deer, or his weight would not have been what it was in gentle- man-rider races from the Hunt steeple-chase at La Marche to the Grand National in the Shires. " As if Parliament couldn't meet without di'acroina; us through the dust ! The idiots wiite about ^ the swells in the Guards,' as if we had all fun and no work, and knew nothing of the rough of the Ser^dce. I should like to learn what they call sitting motion- less 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 ^' BEAUTY OF THE BEIGADES. 7 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 ha^-ing a summons about it the next day I 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 Ghoorkahs or Bhoteahs, would be light work compared ! " murmured Cecil, mth the most plaintive pity for the hardships of life in the Household, w^hile Eake, 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 gilt mountings, and contemplated with flat- tering self-complacency leathers white as snow, jacks brilliant as black varnish could make them, and silver spm's 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 embroideiy, 8 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 ; bat 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 wistf ulness 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 new comer, 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 w^eakness 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 pre^dous scarcity of her bread-and-cheese grew imme- diately intolerant of any wine less than 90s. the dozen), said that Cecil cared for nothing longer than a fortnight, unless it were 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 tone of a hundred a month ; and also. " BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES." 9 it was not true, for besides Forest King, lie loved his young brother Berkeley : — which, however, she neither knew nor guessed. " Beastly ! " replied that young gentleman, in re- ference 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 huny, however, and he said this as lazily as possible, shaking the white horsehair over his helmit, and drawing in deep draughts of Turkish 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 veiy girlish in his face and his ways. On which confession. Rake retired into the bath-room ; he could hear just as well there, and a sense of ^lecorum 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 cJwse-ld 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 cham- bers, and the possibility of that person's appearance in the witness-box of the Divorce Court. It was in 10 UXDEE TWO FLAGS. no way his passion that blinded him — he did not pnt the steam on hke that, and never went in for any distni'bing emotion — it was simply habit and forget- fulness 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 im- penetrable school, and used to his brother's set, a cool, listless, recldess, thorough-bred, 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 gi'atified ; but he had some- thing of girlish weakness in his nature, and a reserve in his temperament that was with difficulty con- quered. 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 do\\m on him. Cecil gave a long low whistle, and drew a medi- tative whiff from his meerschaum. '' BEAUTY OF THE BKIGADES." 11 '' Tres clier, you're always wanting money. So am I. So is eveiybocly. The normal state of man is to want money. Two ponies. What's it for— eh?" " I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it me, and I told him I would send it him in th^ 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." " Hea^y 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 o-ave 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 apolog}'. '' I backed Grosvenor's play, and you know he's always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldn't tell he'd have such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, B^ie ? I daren't ask the governor ; and besides, I told Poulteney he should have it this morning. "\Yliat 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 12 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 pros- pect, he sauntered to his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet and gold-filigreed absurdities, and shook out all the bank-notes there were in it. There were fives and tens enough to count up 45^. 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-bye. 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 ap- proaching a scene, and so eager was he to escape his brother's gi'atitude. The boy had taken the notes with delighted thanks indeed, but with that tranquil and unprotesting readiness with which spoiled child- ishness, or unhesitating selfishness, accepts gifts and sacrifices from another's generosity, which have been so general that they have ceased to have magnitude. " BEAUTY OF THE BEIGADES." 13 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 an- swered, 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 moustaches, 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 remem- bered I — 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?. 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 14 UXDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 inevitabihties two minutes together, shook liis charger s bridle and can- tered down Piccadilly towards the barracks, while Black Douglas reared, curvetted, made as if he would kick, and finally ended by " passaging " dovni half the length of the road, to the prominent peril of all passers- by, and looking eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and foam-flecked, while he thus expressed his disap- probation of forming part of the escort from Palace to Parliament. " Home Secretary should see about it ; it's abomi- nable ! If we must come among them they ought to be made a little odoriferous first. A couple of fire- engines now, pla^-ing on them continuously "VNith 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 ' BiU 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 chai'gers' flanks, while Black Douglas ^^ BEAUTY OF THE BEIGADES." 15 stood like a rock, tliough a butcher's tray was pressed against liis withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of Cecil's pro- phetic horror, vras 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,'* sighed Bertie, witli a yawn of utter famine for want of somethino; to drink and somethino; to smoke, were it only a glass of brown sherry and a Httle 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 odour 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 16 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 county member who catches you by the button in the lobby, 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, w^ith 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 charg- ing an oyster-stall, or a parapet of fascines to a brist- ling row of umbrellas ? " Which questions as to the relative hardships of the two Arms was a question of military interest never answered, as Cecil SQattered the umbrellas right and " BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES." 17 left, and dashed from the Houses of Parhament 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 the bar- racks, could not console Cecil for fog, wind, mud, oyster -vendors, bad odours, and the uproar and riff- raff of the streets ; specially when his throat was as diy as a limekiln, 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 ]iot thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though his temper was, till the Zu-Zu, in VOL. I. C 18 UNDER TWO FLAGS. her diamond-edition of a villa, prescribed Creme de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession, witli a con- siderable amount of pine-apple ice at three o'clock in the morning, ^Yhich 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 in- souciance 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-chains 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 favourite came " nowhere," or his book was wrong for the Grand National, Cecil had no cares of any sort or description. True, the RoyalHeu Peerage, one of the most ancient and almost one of the most impoverished in the king- dom, could ill afford to maintain its sons in the expen- sive career on which it had launched them, and the chief there was to spare usually went between the eldest, a Secretary of Legation in that costly and charming city of Vienna, and to 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 " BEAUTY OF THE BEIGADES." 19 considerable, and lie ^yas literally as penniless as a man can be to stay in the Guards at all, he had never in any shape realised the want of money. He might not be able to raise a guinea to go towards that long- standing account, his army tailor's bill, and post-obits had long ago forestalled the few hundi'eds a year that, mider 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 dhmers at the clubs, and be amongst 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-'smining schooner amongst the E. V. Y. Squadron, his September battues, his Pytchley hunt- ing, his pretty expensive Zu-Zus and other toys, his di'ag for Epsom and his trap and hack for the Park, his crowd of eno-agements throuo-h the season, and his be'vy of fair leaders of the fashion to smile on liim, and shower their invitation-cards on him, like a rain of rose-leaves, as one of their " best men." "Best,'' that is in the sense of fashion, fliiting, 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 A\-ith, on which understanding he was allowed b}^ the sex to have the imn of their boudoirs and drawing- rooms much as if he were a little lion-dog ; they c2 20 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. counted him quite " safe," he made love to the mar- ried 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. " Voire imperturhabilite" as the Prince de Ligne used to designate La Grande Cathe- rine, would have been an admirable designation for Cecil ; he was impertm'bable 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 honours and threatened horrors, coui'teously, but steadily declined them. Nor in more interesting adventm'es was he less happy in his coolness. When my Lord Regaha, 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, 21 Cecil lifted his laslies lazily, turning to him a face of the most plait-il? and innocent demiu'eness — 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 appre- ciate the interesting character of the amusement, or the coolness of the chief performer in it ; but " Beauty's Solitaire" became a synon^Tii thencefoilli among the Household to typify any very tender passages " sotto quartr occhiP 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 gnawing 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 escapmg, washed away the touch of in a warm fresh draught of pleasure. 22 GHAPTEH II. THE LOOSE BOX; AND THE TABAGIE. ^^ How long before the Frencli 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. " Ver\^ well, then, I will turn in and get some sleep," said the Commander-in- Chief, rolling himself in a cloak, and lying dovtn in a ditch to rest as soundly for the single half -hour as any tired drummer-boy. Serenely as Wellington, another hero slept pro- foundly, on the eye of a great eyent, of a great con- test to be met when the day should break, of a critical "v^ictory, depending on him alone to saye the Guards of England from defeat and shame: their honour and their hopes rested on his solitary head, by him they would be lost or saved ; but, unharassed by the maoiiitude of the stake at issue, unhaunted by the THE LOOSE BOX. AND THE TABAGIE. 26 past, iinfrettecl by the future, he slumbered the slumber of the just. Not Sir Tristram, Sir Cahdore, Sir Launcelot, no, nor Arthur himself, was ever truer knight, was ever gentler, braver, bolder, more staunch 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 capf uls of money were piled by the Ser\ace and the Talent : and in his stride all the fame of the Household would be centred on the moiTow ; 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 Mili- tary — ^the Soldiers' Blue Eiband. 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 minia- tures of his sire and of his dam : Lord of the Isles, one of the greatest hunters that the grass countries 24 UNDER TWO FLAGS. ever saw sent across tliem ; and Bayadere, a wlld- pigeon-blue mare of Circassia. How farther more he stretched up to his long Hne 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, &c. &c, &c., is it not written in the mighty and immortal chronicle, precious 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 once in eveiy line of him ; steel-grey in colour, darkening well at all points, shining and soft as satin, with the firm muscles quivering beneath at the first touch of excitement to the hio-h mettle o and finely-strung organisation ; 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 clearly 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 any one 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 Cur- ragh, and all the gentleman-rider steeple-chases and THE LOOSE BOX, AXD THE TABAGIE. 25 military sweepstakes in the kingdom, and entered now, with tremendous bets on him, for the Gilt Yase. It was a crisp cold night outside, starry and wdntry, 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 an hilarious roll in the straw, and stood " at attention." Awake only, could you tell the generous and gal- lant 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 infi- nitely 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 wdld happy gallop w^as suddenly broken for a gentle head to be softly pushed against my hand with the gentlest of welcomes ! They sadly put to shame the .26 ms-DEK TWO FLAGS. 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 fibre of his body strung to pleasm-able 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 tm-ned 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 l)it of straw out of his mouth, and smiled a smile of sublime scorn and security. " Win, sir ? I shoidd 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-mon'ow ; vou'll have to do all you know." THE LOOSE BOX, AXD THE TAB AG IE. 27 Forest King caught the manger with his teeth, and kicked in a bit of play and ate some more sugar, with much Hcking 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, Eake, and right as a trivet." " In course he is, sir : nobodv ever laid lecp 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 -s^-iry 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 gi-eat 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-mon-ow, I shan't have sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night ! / 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 2S UXDER TWO FLAGS. on in tills 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 6000^. 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 habi- tually, though shadowed now as he crossed the court- yard 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-dis- gusted 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 fur- nishes 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 Lon- don seasons, Paris winters, ducal houses in the hunt- ing months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs, dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproachable every- THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 29 where, cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the E. 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, Sa- vernake, 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 phi- losophy to endure than Timon would ever manage to muster. It is a bore, an unmitigated bore, a harsh, hateful, unrelieved mart^Tdom 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 trou- bles with more than sixty seconds' thought, and who was of that light, impassable, half -levity, half -languor of temperament that both throws off worry easily, and shirks it persistently. " Sufficient for the day," &c., 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- 30 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 divi- nity of the meerschaum, and the paradise of the narghile, — 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 Pratts' of a summer's night, and on the floors 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 talk- ing 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 nitre and antimony in her mash." " Xot at all ! the Regent and Rake cro.^s 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 THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 31 Terry, though, on a bright clay^for sahnon." " Faster thmg 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 of tongues loosened in the tabagie and made eloquent, though slightly inarticu- late, 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 Kaphael Angel, known in the Household as Seraph, was in the full flood of a story of w^hist played under difficulties in the Doncaster express. " I wanted a monkey ; I wanted monkeys a^vf ully," 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 Kockingham, son of the Duke of Lyonnesse. " I wished monkeys, but the others wished ponies and hundreds, so I gave in ; Vandeleur and I w^on 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 dow^i with the shakino;. ' 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 32 UNDER TWO FLAGS. what was up? We'd run into a cattle train. Any- body hurt ? No, nobody hurt ; but we were to get out. ^ I'll be sliot 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 Khin than was good for him at 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 JVIill, 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 toAvn." 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 mouthpiece for his half-finished 33 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 honour of the House- hold." " There are some gt)od 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 jessamine stick of his chibouque. " That brute, Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook jumper, it would be hard to beat Wild Geranium, though her shoulders are not quite what they ought to be. Mon- tecute, 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 one 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 Twelfth ; 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 yom^self in condition. Beauty," growled " Tom," with the chibouque in his mouth, " else nothing could give you the go-by. Its tempt- VOL. 1. D 34 UNDEK TWO FLAGS. ing Providence to go in for the Gilt Yase 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 richng 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 tremen- dous 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 lio-ht fell full on his handsome face, with its fair hue and its gentle languor on which there was not a single trace of the outre Guidance 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 rivaliy 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 homewards through muddy leafless lanes, when the stars had risen. THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 35 " Beauty don't believe in training. No more do I. Never would train for anything," said the Seraph, now, pulling the long ta\A'ny moustaches that were not altogether in character with his seraphic cogno- men. " If a man can ride — let him. If he's born to the pigskin he'll be in at the distance safe enougli, whetlier he smoke 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 pur- gatory ; 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 Yere 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 I 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 ivorit, 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 regu- larly three times a week on venison and champagne d2 36 UXDER TWO FLAGS. at Clirlstoplier's. Yeiy liappy to feed yours, too, if you like ; game comes down to me eveiy 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 Philip, Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the recollection, dipped his fan' moustaches into a foaming seltzer. " Quite right, Seraph ! " said Cecil. " When a man comes up to the weights, looking like a homonunculus 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 Yere. " Morals be hanged ! " said Bertie, very immorally. " I'm glad you remind us of them, Yere, you're such a quintessence of decorum and respectability yourself ! I say — anybody know anything of this fellow of the Twelft^li that's to ride Trelawney's chesnut? " " Jimmy Delmar ? Oh yes ; I know Jimmy," answered Lord Cosmo Wentworth, of the Scots Fusi- liers, from the far depths of an arm-chair. " Knew him at Aldershot. Fine rider ; give you a good bit THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 37 of trouble, Beauty. Hasn't been in England for years ; troop been sucli 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" chesnut." " Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that Irish mare D' Orleans Diamonds, too." " Never mind ! Twelfth won't beat us. The House- hold 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 gal- lantly 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 om' 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 38 UNDEE TT^O FLAGS. 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 odoui's of cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented mist over Bertie's long lithe Hmbs, 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 tlu'ee miles off when Cecil had ]oaid his visit to the loose box. Bertie laughed ; his laugh was like himself, rather languid but veiy light-hearted, very silvery, very engaging. "Sit and smoke till breakfast-time if you like, Tom ; it won't make any difference to we." But the Smoke-Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion of the Household over the ridge and furrow riskmg the steadiness of his wrist and the keenness of his eye by any such additional tempting of Provi- dence, and went off itself in various directions, with good-night iced drinks, yawning considerably like most other Parliaments after a sitting. THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE. 39 It was the old place in the Shires of the Eoyallieu Family in which he had congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the great eventj 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 Koyaume," all circled with oak and lam-el leaves on the collar. It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristo- cratic 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 him- self 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 w^as 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 ! " 40 UNDER TWO FLAGS. He was so little near wliat lie dreaded, at present at least, that the scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him no dreams of its fair and titled em- broideress. 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. 41 CHAPTER III. THE soldiers' BLUE EIBAND. "Take the Field bar one." "Two to one on Forest King." "Two to one on Baj 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 Lon- don ; the great bookmakers were there v/ith their stentor lungs and their quiet quick entry of thou- sands ; 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. 42 UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 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 worshippers 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 " the 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 lapng 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 Eastatt, 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 Champagne Stakes at Doncaster, and the Drawing- room at " glorious Goodwood," and that racing strain through the White Lily blood, coupled with a magni- ficent reputation which he brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, found him chief favour among the Fra- ternity. 43 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 carry^ing his hands as he rode that was precisely Hke Aldcroft's, looked a hundred times more profes- sional than the brilliance of " Beauty," and the reck- less dash of his well-known way of " sending the horse along with all he had in him," which was un- deniably 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 nobbier who had watched many a trial spin, lying hidden in a ditch or a dizain ; 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 favourite 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, its force as well as pace that tells over a bit of plough ; a critter that would win the Derby on the flat would 44 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. knock up over the first spin over the clods ; and that King's legs are too light for my fancy, 'andsome as 't is 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 pictui'e to frame," " a lustre 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 Yarnet never could be. ^^Hiatever the King might prove, however, the Guards, the Flower of the Service, must stand or fall by him ; they had entered nothing else for the race, so complete was the tnist that, like the Seraph, they put in " Beauty " and his grey. But there was no THE soldiers' BLUE KIJBAXD. 45 doubt as to the tremendousness of the struo-o-le lyino" before him. The running ground covered four miles and a half, and had forty-two jumps in it, exckisive of the famous Brixworth: half was grassland, and half ridge and furrow ; a lane with a 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 yawn- ing 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 had been brought together by the Service for the great event ; and if the question could ever be solved, whether it is possible to find a strain that shall com- bine pace over the flat, with a heart to stay over an enclosed 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 Kockingham, 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 fa- vourites 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, without hedging a \ 46 UXDER TWO FLAGS. sliillino'. The London talent, the accents from the great commission stables, the local betting men, the shrewd wiseacres from the Ridings, all the rest of the brotherhood of the Turf were crowding; tos^ether with the deafening shouting common to them, which sounds so tumultuous, so insane, and so unintelligible to outsiders. Amidst 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 Reo;i- ments, were backing their horses with crackers, and jotting down ligm'e after figure, with jewelled pencils, in dainty books, taking long odds Avith the fielders. Carriacres were standincr in lono; lines aloncp 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 enclosure 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 colours of the jockey they favoured, and more predominant than any were Cecil's scarlet and w^hite, only rivalled in prominence by the azure of the Heavy Cavalry champion. Sir Eyre Monta- cute. A drag with four bays — with fine hunting points about them — ^had dashed up, late of course ; the THE soldiers' BLUE EIBAND. 47 Serapli had ST^alng himself from the roller-bolt into the saddle of his hack (one of those 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 which 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 complain- ing of it ; it was too severe, it was unfair, it would break the back of every horse sent at it. The other Stewards were not unwilling to have it tamed down a little, but the 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 yoUy 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 out. Why that's 48 UXDER TWO FLAGS. where I shall thrash Bay Eegent," said Bertie, se- renely, as if the winning of the stakes had been fore- cast in his horoscope. The Seraph whistled, stroking his moustaches. " 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, lounmnss: into the centre 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. Every- body there knew him by name and sight ; and eager glances followed the tall form of the Guards' cham- pion 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 mu " — " Too little hands surety 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 trainin' " — " 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 riffraff of the Ring, in no way disturbing his serene equanimit}'. One man, a big fellow, "ossy" all over, with the genuine sporting cut-away coat, and a superabundance THE SOLDIEES' BLUE EIBAXD. 49 of showy nectie and bad jewellery, eyed liim curiously, and slightly turned so that his back was towards Bertie, as the latter w^as entering a bet with another Guardsman w^ell known on the Turf, and he himself w^as 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 Eoyallieu instinct of extravagance, and, w^ith a half thoughtless, half wilful improvidence, piled debts and difficulties on his rather brainless and boyish head, he had much more to depend on than his elder ; for the 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 w^hom Berkeley w^as taking long odds on the race ; he raised his eye- brows and his face darkened for a second, though re- suming his 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 w^as talking. The Earl nodded assent, every one had heard of it, and a very flagrant case it w^as. VOL. I. E 50 UNDER TWO FLAGS. "There's the fellow," said Cecil, laconically, and strode towards him mth his long, lounging cavahy- 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 tm-ned out of it) had thrown him, and, rel}dng 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 horse-laugh. " Are you the whole Jockey Club that you come it to a honest gentleman like that?" Cecil looked do^\Ti on him slightly amused, immea- surably 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 book- makers was thundering out, " What's up ? " " My ' honest gentleman,' " he said, wearily, '^ leave this, I tell you ; do you hear % " " Make me ! " retorted the " Welsh er," defiant in 51 his stout-built square strength, and ready to brazen the matter out. " Make me, my cock o' fine feathers ! Put me out of the Eing 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 thoucrh he were a terrier, and thrust him through the throng ; Ben Davis, as the AYelsher was named, mean- time being so utterly amazed at such unlooked-for might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most grace- fully 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 astonish- ment. 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 mornincr to note what took place, thrust him along in the single clasp of his right hand, pushed him outward to where the run- ning ground swept past the Stand, and threw him, lightly, easily, just as one may throw a lapdog 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 tlie up- e2 0^*^ ^~~«-«* ONIVERSinaFiWW 52 UNDER TWO FLAGS. roarious 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 metro- politan, 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 does not come into the betting-ring again, that's all." The Seraph, Lord Constantia, Wentworth, and many others of his set, catching sight of the tiu'moil 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 clamour 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 riffraff, Berke. 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 THE SOLDIEES' BLUE RIBAND. 53 than thankful for his brother's interference with him- self and the Welsher. " You have done the Tui'f a ser\ace, Beauty, a yeiy great service ; there's no doubt about that," said the Seraph. " Law can't do anything, as you say ; opinion must clear the King 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 un- steadying 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 afterwards 1 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 A\^th his young brother which had spurred him to such instantaneous action with tliat disreputable personage, who, beyond doubt, only re- ceived a tithe part of his deserts, and merited to be double- thonged off eveiy course in the kingdom. Rake at that instant darted panting like a hot re- triever out of the throng. " Mr. Cecil, sir, will you please come to the weights — the saddling-belFs 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 54 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 con- sented to saunter into the dressing-shed, and was aided by Rake into tops that had at length achieved a spotless triumph, and the scarlet gold-broidered jacket of his fan' friend's art with white hoops, and the " Coeur Yaillant 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 ^vith a deadly passion at his exile from the harvest-field of his lawless gleanings, went his way, with a savage vow of vencreance against the " d d dandv," the ^^ Guards' swell," who had shown him up before his world as the scoundi'el 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 e8]prit du corps was involved, and the Guards are never backward in putting their gold down, as all the world knows. In the enclosure, the cynosure of devouring eyes, stood the King, with the sang froid of a superb gentleman, amidst the clamour raging round him, one delicate ear laid back now and then but otherwise indifferent to the din, with his coat 55 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 Cir- cassia, and his dark antelope eyes gazing with a 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 chesnut, up- wards of sixteen hands, and enormously powerful, with very fine shoulders, and an all-over-like-going head ; he belonged to a Colonel in the Hussars, but was to be ridden by Jimmy Delmar of the Twelfth Lancers, whose colours were violet with orange hoops. INIonta- cute's horse. Pas de Charge, which can'ied most of the money of the English Heavy Cavalry, Montacute him- self being in the Dragoon Guards, was of much the same order, a black hunter with racing-blood in liim, loins and withers that assured any amount of force, and no fault but that of a rather coarse head, trace- able to a slur on his 'scutcheon on the distaff side from a plebeian great-grandmother, who had been a cart mare, the only stain in 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, vdih that rich red gloss that is like the glow of a horse-chesnut, 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 56 UNDER T\\^0 FLAGS. a clay for sheer amusement, and was game to any- thing.* She was entered by Cartouche of the Eoyal Iiish Dragoons, 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 favourites ; Day Star ran them close, the pro- perty of Dui'ham Yavassour, of the Inniskillings, and to be ridden by his owner, a handsome flea-bitten-grey sixteen-hander, with ragged hips, and action that looked a trifle string-halty, but noble shoulders, and gi'eat 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 Kegent at another, slightly leading in the Ring. Thirty-two starters were hoisted up on the tele- graph board, and as the field got at last under weigh, uncommonly handsome they looked, while the silk jackets of all the colours of the rainbow glittered in the bright noon-sun. As Forest King closed in, per- fectly 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 * The portrait of this lady is that of a very esteemed young Irish beauty of my acquaintance ; she this season did seventy-six mUes on a warm J;me day, and ate her corn and tares afterwards as if nothing had happened. She is six years old. 57 It in ever}' 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 " Fa- vourite !" His beauty told on the populace, and even somewhat on the professionals, though the Legs still kept a strong business prejudice against the working powers of " the Guards' crack." The ladies began to lay dozens in gloves on him; not altogther 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 of the field. The Household is usually safe to win the suffrages of the Sex. In the throng on the course Rake instantly bon- neted an audacious dealer who had ventured to con- sider 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 half-breds, 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 unquestionably in their force. The thorough-breds pulled and fretted, and swerved in their impatience; one or two over-contumacious bolted incontinently, others put their heads between their knees in the endeavour to draw their riders over their withers ; AYild Geranium reared straight 58 UKDER TWO FLAGS. upright, fidgeted all over with longing to be off, passaged with the prettiest T\dckedest 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 ex- citement 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 colom', eager ones by the thousand stared thirstily from the crowded com'se, the roar of the Eing sub- sided 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 no w^se 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 chesnut's no end Jit,^ strong as his faith was in the champion of the Brigades. A moment's good start was caught — the flag dropped 59 — off they went sweeping out for the first second like a hne of Cavahy about to charge. Another moment, and they were scattered over the first field, Forest King, Wild Geranium, and Bay Kegent leading for two lengths, when ^lontacute, "v\dth his habitual "fast biu'st," 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 Kegent'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 plough, 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 done up by the terrible work on tlie clods. The five favourites had it now all to themselves ; Day Star pounding onward at tremendous speed, Pas de Charge giving slight sjanptoms of distress owing to the madness of his first burst, the Irish mare literally fly- 60 UNDER TWO FLAGS. ing a-liead of him, Forest King and tlie cliesnut wait- ing on one another. In the Grand Stand the Seraph's eyes strained after the Scarlet and White, and he muttered in his mous- taches, " 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 lash- ing 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. Tvv^o mxore fences came, laced high and stiff with the Shire thorn, and with scarce twenty feet between them, the heavy ploughed land leading to them black and hard, with the fresh earthy scent steam- ing up as the hoofs struck the clods with a dull thunder. Pas de Charge rose to the first : dis- tressed too early, his hind feet caught in the thorn, and he came down rolling clear of his rider ; Monta- cute picked him up with true science, but the day was lost to the English Hea\y Cavalry. Forest King went in and out over both like a bird and led for the first time ; the chesnut 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, THE soldiers' BLUE ElBAND. 61 was but a young one, and went too wildly ; lier spirit wanted cooler curb. And now only, Cecil loosened the King to his full will and his full speed. Now only, the beautiful Ai-ab 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 toucli the dark earth they skimmed over ; neither whip nor spur w^as 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 in them ; Brix- worth lay before him. He knew well what Forest King could do ; but he did not know how great the chesnut Regent's powers might be. The w^ater 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 leapt 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 dark line, shimmering there in the sunlight, the test that all must pass who go in for the Soldiers' Blue Eiband. Forest King scented water, and went on wdth his ears pointed, and his greyhound stride lengthening, quickening, gathering up all its force and its impetus for the leap that w^as before — then like the rise and the swoop of a heron he spanned the stream, and, 62 UNDER TWO FLAGS. landing clear, launched forward with the lunge of a spear darted tlu'ough air. Brixworth was passed — the Scarlet and TV^iite, a mere gleam of bright colom', a mere speck in the landscape, to the breathless crowds in the Stand, sped on over the brown and level grass- land ; two and a quarter miles done in four minutes and twenty seconds. Bay Regent was scarcely behind him ; the chesnut 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 thun- dered on neck and neck Avith the " Guards' crack." The Irish mare followed, and with miraculous game- ness 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 mth 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 vdth his breast and fore-legs resting on the ground, his hind- quarters in the water, and his back 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. THE SOLDIEES' BLUE EIBAND. 63 Not knowing, or looking, or heeding what hap- pened behind, the trio tore on over the meadow and the plough; the two favourites neck by neck, the game little mare hopelessly behind, through that one fatal moment over Brixworth. The tm^ning-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 Eegent wins " — " Scarlet and Yi^iite's ahead" — "Violet's up with him"— " Violet's past him"— " Scarlet recovers" — " Scarlet beats" — " A cracker on the King " — " Ten to one on the Eegent " — " Guards are over the fence first " — " Guards are win- ning" — " 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 w^ere going most men, ay, and good riders too, w^ould have been hurled out of their saddle by the shock; he scarcely swerved; a moment to ease the King and to recover his equili- brium, 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 cop- pices 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 head- 64 TJNDEE TWO FLAGS. long delight, as his knees pressed closer into Forest King's flanks, and, half stirrupless like the Arabs, he thundered forward to the greatest riding feat of his life. His face ^yas 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, w^hirliiig under- neath him as the grey 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 Eegent, "whose hoofs as they dashed the ground up sounded like thunder, and for whose herculean strength the ploughed lands had no terrors ; it an as more than the lead to keep now, there was ground to cover, and the Kincr was losino; 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 bracino' 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 him imder the tranquil gentleness of temper and of custom woke and had the mastery ; he set his teeth hard, and his hands clenched like steel on the bridle. " Oh ! my beauty, my beauty !" he cried, all unconsciously, half aloud, as THE soldiers' BLUE ET13AND. 65 tliey cleared the tliirty-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 heart, the splendid form launched faster out, the stretching stride stretched farther yet with lightning spontaneity, every fibre strained, every nerve struggled, with a magnificent bound like an antelope the grey recovered the ground he had lost, and passed Bay Kegent by a quarter- length. It was a neck to 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 towerinir double hedge of oak rails and of blackthorn which 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 con- test, as superb a sight as the Shires ever saw while the two ran together, the gigantic chesnut, with every massive sinew swelled and strained to tension, side by side with the marvellous grace, the shining flanks, and the Arab-like head of the Guards' horse. Louder and wilder the shrieked tumult rose : " The chesnut beats ! " " The grey beats ! " " Scarlet's ahead!" "Bay Regent's caught him!" "Violet's winning, Violet's winning ! " " The King's neck by neck!" "The King's beating!" "The Guards will get it." " The Guards' crack has it ! " " Not yet, VOL. I. P 66 UXDER TWO FLAGS. not yet ! " " Violet will thrash him at the jmiip ! " "Now for it!" "The Guards, the Guards, the Guards!" "Scarlet wiU wan ! " "The Kin^ 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 chesnut 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 clenched 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 grey's flank. " Oh, my darhng, my beauty — noiu ! " One touch of the spur — the first — and Forest King rose at the leap, all the life and power there THE SOLDIEES' BLUE EIBAXD. 67 were in him gathered for one superhuman and crown- ing effort ; a flash of time, not half a second in dura- tion, and he was Hfted in the air higher, and higher, and higher in the cold, fresh, -wild winter wmd; 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 im- pulse 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 grey swept to the Judge's chair, the air was rent with deafening cheers that seemed to reel like drunken shouts from the multitude. '' Tlie 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 em- broidered " Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume," Forest King stood in all his glory, winner of the Soldiers' Blue Riband, by a feat without its parallel in all the annals of the Gold Yase. But as the crowd surged about him, and the mad cheering crowned his victory, and the Household in the splendour of their triumph and the fulness of their o-ratitude 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. F 2 68 UNDEK TWO FLAGS. " Rather a close finish, eh ? Have you any Moselle Cup going there? I'm a little thirsty." Outsiders would much sooner have thought him de- feated than triumphant ; no one, who had not known him, could possibly have imagined that he had been successful; an ordinaiy spectator would have concluded that, judging by the resigned weariness of his features, he had won the race greatly against his own \vill to his \ now 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 his 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 on thousands, and whose rino-ino" hurrahs greeted the " Guards' crack," passed straight up towards Jimmy Delmar and held out his hand. " You crave me a close thing, ^lajor Delmar. The 69 Vase is as much yours as mine; if your cliesnut 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 over- ture of his rival and conqueror. " Oh ! I can take a beating," he said, good humouredly ; " 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 congi-atulate you most heartily, most sincerely." And he meant it, too. Jimmy never canted, nor did he ever throw the blame, with paltry savage vin- dictiveness, 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 wdll 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. 70 UXDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 colours of their respective heroes ; he was the pet of them all ; " Beauty " had the suffrages of the sex without exception; he was received wdtli bright smiles and graceful congratulations, even from those who had espoused E}Te 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 thmgs 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 centre 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 thorough-bred, a coquette who would smoke a cigarette, yet a peeress who would never lose her dignity. '' Au coeur vaillant rien cV 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 hfted the King to that last leap. It was terrible !" THE SOLDIEES' BLUE PJBAXD. 71 It was terrible ; and a woman, to say notliinf]^ of a woman who was in love with him, might w^ell 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, and could lead the first flight over the Belvoir and the Quorn countries. It was possible that her ladyship was too thorough- bred 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 elo- quence 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 I " She laughed a little, so did he ; they were used to exchange these passages in an admirably artistic mas- querade, 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. "Yv'hat 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 so very delightful that desperate effort to break your neck % It looks pleasant, to judge 72 UNDEK TWO FLAGS. 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 Cecil, 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 common-place, 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 inflection of studied affec- tation, of which he, however much of a dandy he was, was wholly guiltless. " Well ! you won magni- ficently ; 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 colours 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 not wondering why the deuce a fellow had to talk such nonsense. Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with whom he had THE SOLDIEKS' BLUE PJBAND. 73 been in love ever since they had stayed together at Belvoir for the Croxton Park week last autumn ; and who was beautiful enough to make their ^^friend- ship " as enchanting as a page out of the " Deca- merone." And while he bent over her, flirting in the fashion that made him the darling of the draw- ing-rooms, and looking down into her superb Velas- quez eyes, he did not know, and, if he had known, would have been careless of it, that afar off, white 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." 74 CHAPTER ly. LOVE A LA MODE. Life was very pleasant at Royallieu. It lay in the Melton country, and was almost equally well placed for Pytcliley, 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, phea- sants were fed on Indian corn till they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little winding paths of the elder and bilbeny coverts thirty first-rate shots, with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to anmse them till dinner, -with rocketers and warm comers 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 ; on 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 ; LOVE A LA :.IODE. 70 a retinue of powdered servants filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately ban- queting-room, "with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its Vernets, and yet — there was terribly little money at Eoyallieu with it all. Its present luxuiy was pui'chased at the cost of the future, and the parasite of extravagance was constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old Xorman-planted oak of the family-tree. But then who thought of that ? No- body. 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 axe 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 impro\'idence. 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 moulded to do in boy- hood, when they were sent to Eton at ten, -sWth gold dressing-boxes to grace their Dame's tables, embr^'o- Dukes for their co-fags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of the champagnes at the Christopher. The old, old story — ^liow it repeats itself ! Boys grow up amidst profuse prodigality, and are launched into a world where thev can no 7G UNDER TWO FLAGS. more aiTest 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 dishonoured alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lake-side, or under the mo- nastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt ; where a red cross chills the lonely traveller in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a name- less mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters — then at them the world " shoots out its lips with scorn." Xot on them lies the blame. A wintry, watery sun was shining on tlie terraces as Lord Royallieu paced up and down the morning after the Grand Military ; his step and limbs exces- sively enfeebled, but the carriage of his head and the flash of his dark hawk's eyes as proud and untame- able as in his earliest years. He never left his own apartments ; and no one, save his favourite " little Berke," ever went to him without his desire ; he was too sensitive a man to thrust his acje and ailinoj health in amongst 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 LOVE A LA MODE. 77 slirewcl 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 to- wards 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 crea- ture 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 any one, had married the Viscount with no affection towards him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous passion that her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married life, how- ever, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness towards 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 candour before he wedded her ; knew that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavaliy ofiicer, 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 tllro^vn them across each other s path ; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had ever been, had made liim linger "78 UNDER TWO FLAGS. in lier presence, had made lier shrink from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united their names together ; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolised lest slander should touch her tlnrough him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank forests on the desolate moorside of the hills of Hindostan, where lono- 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 favourite child bore her family name, her late lover's name ; and, in resem- bling her race, resembled the dead soldier. More- over, Bertie had been born in the spring following that Nice -s^-inter, and it sufficed to make the Viscount hate him 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 coloured, too strongly to be dissembled, all his feelings and his actions towards his son, and might both liJtve soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly gentle and su- premely careless than Cecil's. As it was, Cecil was sometimes sui'prised at his father's dislike to him; but never thought much about it, and attri- LOVE A LA MODE. 79 buted it, when he did think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old man. To be envious of the favour shown to his bojHish brother could never for a mo- ment have come into his imagination. Lady Royal- lieu, with her last words, had left the little fellow, a cliild of three years old, to 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 d}ing mother had never been wholly forgotten. A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount's still handsome saturnine aquiline 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 lio;ht of a Mediterranean sunset. The soldier had been dead eight-and-twenty years ; but the jealous hate was not dead yet. Cecil took off his hmiting-cap with a certain courtesy that sat veiy well on his habitual languid nonchalance ; he never called his father anything but " Eoyal ;" rarely saw, still less rarely consulted him, and cared not a straw for his censm'e or opinion, but he was too thorough-bred by nature to be able to follow the under-bred indecorum of the day which makes disre- spect 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 mes- sage right now, it seems." " Shouldn't have named us so near alike ; it's often a bore ! " " I didn't name you, sir, your mother named you," 80 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 dis- courteous, a far worse crime in Lord Eoyallieu'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. "/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 ' plough ' is like," he said, with a flash of his falcon eyes over the landscape, Vv^here, 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." LOVE A LA MODE. 81 " 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 hi. points, and lay 500/. 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 luliat you bet, sir; you live as if you were a Kothschild 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 every one, 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 Eockingham — 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 VOL. I. G 82 UNDER TWO FLAGS. you do. You conduct yourself as if you were a mil- lionaire, 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 beggaiy, 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 flashed out with wicked scorching malignity, lashing and upbraiding the man who was the victim of his owai unwisdom and extravagance. A slight tinge of colour 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 towards the Viscount. " Eoyal 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, draw- ing his arm about Berkeley's shoulder, and looking vdth. pride upon his bright and gracious youth. LOVE A LA MODE. 83 More than an old man's preference ^yo^lld 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 Vis- count 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 uncon- scious yet unvar)dng obedience to his dead mother's 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 tmiied 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 g2 84 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 father's 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 Quom. They moved off ere long to draw the Holt Wood, in as open a morning, and as strong a scenting wind, as ever favoured Melton Pink. A whimper and " gone away ! " soon echoed from Beeby-side, and the pack, not letting the fox hang a second, dashed after him, making straight for Scrap- toft. 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 foxholes 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. LOVE A LA MODE. 85 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 countr}^, nearly saved his brush in the t^^^li^;ht when scent was lost in a rushino; hailstorm, but had the " little ladies" laid on ao^ain 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 tried 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 laiew; thirty minutes without a check ; such a pace ! " and care little whether the finale be "killed" or "broke away," and those of older 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 ; posi- tively iL'alkedy 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 Bertie remembered the caustic lash of his father's ironies while he was lifting Mother of Pearl over the posts and rails, and sweep- ing on, with the halloo ringing down the wintry wind as the grasslands flew beneath him ? Was it likely that he recollected the difficulties that huntr above 86 UNDER TWO FLAGS. him while he was dashing down the Gorse happv 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 realise in how near a neighbourhood 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 w^th the Seraph through the leafless muddy lanes in the gloaming. Scarcely ; — it is very easy to remember our difli- culties when we are eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad soups and worse wines in conti- nental impecuniosity, sleeping on them as rough Australian shake-downs, or wearing them perpetu- ally in Galifornian rags and tatters, it were im- possible 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 every- thing about us is symbolical and redolent of wealth and ease — when the art of enjo}Tnent 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 beg- gar while you never want sovereigns for whist ; and it would be beyond the powers of human nature to con- ceive your ruin irrevocable, while you still eat turbot and terrapin with a powdered giant behind your chair daily. Up in his garret a poor A^Tetch knows very LOVE A LA MODE. 87 well what he is, and realises in stern fact the extre- mities 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 realise it when — pressed to dine with Lord Guene- vere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while grooms dashed over to Royallieu for their changes of clothes — he caught a glimpse, as 88 UNDER TWO FLAGS. they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their pre-prandial cups of tea in the hbrary, an enchanting group of lace and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blonde cheeks and brunette tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down amongst them to be the darling of that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted vnth by those soft, languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his chatelaine, and to be spoiled as women will spoil the privileged pet of their drawing-rooms whom they have made " free of the guild," and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of anything " serious." He w^as the recognised darling, and permitted pro- perty, 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 Avith them, conduct a Boccaccio intricrue throuo;h the height of the season, and make them really believe themselves actually in love while they were at the Moors or dowm the Nile, and would have given their diamonds to get a new distraction. Lady Guenevere w^as 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 tiiem wore the mas- querade dress to perfection. He had fallen in love LOYE A LA MODE. 89 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 ex- erting himself either to resist or to 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 farm-yard, and the triumphant conquests that he gained over his brother Peers' Short-liorns and Suffolks, to trouble his head about Cecil's attendance on his beautiful Countess. They corresponded in Spanish ; they had a thousand charming cyphers ; they made the columns of the Times and the Post play the unconscious role of me- dium 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 country-houses, and arranged signals for mute communicntion : 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 brilhant ladyship, and there was nothing on earth, perhaps, of which he would have 90 UNDER TWO FLAGS. had a more lively dread than a "scene;" his pre- sent " friendship," however, was delightful, and pre- sented no such dangers, while his fair " friend " was one of the greatest beauties and the greatest coquettes of her time. Her smile was honour ; her fan was a sceptre ; 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 won- dered at in one so omnipotent, and her chains, after all, were made of roses. As she sat in the deep ruddy glow of the libraiy 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 amongst 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 pohshed 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; when she lapsed into a beauti- fully-tinted study of la femme incomprise, when time and scene suited, when the stars were very clear above the terraces without, and the conservatory veiy soli- tary, and a touch of Musset or Owen Meredith chimed in well with the light and shade of the oleanders and the brown lustre of her own eloquent glance ; — in all these various moments how superb she was ! And if in LOVE A LA MODE. 91 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 WTitten in prose, in her soul far preferring Le Follet; why — it did not matter, that I can see ; all great ladies gamble in stock now-a-days under the rose ; and women are for the most part as cold, clear, hard, and practical as their adorers be- neve them the contrary ; and a ferame incompnse is so charming when she avows herself comprehended by 3/0W, that you would never risk spoiling the con- fidence by hinting a doubt of its truth. If she and Bertie only played at love, if neither be- lieved much in the other, if each trifled with a pretty gossamer souiflet of passion much as they trifled with their 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 bit- terness 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 92 rXDEE TWO FLAGS. former gentle luxmy, flirted with his liege lady that night, lying back in the softest of lounging-chairs, Avith his dark dreamy handsome eyes looking all the eloquence in the world, and his head drooped till his moustaches were almost touching her laces, his Queen of Beauty listened with charmed interest, and to judge by his attitude he might have been praying after the poet — " Ho-w 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 Blue- bell, 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 Me- redith style of thing to perfection, but on the wliole 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 tmni perpetual periods on the lustre 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 LOVE A LA MODE. 93 in the world, in the neighboui'hoocl of Market Har- borough, which he had taken for her, and had been at the meet that day in her little toy trap (with its pair of sno^^y 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 " puiders," 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 Ameha. The Zu-Zu might rage, might sulk, might pout, might even swear all sorts of naughty Mabille oaths, most villanously 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. 94 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. "You drive a team, Beauty — never drive a team," the Serapli 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 tui'n 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 yom' 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 Avhich salutary advice Cecil only gave a laugh, going on his own w^ays 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 Matri- monial Pack, with those clever hounds Belle and Fashion ever leading in full cry after him, that he dreaded the sight of a ball-room meet ; and, shunning the rich preserves of the Salons, ran to earth per- sistently in the shady woods 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. 95 CHAPTER Y. UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE. " You're a lad o' wax, my beauty ! " cried Mr. Eake, enthusiastically, sui-veying 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 lustre is ! Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is in blood. The httlest pippin that ever tln*ew 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 Hmbs of the champion of the " First Life," and plunged into speculation on the democratic tenden- cies of the age as clearly contradicted by all the evi- dences of the flat and furrow, while Forest King 96 UNDER TWO FLAGS. drank a dozen go-downs of water, and was rewarded for the patience with which he had subdued his in- chnation to kick, fret, spring, and break away through- out the dressing by a full feed thrown into his crib, wdiich Eake watched him with adoring gaze eat to the very last gi'ain. "You precious one!" soliloquised that philosopher, who loved the horse with a sort of passion since his victory over the Shires. " What a lot o' enemies you've been and gone and made ! — that's where it is, my boy ; nobody can't never forgive Success. All them fielders have lost such a sight of money by you ; them book- makers have had such a lot of pots upset by you ; bless you I if you w^ere on the flat you'd be doctored or roped in no time. You've won for the gentlemen, my lovely — for your own cracks, my boy — and that's just what they'll never pardon you." And Eake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts (he liked the "' gentlemen" himself), 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 hunt- ing-costume, gold-hilted knife and all, and spent Cecil's winnings for him with a rapidity that threa- tened to leave very few of them for the London season. She was ver}' pretty ; sweetly pretty ; with fair hair UNDER THE KEEPER'S TEEE. 97 tliat 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 rqyertoire, but to this w^as her command of lan^uao-e limited. c o She dressed perfectly, but she was a vulgar little soul ; drank everything, from Bass's ale to rum-punch, and from cheriy-brandy to absinthe ; thought it the height of wit to stifle you with cayenne slid into your vanille 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 phrase- ology, so long as she could stew her pigeons in cham- pagne, 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 Rich- mond 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 amidst turtle and truffles for childish innocence in the cottage at home where honeysuckles blossomed and brown brooks made melody, and pas- sionately grieving on the purple cushions of a barouche for the time of straw pallets and untroubled sleep, VOL. I. n 98 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 odour of pigsty and straw-yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all the other six days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a general atmo- sphere of beer and wash-tubs : she hated her past, and loved her cisfar on the drao;. The Zu-Zu is fact ; !D CD ■' the moralists' pictures are moonshine. The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, more- over, daily becoming more prominent in the world, more brilliant, more frankly recognised, and more omnipotent. Whether this will ultimately prove for the better or the worse, it would be a bold man v\'ho should dare say ; there is at least one thing left to desire in it — i.e. that the synonyme of " Aspasia," which serves so often to designate in jom'nalistic literature these Free Lances of life, were more suitable in artistic and intellectual similarity, and that when the Zu-Zu and her co-brigands 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 know a little orthography, if they could not be changed into such queens of grace, of intellect, of sovereign mind and splendid -svit as were their pro- totypes 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, Cra- tinus so acrid and yet so jovial, Damon of the silver UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE. 99 lyre, and the great poets who are poets for all time. Author and artist, noble and soldier, court the Zu-Zu order now as the Athenians courted their brilliant €Taipai ; 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 wilful so^-ereignty fancied, and Rake rode on now with his master's note, bearing no very good will to her ; for Eake had very strong prejudices, and none stronger than against these pillagers who went about seek- ing whom they should devour, and laughing at the wholesale ruin that they wrought, while the sen- timentahsts babbled in " Social Science " of " pearls lost " and " innocence betrayed." " A girl that used to eat tripe and red herring in a six-pair back, and dance for a shiUing a night in gauze, coming it so grand that she'll only eat aspa- ragus 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, as they have done ere now to that of celebrities of her sisterhood, and buy with eager curiosity, at high prices, her most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most flimsy gewgaws of marqueterie ! II 2 100 UNDER TWO FLAGS. Rake had seen a good deal of men and manners, and, in his own opinion at least, was " up to eveiy 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 pep- pery, Mr. Rake polished his wits quite as much as he polished the tops, and considered himself a philo- sopher. Of whose son he was he had not the re- motest idea; his earliest recollections were of the teiuler mercies of the workhouse ; but even that chill foster-mother, the parish, had not damped the liveli- ness 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 Xew York, a ventriloquist in Maryland, a vaquero in Spanish California, a lemon- ade-seller in San Francisco, a revolutionist in the Argentine (without the most chstant idea what he fought for), a boatman on the Bay of ^Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, a trapper in the Wilder- ness, 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, i 101 a splendid fellow in a charge or a pursuit, with an astonishing power over horses, and the clearest back- handed sweep of a sabre that ever cut down a knot of natives ; hut — insubordinate. Do his duty whenever fighting was in question, he did most zealously, but to kick over the traces at other times was a tempta- tion 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 con- trol 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 wlien the — th came back to Briorhton and to barracks, the evil spirit of rebellion began to get a little hotter in him under the Corporal's " Idees Xa- poliennes" of justifiable persecution. Wame indisput- ably 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 102 UNDER TWO FLAGS. aristocratic prejudices ; " but when it comes to a duffer like that, that knows no better than me, what avit a bit better than me, and what is as clumsy a duffer about a horse's plates as ever I knew, and would a'most let a youn£[ '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 "pro- motion from tlie ranks" had they been there to take the lesson. At last, in the leisure of Brighton, the storm broke. Eake had a Scotch hound that was the pride of his life, his beer-money often going instead to buy dainties for the doer, who became one of the channels through which Warne could annoy and thwart him. The dog did no harm, being a fine, w^ell-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 experiences 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 103 by in harness, hit him over the head with a heavy whip ]ie had in his hand ; infui'iated 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 light- ning, and wrenching the whip out of his hand, struck him a slashing, stinging blow across the face. " Plang 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 guard-room. Rake learnt 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 the barrack, as though they were statues of stones, — 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 regi- ment, 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 104 UNDER TWO FLAGS. provocation received, the prisoner, wlio was much liked by the officers, was condemned to six months' imprison- ment for his insubordination and blow to his non- commissioned officer, without being tied up to the tri- angles. 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 Eake, with his cheerfulness under difficulties, his love for the hound, and his bright, sunburnt, shrewd, humor- ous countenance, took his fancy. " Beauty " was the essence of good nature. Indo- lent 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 vh'tue, per- haps, 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," murmm'ed Cecil to his cheroot, careless of the demorahsing tendency of his remarks for the Army in general. Had it occurred in the Guards, and he had " sat " on the case, Eake would have had one veiy lenient judge. As it T\-as, Bertie actually went the lengths of think- ing seriously about the matter ; he liked Eake's devo- tion to his dumb friend, and he heard of his intense po- pularity in his troop; he wished to save, "if he could, so fine a fellow from the risks of his turbulent passion. UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE. 105 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-me-care throughout the whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence wdth sublime impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels with an utterly reckless non- chalance ; but somehow or other, when that message reached him, a vivid sense that he ivas 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 con- demnation, who had even thought of his dog; and Rake, .the philosophic and the 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 scandalised 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 wdierever he went from then until now, two years after. 106 UNDER TWO FLAGS. Rake loved liis master witli a fidelity very rare in these days ; lie 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 innings when the Household played the Zingari, or his victory when his yacht won the Cherbom-g Cup, as though those successes had been Eake'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 ; hell 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 twihght, notice what would have escaped any save one who had been prac- tised as a trapper in the red Canadian woods, namely, the head of a man almost hidden among the hea^y 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 ; more- over, they had been trained to know such little signs as a marsh from a hen hari'ier in full flight, by the length of w^ing and tail, and a mdgeon or a coot from UNDER THE KEEPEE'S TREE. 107 a mallard or a teal, by the depth each swam out of the water. Grey and foggy as it was, and high as was the gorse, Rake recognised his born-foe, AYillon. " What's he up to there f 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 see one ; it's my belief he cheats the stable thick and thin, and gets on Mr. Cecil's mounts to a good tune — ay, 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 pass- ing 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 reconnais- sance safely and unseen with the science at stalking brute or man that he had learnt of his friends the Sioux. But second thoughts showed him this 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," mused Rake, with his latent animosity to the head groom, and his vigilant loyalty to Cecil overruling any scni]>le as to his right to overlook his foe's movements ; and with a gallop that was muffled on the heather'd turf he 108 UNDER TWO FLAGS. dashed straight at the covert unperceived till he was within ten paces. Willon started and looked up hastily; he was talking to a square-huilt man very quietly dressed in shepherds' plaid, chiefly remarkable by a red-hued beard and whiskers. The groom turned pale and laughed neiTOusly 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." " / ain't afraid of going to grass, if you are ! " retorted Eake, scornfully; boldness was not his enemy's strong point. " Who's your pal, old fellow?" " A cousin o' mine, out o' Yorkshire," vouchsafed Mr. AYillon, looking anything but easy, while the cousin aforesaid nodded sulkily on the introduction. " Ah ! looks like a Yorkshire tyke," muttered Eake, with a volume of meaning condensed in these inno- cent 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 Ais cousins a gi'inning 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 rXDER THE keeper's TREE. 109 rash, 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 no- body'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 outlying coverts. He would have been more so had he guessed that Ben Davis's red beard and demui'e attire, with other as efficient dis- guises, had prevented even his own keen eyes from penetrating the identity of Willon's "cousin" with the AYelsher he had seen thrust off the course the day before by his master. 110 CHAPTER VI. THE END OF A RIXGIXG EUX. " 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 ^yhip : the latter class, by-the-by, 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 t^^ilight, and makes the homids pick the scent slowly and wretchedly, over marsli and through water ? ^\^io would not give fifty guineas a second for the glorious thii-ty minutes of racing that shows steam and steel over fence and fallow in a THE END OF A RINGING EUN. Ill clipping rush ^\dtliout 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 Fitz William's, household words and " names be- loved," that fills IMelton and Market Harborough, and makes the best flirts of the ball-room 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 %to the blaze of the Muscovite guns, that in their fathers' days gave to Grant's Hussars their swoop, like eagles, on to the rear-guard 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 then' 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 break- fast 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" 112 UNDErt TWO FLAGS. 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 des- peration 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 Demi- rep'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 I" expostu- lated Cecil, with appealing rebuke. " If a fellow ivere 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." fiertie lifted his eyes Vv ith plaintive resignation from the Demirep's yellow-papered romance. " I'm really in an interesting chapter : Aglae has THE END OF A EINGING KUN. 113 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 " thrih," not even plunging down the Matterhorn, losing " long odds in thou' " over the Oaks, or being sunned in the ejes of the fairest women 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 knoAV ; only the cads and tlje clergy can damn one now-a-days ; 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 iirst cropper," laughed the Seraph. " Do get np I " " Bother ! " sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, while the Seraph disappeared in a cloud of turkish. Neither Bertie's indolence nor his insouciance were assumed ; utter carelessness was his nature, utter impassability was his habit, and he was truly for the moment loth 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. VOL. I. I 114 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present squires found no favour with Bertie ; a shoe 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 Eovallieu were by good luck in time for the throw-off of the Quorn, where the hero of the Blue Eiband 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 w^ere winding over the gorse. The meet was brilliant and very- large ; show^ng such a gathering as only the Melton country can ; and foremost among the crowd of car- riages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite Peeress in her -saolet habit, and her tiny velvet hat ; and the pony equipage of the Zu-Zu, all glittering w4th 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 liimself into saddle. The Seraph gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced. He detested women in the hunting-field, but that sweetest tem- pered giant of the Brigades never refused anything to anybody — much less to " Beauty." THE END OF A KINGING KUN. • 115 To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed mar- vellous 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 reve- rent 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 sulki- ness, by a propitiatory offer of a little gold sherry-flask, studded with turquoises, just ordered for her from Regent-street, which, however, she ungraciously con- temned, because she thought it had only cost twenty guineas ; anchoring the victimised Seraph beside her by an adroit "Ah! by the way. Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your rose-scented 2^cipelitos ; she's been vvdld to smoke them ; *' and leaving the Zu-Zu content at securing a futm-e Duke, was free to canter back and flirt on the off-side of Yivandiere, till the " signal," the " cast," made with consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the brushwood, the tighten- ing of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the chal- lenge, 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 i2 116 UKDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 thorough-bred and colossal as himself, led the ^vay with them. The scent was hot as death in the spin- neys, 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 browai mare, very cleverly, over a bilberry hedge, and set her little white teeth with a will on the Seraph's otto- of-rose cigarette. Lady Guenevere heard the words as Yivandiere rose in the air with the light bound of a roe, and a shght 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 aw^oke in her, and shone in her glance, wdiile she rode on as that fau' leader of the Belvoir and Pytchley alone could ride over the fallows. The steam was on at full pressure, the homids 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 END OF A RINGING EUN. 117 the fox making for shelter. Fence, and double, hedge and brook, soon scattered the field; straying off far and ^yide, and coming to grief with lots of " downers," it gi*ew select, and few but the crack men could keep the hounds in view. " Catch 'em who can," was the one mot cVordre, 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 black- thorn ; here a big fence towered ; there a brook rushed angi'ily 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. Lad}'" Guenevere and the Seraph w^ere run- ning 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 118 UNDER TWO FLAGS. and as fast as at tlie find ; tlie speed .was like light- ning past the brown woods, the dark-green pine plantations, the hedges, bright with scarlet berries ; through the green low-l;ying grasslands, and the wind- ing drives of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued beech trunks, whose roots the violets were just purpling with then' 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 brawl- ing brook that Eeynard 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 villanous mud-bank for landing ; and the water, thickened and swollen with recent rains, had made all the land that sloped to it muy 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 towards 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 charac" THE END OF A RINGING EUN. 119 teristic careless dash and fine science mingled, cleared it ; but, falling with a mighty crash, gave him a piu'ler on the opposite side, and was within an ace of striking him dead with his hoof in frantic struggles to recover. The Seraph, however, was on his legs with a rapidity marvellous in a six-foot-three son of Anak, picked up the horse, threw himself into saddle, and dashed off again quick as hghtning, with his scarlet stained all over, and liis long fair moustaches floating in the wind. The Zu-Zu turned Mother of Pearl back with a fiery French oath ; she hated to be "cut dow^n," but she hked 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 w^as 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, wdio, 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, tantahsing second, and, on a scent breast- high, raced him with the rush of an express through the straggling street of a little hamlet, and got him out again on the level pastures and across a fine line of huntmg countiy, with the leafless woods and the low gates of a park far away to their westward. " A guinea to a shilling that we kill liim ! " cried the flute-voice of her brilliant ladyship, as she ran a 120 UNDER TWO FLAGS. moment side by side witli Forest King, and flaslied her rich eyes on his rider ; she had scorned the Zu- Zu, but on occasion she ^yould 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 towards the woods on the right, making with all the craft and the 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 gi'ound and save his brush ! " thundered the Seraph, as though he were hunting his own hounds at Lyonnesse, Vvdio 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 treJlis-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 ring- ing cheers of the Shire ; Cecil, the Seraph, and her victorious ladyship alone coming in for the glories of "finish." " Never had a faster seventy minutes up-wind,'> THE E^'D OF A EIXGIXG EUX. 121 said Lady Guenevere, looking at the tiny jewelled watch, the size of a sixj^ence, that was set in the handle of her whip, as the brush, wdth all the com- pliments 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, honoui'ed 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 they wanted to eat, 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 grey stone steps of the Elizabethan house. The sun shone brightly on the oriel case- ments, 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 auraucaria, 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 veiy moment, as the words were spoken, a groom approached him hastily ; his young brother, whom he had scarcely seen since the find, had been 122 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. thrown and taken home on a hurdle; the injuries, were rumoured 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, mth its faint chloroform odom', the boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered on the pillow, his chest bare, and his right arm broken and splintered. The death-like 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 cbopped do'SMi by it, his head bent on his arms. " It is 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 tmnbled curls, tm'ned 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 \^inning the race. THE END OF A EINGING EUN. 123 " Perfectly certain," answered the surgeon, cheer- fully. " He is not over strong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight ; he will be out of that bed in a fortnight." "How did he fall?" But wiiile they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking at the handsome Antinous-like form of the lad 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 injunc- tion ? 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 favour 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 pain- fully, that he scarcely knew what ailed him. Had he had his old tact about him, he would have known how 124 UNDER TWO FLAGS. worse than useless it would be for Mm to seek his father in such a moment. Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened the door of his private apartments, hea^dly darkened and heavily perfumed ; at the tm-n 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 recognised him till he heard liis voice, and he waved him off with a fierce contemp- tuous gesture; the grief for his favourite'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 vigour to his emaciated frame, while the dignity of his grand car riao-e blent with the furious force of his infuriated THE EXD OF A PJNGING EUN. 125 blindness. " If you liacl had the heart of a man you would have saved such a child as that from his peril ; warned him, watched him, succoured him at least when he fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, if death come to him ! You are safe; you are always safe. You try to Idll youi'self with every vice under heaven, and only get more strength, more grace, more pleasm-e from it — ^^^ou are always safe because I hate you. Yes ! I hate you, sir I " No words can give the force, the malignity, the concentrated meaning with which the words were hmded 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 scom-ges, but he bowed once more with the man- ner that was as inseparable from him as his nature. " Hate is so very exhausting ; I regret I give you the trouble of it. ]\Iay I ask why you favour 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 ^Vlan Bertie's voice; I loved your mother, I worshipped her ; but — you are his son, not mine I " 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 126 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 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 paralyse him for the moment, the next he recovered himself, and lifted his head mth as haughty a gesture as his father's, his features were perfectly composed again, and sterner than in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked. " You lie, and you know that you lie. My mother was pui'e 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 1 be so melodramatic ? We were like two men at the Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such a bad form ! " But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, and gentle though his nature was, beyond all foro;iveness from him was the dishonour of his mo- ther's memory. 127 CHAPTER VII. ^ AFTER A RICHMOND DIXXEE. 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 Affghan war, was never more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby to Ducal. Escorts to Levees, guards of honour 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 Mle ; the recon- naissances from club \N^ndows, the videttes at Flirta- tion 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 up Belgravian staircases when a fashionable 128 UXDEE TWO FLAGS. cli'um beat the rataplan ; the skii-mishes with sharp- shooters of the bricrht-ai-mecl Irrecmlar Lances ; the foramnsj-dutv when fair commanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties ; the ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps ; the terrible risk of crossing into the enemy's lines, and being made to sun-ender as prisoners of war at the jails of St. George's, or of St. Paul's Knightsbridge : the constant inspections of the Flying Battahons of the Ballet, and the pickets afterwards in the AYood of St. John ; the anxieties of the Club commissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines ; the fatigue duty of ball-rooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the clause in the Eegulations never to wear the same gloves twice ; all these, without counting the close battles of the Corner and the unremitting requirements of the Tiu'f, worked the First Life and the rest of the Bri- gades, Horse and Foot, so hard and incessantly, that some almost thought of changing into the dreaiy depot of St. Stephen's ; and one mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enoucrh and false enough to his colours to meditate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself up at St. George's — '' because a fellow once hancred is let alone, vou 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 — marvellous and indefinable word, that gives a more powerful crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can ever bestow. And AFTES A EICmiOXL DIXXEP.. 129 no list was '-the thing" vritliout his name, ivj re- ception, no garden party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowed ijoudoir, fashionably ajic/ie •without being visited by liim. How he, in espe- cial, had got his reputation it would have been liard to say, unless it were that he da-essed a shade more perfectly than any one, and with such inimitable carelessness in the perfection, too, and had an almost unattainable matchlessness in the samf froid of his soft languid insolence, and incredible though ever gentle effronteiw. However gained, he had it : and his beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton with two blood greys dancing in impatience over the stones, or his little dark-ni'een broucrham for nirrlit-work, were, one or another of them, always ^QQn 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 bra\'issima, introduced a new tie by an evening's wear, gave a cook thie cordon with liis 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 Lor 1, or from his elder brother, the heir ; and now ever}' chance of it was hopelessly closed; nothing but the whim or the will of tliose who held VOL. I. K 130 UNDEE TWO FLAGS. 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 " no- where " 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 betwixt his glittering luxurious world and the fiat of outlawry and exile. He knew that the Jew^s might be down on him any night that he sat at the Guards' mess, flirted Avith 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 Koyallieu 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 realised 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 realise that mid- night 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 pomegra- nate and amber grape, and the scarlet of odorous flowers, and the blush of a girl's kiss-warmed cheek ? A sentimental metaphor vnih wdiich to compare the difficulties of a dandy of the Household, because his " stiff " was floating about in too many directions at AFTEE A EICHMOXD DIXXEE. 131 too many high figures, and he had hardly enough till next pay-day came round to purchase the bou- quets he sent, and meet the club-fees that were due ! But, after all, may it not well be doubted if a sliarp shock and a second's blindness, and a sudden sweep down under the walls of the Cathedral or tlie 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 disbeheve 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 hor.^es in the town, a dozen rose-notes sent to his cluljs or his lodgings in a day, and the newest thing m 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 fear- ful hard work consequent on having played the Foot Guards at Lord's, and, in an unwaiy moment, having allowed himself to be decoyed afterwards to a private concert, and very nearly proposed to in con- sequence, during a S}'mp]iony in A ; an impending terror from which he could hardly restore himself by puffing turkish like a steam-engine, to assure him- self of his jeopardised safety. "You're horribly imprudent ! " '' Xot a bit of it," rejoined Beauty, serenely. " That k2 132 UNDEK TWO FLAGS. is the superior wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbour'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 futuro, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion, "You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was tJiei/ 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 futm'e chance of showing in the latter class of marital defrauded, by shying that proposal during the Sym- phony in A, on which his thoughts ran as the thoughts of one who lias just escaped from an Alpine crevasse run on the past abyss in which he has been so nearly lost for ever. " 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 ! " i AFTER A PJCHMOXD DIXNER. 133 " Ah, by Jove ! and what saved you ? " The Seraph lifted hhnself a little, with a sort of pit}'ing sympathising curiosity towards a fellow- sufferer. '' Well, I'll tell you," said Bertie, ^\^th 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 Eoyal, I think. Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw sucJi 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 ivould 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 di\ine 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 sherr)-cobbler melt away : when you have been so near breaking youi' neck down the ^latrimonial Matterhorn, it is painfully interesting to hear how your friend escaped the same risks of descent. 134. UNDEK TWO FLAGS. ^' 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, Fm so hungry! 1 could eat a ichole chicken I ' The sigh, the smile, the blush, the light, were for her dinner — not for me! The spell was broken for ever. A girl whom / 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 laugh- ter, 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 now-a-days. 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. Serve her right," miu'mured Cecil, sententiously. " Only think what she lost just through hungering for a chicken ; if I hadn't have proposed for her, for one hardly AFTER A EICHMOND DINNEE. 135 keeps the screw up to sucli self-sacrifice as that when one is cool the next morning, I would have made her the fashion ! " With which masterly description in one plirase 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 con- sisted in driving do\vn 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 out from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretching gallop doviai the Kew road. It certainly had no other more aquatic fea- ture 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 that would have been worthy of mediaeval " Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and drop." It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Brown- ing's fashion, 136 UNDER TWO FLAGS. '■ 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 gro^w-n old ;" because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to thmk 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 -vdsas and luggage and all that, chloride of lime'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 puff- ing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster di'owned in Chablis, or pelt- ing liim with bonbons. As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil's box-seat, remembered she had