Under Two Flags

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"But you must have trained at Christ Church, Rock, for the Eight?" asked
another Guardsman, Sir Vere Bellingham; "Severe," as he was christened,
chiefly because he was the easiest-going giant in existence.

"Did I! men came to me; wanted me to join the Eight; coxswain came,
awful strict little fellow, docked his men of all their fun--took plenty
himself though! Coxswain said I must begin to train, do as all his
crew did. I threw up my sleeve and showed him my arm;" and the Seraph
stretched out an arm magnificent enough for a statue of Milo. "I said,
'there, sir, I'll help you thrash Cambridge, if you like, but train I
won't for you or for all the University. I've been Captain of the
Eton Eight; but I didn't keep my crew on tea and toast. I fattened 'em
regularly three times a week on venison and champagne at Christopher's.
Very happy to feed yours, too, if you like; game comes down to me every
Friday from the Duke's moors; they look uncommonly as if they wanted
it!' You should have seen his face!--fatten the Eight! He didn't let me
do that, of course; but he was very glad of my oar in his rowlocks, and
I helped him beat Cambridge without training an hour myself, except so
far as rowing hard went."

And the Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the recollection, dipped
his fair mustaches into a foaming seltzer.

"Quite right, Seraph!" said Cecil; "when a man comes up to the weights,
looking like a homunculus, after he's been getting every atom of flesh
off him like a jockey, he ought to be struck out for the stakes, to
my mind. 'Tisn't a question of riding, then, nor yet of pluck, or of
management; it's nothing but a question of pounds, and of who can stand
the tamest life the longest."

"Well, beneficial for one's morals, at any rate," suggested Sir Vere.

"Morals be hanged!" said Bertie, very immorally. "I'm glad you remind us
of them, Vere; you're such a quintessence of decorum and respectability
yourself! I say--anybody know anything of this fellow of the Tenth
that's to ride Trelawney's chestnut?"

"Jimmy Delmar! Oh, yes; I know Jimmy," answered Lord Cosmo Wentworth, of
the Scots Fusileers, from the far depths of an arm-chair. "Knew him at
Aldershot. Fine rider; give you a good bit of trouble, Beauty. Hasn't
been in England for years; troop been such a while at Calcutta. The
Fancy take to him rather; offering very freely on him this morning in
the village; and he's got a rare good thing in the chestnut."

"Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that Irish mare
D'Orleans Diamonds, too."

"Never mind! Tenth won't beat us. The Household will win safe enough,
unless Forest King goes and breaks his back over Brixworth--eh, Beauty?"
said the Seraph, who believed devoutly in his comrade, with all the
loving loyalty characteristic of the House of Lyonnesse, that to
monarchs and to friends had often cost it very dear.

"You put your faith in the wrong quarter, Rock; I may fail you, he never
will," said Cecil, with ever so slight a dash of sadness in his words;
the thought crossed him of how boldly, how straightly, how gallantly
the horse always breasted and conquered his difficulties--did he himself
deal half so well with his own?

"Well! you both of you carry all our money and all our credit; so for
the fair fame of the Household do 'all you know.' I haven't hedged a
shilling, not laid off a farthing, Bertie; I stand on you and the King,
and nothing else--see what a sublime faith I have in you."

"I don't think you're wise then, Seraph; the field will be very
strong," said Cecil languidly. The answer was indifferent, and certainly
thankless; but under his drooped lids a glance, frank and warm, rested
for the moment on the Seraph's leonine strength and Raphaelesque head;
it was not his way to say it, or to show it, or even much to think it;
but in his heart he loved his old friend wonderfully well.

And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple-chase of
the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Parliament, while the great
clouds of scented smoke circled heavily round; making a halo of Turkish
above the gold locks of the Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield's
velvets in strong odors of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented
mist over Bertie's long, lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough to
disdain all "training for the weights."

"That's not the way to be in condition," growled "Tom," getting up with
a great shake as the clock clanged the strokes of five; they had only
returned from a ball three miles off, when Cecil had paid his visit
to the loose box. Bertie laughed; his laugh was like himself--rather
languid, but very light-hearted, very silvery, very engaging.

"Sit and smoke till breakfast time if you like, Tom; it won't make any
difference to me."

But the Smoke Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion of the Household
over the ridge and furrow risking the steadiness of his wrist and the
keenness of his eye by any such additional tempting of Providence, and
went off itself in various directions, with good-night iced drinks,
yawning considerably like most other parliaments after a sitting.

It was the old family place of the Royallieu House in which he had
congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the great event, and
consequently the bachelor chambers in it were of the utmost comfort and
spaciousness, and when Cecil sauntered into his old quarters, familiar
from boyhood, he could not have been better off in his own luxurious
haunts in Piccadilly. Moreover, the first thing that caught his eye was
a dainty scarlet silk riding jacket broidered in gold and silver, with
the motto of his house, "Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume," all circled
with oak and laurel leaves on the collar.

It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristocratic hands, and
he looked at it with a smile. "Ah, my lady, my lady!" he thought half
aloud, "do you really love me? Do I really love you?"

There was a laugh in his eyes as he asked himself what might be termed
an interesting question; then something more earnest came over his face,
and he stood a second with the pretty costly embroideries in his hand,
with a smile that was almost tender, though it was still much more
amused. "I suppose we do," he concluded at last; "at least quite as
much as is ever worth while. Passions don't do for the drawing-room, as
somebody says in 'Coningsby'; besides--I would not feel a strong emotion
for the universe. Bad style always, and more detrimental to 'condition,'
as Tom would say, than three bottles of brandy!"

He was so little near what he dreaded, at present at least, that the
scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him no dreams of his fair
and titled embroideress. He looked out, the last thing, at some ominous
clouds drifting heavily up before the dawn, and the state of the
weather, and the chance of its being rainy, filled his thoughts, to the
utter exclusion of the donor of that bright gold-laden dainty gift. "I
hope to goodness there won't be any drenching shower. Forest King can
stand ground as hard as a slate, but if there's one thing he's weak in
it's slush!" was Bertie's last conscious thought, as he stretched his
limbs out and fell sound asleep.



CHAPTER III.

THE SOLDIERS' BLUE RIBBON.

"Take the Field bar one." "Two to one on Forest King." "Two to one on
Bay Regent." "Fourteen to seven on Wild Geranium." "Seven to two against
Brother to Fairy." "Three to five on Pas de Charge." "Nineteen to six
on Day Star." "Take the Field bar one," rose above the hoarse tumultuous
roar of the ring on the clear, crisp, sunny morning that was shining on
the Shires on the day of the famous steeple-chase.

The talent had come in great muster from London; the great bookmakers
were there with their stentor lungs and their quiet, quick entry of
thousands; and the din and the turmoil, at the tiptop of their height,
were more like a gathering on the Heath or before the Red House, than
the local throngs that usually mark steeple-chase meetings, even when
they be the Grand Military or the Grand National. There were keen
excitement and heavy stakes on the present event; the betting had never
stood still a second in Town or the Shires; and even the "knowing ones,"
the worshipers of the "flat" alone, the professionals who ran down
gentlemen races and the hypercritics who affirmed that there is not such
a thing as a steeple-chaser to be found on earth (since, to be a
fencer, a water-jumper, and a racer were to attain an equine perfection
impossible on earth, whatever it may be in "happy hunting ground" of
immortality)--even these, one and all of them, came eager to see the
running for the Gilt Vase.

For it was known very well that the Guards had backed their horse
tremendously, and the county laid most of its money on him, and
the bookmakers were shy of laying off much against one of the first
cross-country riders of the Service, who had landed his mount at the
Grand National Handicap, the Billesdon Coplow, the Ealing, the Curragh,
the Prix du Donjon, the Rastatt, and almost every other for which he had
entered. Yet, despite this, the "Fancy" took most to Bay Regent; they
thought he would cut the work out; his sire had won the Champion Stakes
at Doncaster, and the Drawing-room at "glorious Goodwood," and that
racing strain through the White Lily blood, coupled with a magnificent
reputation which he brought from Leicestershire as a fencer, found him
chief favor among the fraternity.

His jockey, Jimmy Delmar, too, with his bronzed, muscular, sinewy frame,
his low stature, his light weight, his sunburnt, acute face, and a way
of carrying his hands as he rode that was precisely like Aldcroft's,
looked a hundred times more professional than the brilliance of
"Beauty," and the reckless dash of his well-known way of "sending the
horse along with all he had in him," which was undeniably much more like
a fast kill over the Melton country, than like a weight-for-age race
anywhere. "You see the Service in his stirrups," said an old nobbler who
had watched many a trial spin, lying hidden in a ditch or a drain; and
indisputably you did: Bertie's riding was superb, but it was still the
riding of a cavalryman, not of a jockey. The mere turn of the foot in
the stirrups told it, as the old man had the shrewdness to know.

So the King went down at one time two points in the morning betting.

"Know them flash cracks of the Household," said Tim Varnet, as sharp a
little Leg as ever "got on" a dark thing, and "went halves" with a jock
who consented to rope a favorite at the Ducal. "Them swells, ye see,
they give any money for blood. They just go by Godolphin heads, and
little feet, and winners' strains, and all the rest of it; and so long
as they get pedigree never look at substance; and their bone comes no
bigger than a deer's. Now, it's force as well as pace that tells over a
bit of plow; a critter that would win the Derby on the flat would knock
up over the first spin over the clods; and that King's legs are too
light for my fancy, 'andsome as 'tis ondeniable he looks--for a little
'un, as one may say."

And Tim Varnet exactly expressed the dominant mistrust of the talent;
despite all his race and all his exploits, the King was not popular in
the Ring, because he was like his backers--"a swell." They thought him
"showy--very showy," "a picture to frame," "a luster to look at"; but
they disbelieved in him, almost to a man, as a stayer, and they trusted
him scarcely at all with their money.

"It's plain that he's 'meant,' though," thought little Tim, who was
so used to the "shady" in stable matters that he could hardly persuade
himself that even the Grand Military could be run fair, and would have
thought a Guardsman or a Hussar only exercised his just privilege as
a jockey in "roping" after selling the race, if so it suited his book.
"He's 'meant,' that's clear, 'cause the swells have put all their
pots on him--but if the pots don't bile over, strike me a loser!" a
contingency he knew he might very well invoke; his investments being
invariably so matchlessly arranged that, let what would be "bowled
over," Tim Varnet never could be.

Whatever the King might prove, however, the Guards, the Flower of the
Service, must stand or fall by him; they had not Seraph, they put in
"Beauty" and his gray. But there was no doubt as to the tremendousness
of the struggle lying before him. The running ground covered four miles
and a half, and had forty-two jumps in it, exclusive of the famous
Brixworth: half was grassland, and half ridge and furrow; a lane
with very awkward double fences laced in and in with the memorable
blackthorn, a laid hedge with thick growers in it and many another
"teaser," coupled with the yawning water, made the course a severe one;
while thirty-two starters of unusual excellence gave a good field and
promised a close race. Every fine bit of steeple-chase blood that was to
be found in their studs, the Service had brought together for the great
event; and if the question could ever be solved, whether it is possible
to find a strain that shall combine pace over the flat with the heart
to stay over an inclosed country, the speed to race with the bottom to
fence and the force to clear water, it seemed likely to be settled
now. The Service and the Stable had done their uttermost to reach its
solution.

The clock of the course pointed to half-past one; the saddling bell
would ring at a quarter to two, for the days were short and darkened
early; the Stewards were all arrived, except the Marquis of Rockingham,
and the Ring was in the full rush of excitement; some "getting on"
hurriedly to make up for lost time; some "peppering" one or other of the
favorites hotly; some laying off their moneys in a cold fit of caution;
some putting capfuls on the King, or Bay Regent, or Pas de Charge,
from the great commission stables, the local betting man, the shrewd
wiseacres from the Ridings, all the rest of the brotherhood of the Turf
were crowding together with the deafening shouting common to them which
sounds so tumultuous, so insane, and so unintelligible to outsiders.
Amid them half the titled heads of England, all the great names known
on the flat, and men in the Guards, men in the Rifles, men in the Light
Cavalry, men in the Heavies, men in the Scots Greys, men in the Horse
Artillery, men in all the Arms and all the Regiments that had sent their
first riders to try for the Blue Ribbon, were backing their horses with
crackers, and jotting down figure after figure, with jeweled pencils, in
dainty books, taking long odds with the fields. Carriages were standing
in long lines along the course, the stands were filled with almost as
bright a bevy of fashionable loveliness as the Ducal brings together
under the park trees of Goodwood; the horses were being led into the
inclosure for saddling, a brilliant sun shone for the nonce on the
freshest of February noons; beautiful women were fluttering out of their
barouches in furs and velvets, wearing the colors of the jockey they
favored, and more predominant than any were Cecil's scarlet and white,
only rivaled in prominence by the azure of the Heavy Cavalry champion,
Sir Eyre Montacute. A drag with four bays--with fine hunting points
about them--had dashed up, late of course; the Seraph had swung himself
from the roller-bolt into the saddle of his hack (one of these few rare
hacks that are perfect, and combine every excellence of pace, bone, and
action, under their modest appellative), and had cantered off to join
the Stewards; while Cecil had gone up to a group of ladies in the Grand
Stand, as if he had no more to do with the morning's business than they.
Right in front of that Stand was an artificial bullfinch that promised
to treat most of the field to a "purler," a deep ditch dug and filled
with water, with two towering blackthorn fences on either side of it,
as awkward a leap as the most cramped country ever showed; some were
complaining of it; it was too severe, it was unfair, it would break the
back of very horse sent at it. The other Stewards were not unwilling to
have it tamed down a little, but he Seraph, generally the easiest of all
sweet-tempered creatures, refused resolutely to let it be touched.

"Look here," said he confidentially, as he wheeled his hack round to the
Stand and beckoned Cecil down, "look here, Beauty; they're wanting
to alter that teaser, make it less awkward, you know; but I wouldn't
because I thought it would look as if I lessened it for you, you know.
Still it is a cracker and no mistake; Brixworth itself is nothing to it,
and if you'd like it toned down I'll let them do it--"

"My dear Seraph, not for worlds! You were quite right not to have a
thorn taken down. Why, that's where I shall thrash Bay Regent," said
Bertie serenely, as if the winning of the stakes had been forecast in
his horoscope.

The Seraph whistled, stroking his mustaches. "Between ourselves, Cecil,
that fellow is going up no end. The Talent fancy him so--"

"Let them," said Cecil placidly, with a great cheroot in his mouth,
lounging into the center of the Ring to hear how the betting went on his
own mount; perfectly regardless that he would keep them waiting at the
weights while he dressed. Everybody there knew him by name and sight;
and eager glances followed the tall form of the Guards' champion as he
moved through the press, in a loose brown sealskin coat, with a little
strip of scarlet ribbon round his throat, nodding to this peer, taking
evens with that, exchanging a whisper with a Duke, and squaring his
book with a Jew. Murmurs followed about him as if he were the horse
himself--"looks in racing form"--"looks used up to me"--"too little
hands surely to hold in long in a spin"--"too much length in the limbs
for a light weight; bone's always awfully heavy"--"dark under the eye,
been going too fast for training"--"a swell all over, but rides no end,"
with other innumerable contradictory phrases, according as the speaker
was "on" him or against him, buzzed about him from the riff-raff of the
Ring, in no way disturbing his serene equanimity.

One man, a big fellow, "'ossy" all over, with the genuine sporting
cut-away coat, and a superabundance of showy necktie and bad jewelry,
eyed him curiously, and slightly turned so that his back was toward
Bertie, as the latter was entering a bet with another Guardsman well
known on the turf, and he himself was taking long odds with little Berk
Cecil, the boy having betted on his brother's riding, as though he
had the Bank of England at his back. Indeed, save that the lad had
the hereditary Royallieu instinct of extravagance, and, with a half
thoughtless, half willful improvidence, piled debts and difficulties
on this rather brainless and boyish head, he had much more to depend on
than his elder; old Lord Royallieu doted on him, spoilt him, and denied
him nothing, though himself a stern, austere, passionate man, made
irascible by ill health, and, in his fits of anger, a very terrible
personage indeed--no more to be conciliated by persuasion than iron
is to be bent by the hand; so terrible that even his pet dreaded him
mortally, and came to Bertie to get his imprudences and peccadilloes
covered from the Viscount's sight.

Glancing round at this moment as he stood in the ring, Cecil saw the
betting man with whom Berkeley was taking long odds on the race; he
raised his eyebrows, and his face darkened for a second, though resuming
its habitual listless serenity almost immediately.

"You remember that case of welshing after the Ebor St. Leger, Con?" he
said in a low tone to the Earl of Constantia, with whom he was talking.
The Earl nodded assent; everyone had heard of it, and a very flagrant
case it was.

"There's the fellow," said Cecil laconically, and strode toward him with
his long, lounging cavalry swing. The man turned pallid under his florid
skin, and tried to edge imperceptibly away; but the density of the
throng prevented his moving quickly enough to evade Cecil, who stooped
his head, and said a word in his ear. It was briefly:

"Leave the ring."

The rascal, half bully, half coward, rallied from the startled fear into
which his first recognition by the Guardsman (who had been the chief
witness against him in a very scandalous matter at York, and who had
warned him that if he ever saw him again in the Ring he would have him
turned out of it) had thrown him, and, relying on insolence and the
numbers of his fraternity to back him out of it, stood his ground.

"I've as much right here as you swells," he said, with a hoarse laugh.
"Are you the whole Jockey Club, that you come it to a honest gentleman
like that?"

Cecil looked down on him slightly amused, immeasurably disgusted--of all
earth's terrors, there was not one so great for him as a scene, and the
eager bloodshot eyes of the Ring were turning on them by the thousand,
and the loud shouting of the bookmakers was thundering out, "What's up?"

"My 'honest gentleman,'" he said wearily, "leave this. I tell you; do
you hear?"

"Make me!" retorted the "welsher," defiant in his stout-built square
strength, and ready to brazen the matter out. "Make me, my cock o' fine
feathers! Put me out of the ring if you can, Mr. Dainty Limbs! I've as
much business here as you."

The words were hardly out of his mouth before, light as a deer and
close as steel, Cecil's hand was on his collar, and without any seeming
effort, without the slightest passion, he calmly lifted him off the
ground, as though he were a terrier, and thrust him through the throng;
Ben Davis, as the welsher was named, meantime being so amazed at such
unlooked-for might in the grasp of the gentlest, idlest, most gracefully
made, and indolently tempered of his born foes and prey, "the swells,"
that he let himself be forced along backward in sheer passive paralysis
of astonishment, while Bertie, profoundly insensible to the tumult that
began to rise and roar about him, from those who were not too absorbed
in the business of the morning to note what took place, thrust him
along in the single clasp of his right hand outward to where the running
ground swept past the Stand, and threw him lightly, easily, just as one
may throw a lap-dog to take his bath, into the artificial ditch filled
with water that the Seraph had pointed out as "a teaser." The man fell
unhurt, unbruised, so gently was he dropped on his back among the muddy,
chilly water, and the overhanging brambles; and, as he rose from the
ducking, a shudder of ferocious and filthy oaths poured from his lips,
increased tenfold by the uproarious laughter of the crowd, who knew him
as "a welsher," and thought him only too well served.

Policemen rushed in at all points, rural and metropolitan, breathless,
austere, and, of course, too late. Bertie turned to them, with a slight
wave of his hand, to sign them away.

"Don't trouble yourselves! It's nothing you could interfere in; take
care that person doesn't come into the betting ring again, that's all."

The Seraph, Lord Constantia, Wentworth, and may others of his set,
catching sight of the turmoil and of "Beauty," with the great square-set
figure of Ben Davis pressed before him through the mob, forced their way
up as quickly as they could; but before they reached the spot Cecil was
sauntering back to meet them, cool and listless, and a little bored with
so much exertion; his cheroot in his mouth, and his ear serenely deaf to
the clamor about the ditch.

He looked apologetically at the Seraph and the others; he felt some
apology was required for having so far wandered from all the canons of
his Order as to have approached "a row," and run the risk of a scene.

"Turf must be cleared of these scamps, you see," he said, with a half
sigh. "Law can't do anything. Fellow was trying to 'get on' with
the young one, too. Don't bet with those riff-raff, Berk. The great
bookmakers will make you dead money, and the little Legs will do worse
to you."

The boy hung his head, but looked sulky rather than thankful for his
brother's interference with himself and the welsher.

"You have done the Turf a service, Beauty--a very great service; there's
no doubt about that," said the Seraph. "Law can't do anything, as you
say; opinion must clear the ring of such rascals; a welsher ought not to
dare to show his face here; but, at the same time, you oughtn't to have
gone unsteadying your muscle, and risking the firmness of your hand at
such a minute as this, with pitching that fellow over. Why couldn't you
wait till afterward? or have let me do it?"

"My dear Seraph," murmured Bertie languidly, "I've gone in to-day
for exertion; a little more or less is nothing. Besides, welshers are
slippery dogs, you know."

He did not add that it was having seen Ben Davis taking odds with his
young brother which had spurred him to such instantaneous action with
that disreputable personage; who, beyond doubt, only received a tithe
part of his deserts, and merited to be double-thonged off every course
in the kingdom.