Under Two Flags

O >> Ouida [Louise de la Ramee] >> Under Two Flags


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 thoroughbred; a coquette who would smoke a
cigarette, yet a peeress who would never lose her dignity.

"Au coeur vaillant rien d'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 lifted the King to that last leap. It
was terrible!"

It was terrible; and a woman, to say nothing of a woman who was in
love with him, might well 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
fillies, and could lead the first flight over the Belvoir and the Quorn
countries. It was possible that her ladyship was too thoroughbred 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 eloquence 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!"

She laughed a little, so did he; they were used to exchange these
passages in an admirably artistic masquerade, 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.

"What 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 very delightful, that desperate effort to
break your neck? It looks pleasant, to judge 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 Bertie
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 commonplace, 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 indication of studied
affectation, of which he, however much of a dandy he was, was wholly
guiltless. "Well! you won magnificently; 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 colors
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 wondering why the deuce a fellow had to talk
such nonsense. Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with whom he had been in love
ever since they stayed together at Belvoir for the Croxton Park week the
autumn previous; and who was beautiful enough to make their "friendship"
as enchanting as a page out of the "Decamerone." And while he bent
over her, flirting in the fashion that made him the darling of the
drawing-rooms, and looking down into her superb Velasquez eyes, he did
not know, and if he had known would have been careless of it, that
afar off, while 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."



CHAPTER IV.

LOVE A LA MODE.

Life was very pleasant at Royallieu.

It lay in the Melton country, and was equally well placed for Pytchley,
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, pheasants were fed on Indian
corn till they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little
winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first-rate shots,
with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to amuse them
till dinner, with rocketers and warm corners 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; in 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; a retinue of powdered servants
filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately
banqueting room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its
Vernets, and yet--there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it
all. Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the future, and the
parasite of extravagance was constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old
Norman-planted oak of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that?
Nobody. 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 ax 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 improvidence. 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 molded to do in boyhood, when they were set to Eton at ten
with gold dressing-boxes to grace their Dame's tables, embryo Dukes for
their cofags, and tastes that already knew to a nicety the worth of
the champagnes at the Christopher. The old, old story--how it repeats
itself! Boys grow up amid profuse prodigality, and are launched into a
world where they can no more arrest 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 dishonored alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lakeside, or
under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red
cross chills the lonely traveler in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian
forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a
nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed waters--then
at them the world "shoots out its lips with scorn." Not on them lies the
blame.

A wintry, watery sun was shining on the terraces as Lord Royallieu paced
up and down the morning after the Grand Military; his step and limbs
excessively enfeebled, but the carriage of his head and the flash of
his dark hawk's eyes as proud and untamable as in his earliest years.
He never left his own apartments; and no one, save his favorite "little
Berk," ever went to him without his desire. He was too sensitive a
man to thrust his age and ailing health in among 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 shrewd
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 toward 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 creature 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 anyone, had married the Viscount with no
affection toward him, while he had adored her with a fierce and jealous
passion that her indifference only inflamed. Throughout her married
life, however, she had striven to render loyalty and tenderness toward
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 candor before he wedded her; knew
that the man she did love was a penniless cousin, a cavalry officer, 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 thrown them across
each other's path; the old love, stronger, perhaps, now than it had
ever been, had made him linger in her presence--had made her shrink
from sending him to exile. Evil tongues at last had united their names
together; Alan Bertie had left the woman he idolized lest slander should
touch her through him, and fallen two years later under the dark dank
forests on the desolate moor-side of the hills of Hindostan, where long
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 favorite child bore her family
name--her late lover's name; and, in resembling her race, resembled the
dead soldier. It was sufficient to make him hate Bertie 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 colored, too strongly
to be dissembled, all his feelings and his actions toward his son, and
might both have soured and wounded any temperament less nonchalantly
gentle and supremely careless than Cecil's.

As it was, Bertie was sometimes surprised at his father's dislike to
him, but never thought much about it, and attributed it, when he did
think of it, to the caprices of a tyrannous old man. To be jealous of
the favor shown to his boyish brother could never for a moment have come
into his imagination. Lady Royallieu with her last words had left the
little fellow, a child of three years old, in 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 dying mother had never been
wholly forgotten.

A heavy gloom came now over the Viscount's still handsome aquiline,
saturnine 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 light of a Mediterranean sunset. The soldier had been
dead eight-and-twenty years; but the jealous hate was not dead yet.

Cecile took off his hunting-cap with a courtesy that sat very well on
his habitual languid nonchalance; he never called his father anything
but "Royal"; rarely saw, still less rarely consulted him, and cared
not a straw for his censure or opinion; but he was too thoroughbred by
nature to be able to follow the underbred indecorum of the day which
makes disrespect 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 message right now, it seems."

"Shouldn't have named us so near alike; it's often a bore!" said Bertie.

"I didn't name you, sir; your mother named you," 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 discourteous--a far worse crime in Lord Royallieu'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.

"I 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 'plow' is like," he said, with a flash of his
falcon eyes over the landscape, where, 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."

"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 5 pound points, and lay 500 pounds 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 what you bet, sir; you live as if you were a Rothschild 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 everyone, 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 Rockingham--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 you do. You conduct yourself as if you
were a millionaire, 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 beggary, 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 flushed out with wicked, scorching malignity;
lashing and upbraiding the man who was the victim of his own unwisdom
and extravagance.

A slight tinge of color 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 toward the Viscount. "Royal 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; drawing his arm about
Berkeley's shoulder, and looking with pride upon his bright and gracious
youth.

More than an old man's preference would 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 Viscount 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 unconscious, yet
unvarying, obedience to his dead mothers' 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 turned 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 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 fathers' 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 Quorn. They moved off ere long to draw the Holt Wood, in as
open a morning and as strong a scenting wind as ever favored Melton
Pink.

A whimper and "gone away!" soon echoed from Beebyside, and the pack,
not letting the fox hang a second, dashed after him, making straight for
Scraptoft. 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 foxhole
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, 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 country, nearly
saved his brush in the twilight when the scent was lost in a rushing
hailstorm, but had the "little ladies" laid on again 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 tired 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 knew--thirty minutes
without a check--such a pace!" and care little whether the finale be
"killed" or "broke away," and those of the old 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; positively walked, 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 Cecil remembered the caustic lash of his father's
ironies while he was lifting Mother of Pearl over the posts and rails,
and sweeping on, with the halloo ringing down the wintry wind as the
grasslands flew beneath him? Was it likely that he recollected the
difficulties that hung above him while he was dashing down the Gorse
happy 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 realize in how near a neighborhood 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 with the Seraph through the leafless, muddy lanes in
the gloaming?

Scarcely; it is very easy to remember our difficulties when we are
eating and drinking them, so to speak, in bad soups and worse wines
in continental impecuniosity; sleeping on them as rough Australian
shake-downs, or wearing them perpetually in Californian rags and
tatters--it were impossible 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 everything about us is symbolical and redolent of
wealth and ease--when the art of enjoyment 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 beggar while you never
want sovereigns for whist; and it would be beyond the powers of human
nature to conceive your ruin irrevocable while you still eat turbot
and terrapin, with a powdered giant behind your chair daily. Up in his
garret a poor wretch knows very well what he is, and realizes in stern
fact the extremities 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 realize it when--pressed to dine with
Lord Guenevere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while a
groom dashed over to Royallieu for his change of clothes--he caught a
glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their
preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace and
silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blond cheeks and brunette
tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed
the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among them to be the darling of
that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by those soft,
languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his
chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women will spoil the
privileged pet of their drawing rooms whom they had made "free of
the guild," and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of
anything "serious."