Under Two Flags

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


"Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy; but none
so much to my taste," said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with a
yawn. "With every regard to hospitality and the charms of your society,
might I hint that five o'clock in the morning is not precisely the most
suitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?"

"For God's sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most miserable wretch in
creation."

Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanished
from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the serene
insouciance of his face.

"Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard," he thought, but he
was not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and its
rejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himself
with a sigh.

"Dear boy, why didn't you sleep upon it? I never think of disagreeable
things till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with the
cup and put them down with it. You don't know how well it answers; it
disposes of them wonderfully."

The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in the
gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.

"How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and you care no
more than if you were a stone. You only think of yourself; you only live
for yourself!"

He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that very
table the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts that
had been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race. There is a
childish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits received
save as title-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him with
just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his
glance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish,
passionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.

"'Brutal'! What a word, little one. Nobody's brutal now; you never see
that form nowadays. Come, what is the worst this time?"

Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows leaned;
scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and the
gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was something
dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, upon
him, that was new there.

"The worst is soon told," he said huskily, and his teeth chattered
together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. "I lost two hundred
to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing;
I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am under
age; and--and"--his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew
that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and
his brothers was the thing he had now to tell--"and--I borrowed three
ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot
of banknotes after settling-day. I told him I would pay them to-morrow;
I made sure I should have won to-night."

The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the
belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a
bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken
in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's
confession.

Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his
face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his
mother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and
unmentionable degradation--it was to borrow of a friend.

"You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley," he said,
with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his
voice. "Have you no common knowledge of honor?"

The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger
rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down
on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.

"You are severe enough," he said gloomily, and yet insolently. "Are you
such a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, are
about one-fifth of yours."

For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way. Be
his debts what they would, there was not one among them to his friends,
or one for which the law could not seize him. He was silent; he did not
wish to have a scene of discussion with one who was but a child to him;
moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to avert
even a dispute, at any cost.

He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting his
cheroot in his mouth.

"Tres cher, you are not courteous," he said wearily; "but it may be
that you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anything
except the fit of my coats; I don't think I ever told you I was. I am
not altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a model
for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond
Street to show the muffs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; you
say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow--to-day rather. I can suggest
nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal
straight out; he never refuses you."

Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a
stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly
moved by fear.

"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration that
was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live I
would! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--and
now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on
Royallieu--"

"What? Foreclose what?"

"The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish
egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be
considered save his own. "You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as
Monti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose--I
think that's the word--and Royal has had God knows what work to stave
them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than
I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard."

Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn
the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find
how entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him from
all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him
ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.

"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languid
stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects.
"And--I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would help
you?"

"I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him."

Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he
shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came
to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest
himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,--less
extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,--he might
have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might
have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a
sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary
in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the sum that
the boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set, and with his habits,
that he had betted it over and over again in a clubroom, on a single
game of whist. It cut him with a bitter, impatient pain; he was as
generous as the winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temper
than the poverty that paralyzes its power to give.

"It is no use to give you false hopes, young one," he said gently. "I
can do nothing! You ought to know me by this time; and if you do, you
know too that if the money was mine it would be yours at a word--if you
don't, no matter! Frankly, Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may be
called in any moment; when they are I must send in my papers to sell,
and cut the country, if my duns don't catch me before, which
they probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents and
purposes--dead. This is not lively conversation, but you will do me the
justice to say that it was not I who introduced it. Only--one word for
all, my boy; understand this: if I could help you I would, cost what it
might, but as matters stand--I cannot."

And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to envelope him; the
subject was painful, the denial wounded him by whom it had to be given
full as much as it could wound him whom it refused. Berkeley heard it
in silence; his head still hung down, his color changing, his hands
nervously playing with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening their
gold tops.

"No--yes--I know," he said hurriedly; "I have no right to expect it, and
have been behaving like a cur, and--and--all that, I know. But--there is
one way you could save me, Bertie, if it isn't too much for a fellow to
ask."

"I can't say I see the way, little one," said Cecil, with a sigh. "What
is it?"

"Why--look here. You see I'm not of age; my signature is of no use; they
won't take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come to
me when Royal dies; though 'tisn't enough to make the Jews 'melt' at a
risk. Now--now--look here. I can't see that there could be any harm in
it. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he's as rich as all the
Jews put together. What could there be in it if you just asked him to
lend you a monkey for me? He'd do it in a minute, because he'd give
his head away to you--they all say so--and he'll never miss it. Now,
Bertie--will you?"

In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal was
panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot
color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full
of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from
his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look
disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.

"What you ask is impossible," he said briefly. "If I did such a thing as
that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow."

The boy's face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still
bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother's.

"You speak as if it would be a crime," he muttered savagely, with a
plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt
with and unjustly punished.

"It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a
gentleman," said Cecil, as briefly still. "That is answer enough."

"Then you will not do it?"

"I have replied already."

There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused
before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before;
something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of
the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the
haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the
too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil's disposition.

"You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so
wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel," he moaned
passionately. "The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is your
pride--nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless
beggars!"

"If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other
men?"

"You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!"

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did
not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to
defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far
greater than his heed of misconstruction.

"You are a brute to me!" went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter
passion rising almost to tears like a woman's. "You pretend you can
refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn
on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'll
let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save
me; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor's
prison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helping
a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug
your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest
picked out of your cursed French novels!"

"Melodramatic, and scarcely correct," murmured Bertie.

The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not
given to making much of anything that was due to himself--partly through
carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother
of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men
call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did
to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.

There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament
created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never
own a reality.

"Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say," he began very
gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in
the boy's eyes. "Don't be down about this; you will pull through, never
fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know
him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell
every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you
safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind--tell him all. No half
measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You
will not come back without it."

Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother's, the red color darker
on his face.

"Do as I say," said Cecil, very gently still. "Tell him, if you like,
that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; he
will be sure to pity you then."

There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the last words,
but it passed at once as he added:

"Do your hear me? will you go?"

"If you want me--yes."

"On your word, now?"

"On my word."

There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eagerness in the way
he assented that might have made the consent rather a means to evade the
pressure than a genuine pledge to follow the advice; that darker, more
evil, more defiant look was still upon his face, sweeping its youth
away and leaving in its stead a wavering shadow. He rose with a sudden
movement; his tumbled hair, his disordered attire, his bloodshot eyes,
his haggard look of sleeplessness and excitement in strange contrast
with the easy perfection of Cecil's dress and the calm languor of his
attitude. The boy was very young, and was not seasoned to his life and
acclimatized to his ruin, like his elder brother. He looked at him with
a certain petulant envy; the envy of every young fellow for a man of the
world. "I beg your pardon for keeping you up, Bertie," he said huskily.
"Good-night."

Cecil gave a little yawn.

"Dear boy, it would have been better if you could have come in with
the coffee. Never be impulsive; don't do a bit of good, and is such bad
form!"

He spoke lightly, serenely; both because such was as much his nature as
it was to breathe, and because his heart was heavy that he had to send
away the young one without help, though he knew that the course he
had made him adopt would serve him more permanently in the end. But he
leaned his hand a second on Berk's shoulder, while for one single moment
in his life he grew serious.

"You must know I could not do what you asked; I could not meet any man
in the Guards face to face if I sunk myself and sunk them so low. Can't
you see that, little one?"

There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly have believed
that his brother had at length some perception of his meaning.

"You say so, and that is enough," said the boy pettishly; "I cannot
understand that I asked anything so dreadful; but I suppose you have too
many needs of your own to have any resources left for mine."

Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. But he
could not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, less even for
his brother's ingratitude than at his callousness to all those finer,
better instincts of which honor is the concrete name.

For the moment, thought--grave, weary, and darkened--fell on him; he had
passed through what he would have suffered any amount of misconstruction
to escape--a disagreeable scene; he had been as unable as though he
were a Commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor the
necessities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced,
despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face the
ruin that awaited him. There was no other name for it: it would be ruin
complete and wholly inevitable. His signature would have been accepted
no more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to the
uttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could have
no power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a few
months, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness lay
beyond.

Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to him
endurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits,
habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become to
him as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out from
all that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his very
name forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a man
without a career, without a hope, without a refuge--he could not realize
that this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must within
so short a space be his. Life had gone so smoothly with him, and his
world was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was so
habitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolation
lying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of health
can believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sun
has set.

As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glancing on the
gold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the fireplace, and the
smoke of his cheroot curling among the pile of invitation cards to all
the best houses in town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe that
things were really come to this pass with him. It is so hard for a man
who has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day and
night to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence he may
be lying in the debtors' prison at Baden; it is so difficult for a man
who has had no greater care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of a
Guards' Ball or of a yacht's summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceive
the fact that in a year's time he will thank God if he have a few francs
left to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreign
bathing-place.

"It mayn't come to that," he thought; "something may happen. If I could
get my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should win
some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I must
win; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only be
the French horses between us and an absolute 'walk over.' Things mayn't
come to the worst, after all."

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was his
temperament, that he read himself to sleep with Terrail's "Club des
Valets de Coeur," and slept in ten minutes' time as composedly as though
he had inherited fifty thousand a year.



That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, Forest King stood
without any body-covering, for the night was close and sultry, a lock of
the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and his favorite wheaten-gruel
standing uncared-for under his very nose; the King was in the height
of excitation, alarm, and haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his
head, his nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with
a nervous, angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his
heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite wall, with
a force that reverberated through the stables and made his companions
start and edge away. It was precisely these companions that the
aristocratic hero of the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred.

They had just been looking him over--to their own imminent peril; and
the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant six-year-old of Paris,
and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the knightly descendant of the
White Cockade blood and of the coursers of Circassia, had resented the
familiarity proportionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was
a very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to
a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would suffer
liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were very just; and
if his clever heels had caught--and it was not his fault that they
did not--the heads of his two companions, instead of coming with that
ponderous crash into the panels of his box, society would certainly have
been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than had ever before
hung in the careless balance of his life.

But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught the oak of
his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went
on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully
chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever
seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in
their mouths.

"It's almost a pity--he's in such perfect condition. Tip-top. Cool as
a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats up to the last
grain; leads the whole string such a rattling spin as never was spun
but by a Derby cracker before him. It's almost a pity," said Willon
meditatively, eyeing his charge, the King, with remorseful glances.

"Prut-tush-tish!" said his companion, with a whistle in his teeth that
ended with a "damnation!" "It'll only knock him over for the race; he'll
be right as a trivet after it. What's your little game; coming it soft
like that, all of a sudden? You hate that ere young swell like p'ison."

"Aye," assented the head groom with a tigerish energy, viciously
consuming his bit of straw. "What for am I--head groom come nigh twenty
years; and to Markisses and Wiscounts afore him--put aside in that ere
way for a fellow as he's took into his service out of the dregs of a
regiment; what was tied up at the triangles and branded D, as I know on,
and sore suspected of even worse games than that, and now is that set
up with pride and sich-like that nobody's woice ain't heard here except
his; I say what am I called on to bear it for?": and the head groom's
tones grew hoarse and vehement, roaring louder under his injuries. "A
man what's attended a Duke's 'osses ever since he was a shaver, to be
put aside for that workhus blackguard! A 'oss had a cold--it's Rake
what's to cure him. A 'oss is entered for a race--it's Rake what's to
order his morning gallops, and his go-downs o' water. It's past bearing
to have a rascally chap what's been and gone and turned walet, set up
over one's head in one's own establishment, and let to ride the high
'oss over one, roughshod like that!"

And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely thus heaped
on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made an end of it, with a
vindictive "Will yer be quiet there; blow yer," to the King, who was
protesting with his heels against the conversation.

"Come, then, no gammon," growled his companion--the "cousin out o'
Yorkshire" of the keeper's tree.

"What's yer figure, you say?" relented Willon meditatively.

"Two thousand to nothing--come!--can't no handsomer," retorted the
Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man conscious of behaving very
nobly.

"For the race in Germany?" pursued Mr. Willon, still meditatively.

"Two thousand to nothing--come!" reiterated the other, with his arms
folded to intimate that this and nothing else was the figure to which he
would bind himself.

Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse as though he
were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to judge, grew a little
pale; and stooped forward.

"Hush! Somebody'll spy on us. It's a bargain."

"Done! And you'll paint him, eh?"

"Yes--I'll--paint him."

The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while his eyes
glanced with a furtive, frightened glance over the loose-box.
Then--still with that cringing, terrified look backward to the horse,
as an assassin may steal a glance before his deed at his unconscious
victim--the head groom and his comrade went out and closed the door of
the loose-box and passed into the hot, lowering summer night.