Ouida - Under Two Flags

Murmuring which multiplicity of directions, for Rake to catch as he could, in the softest and sleepiest of tones, Bertie Cecil drank a glass of Curacoa, put his tall, lithe limbs indolently off his sofa, and surrendered himself to the martyrdom of cuirass and gorget, standing six feet one without his spurred jacks, but light-built and full of grace as a deer, or his weight would not have been what it was in gentleman-rider races from the Hunt steeple-chase at La Marche to the Grand National in the Shires.

“As if Parliament couldn’t meet without dragging us through the dust! The idiots write about ‘the swells in the Guards,’ as if we had all fun and no work, and knew nothing of the rough of the Service. I should like to learn what they call sitting motionless 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 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 having a summons about it the next day! 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 Ghoorkhas or Bhoteahs, would be light work, compared!” murmured Cecil with the most plaintive pity for the hardships of life in the Household, while Rake, 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 gild mountings, and contemplated with flattering self-complacency leathers white as snow, jacks brilliant as black varnish could make them, and silver spurs 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 embroidery, 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; but 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 wistfulness 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 newcomer, 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 weakness 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 previous scarcity of her bread-and-cheese, grew immediately intolerant of any wine less than 90s the dozen), said the Cecil cared for nothing longer than a fortnight, unless it was 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 tune of a hundred a month; and, also, it was not true, for, besides Forest King, he loved his young brother Berkeley—which, however, she neither knew nor guessed.

“Beastly!” replied the young gentleman, in reference 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 hurry, however, and he said this as lazily as possible, shaking the white horsehair over his helmet, and drawing in deep draughts of Turkish Latakia 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 very girlish in his face and his ways. On which confession Rake retired into the bathroom; he could hear just as well there, and a sense of decorum 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 chose-la 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 chambers, and the possibility of that person’s appearance in the witness-box of the Divorce Court. It was in no way his passion that blinded him—he did not put the steam on like that, and never went in for any disturbing emotion—it was simply habit, and forgetfulness 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, impenetrable school, and used to his brother’s set; a cool, listless, reckless, thoroughbred, 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 gratified; but he had something of girlish weakness in his nature, and a reserve in his temperament that was with difficulty conquered.

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 down on him.

Cecil gave a long, low whistle, and drew a meditative whiff from his meerschaum.

“Tres cher, you’re always wanting money. So am I. So is everybody. The normal state of man is to want money. Two ponies. What’s it for?”

“I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it me, and I told him I would send it him in the 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.”

“Heavy 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 gave 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 apology. “I backed Grosvenor’s play, and you know he’s always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldn’t tell he’d go a crowner and have such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, Bertie? I daren’t ask the governor; and besides I told Poulteney he should have it this morning. What do you think if I sold the mare? But then I couldn’t sell her in a minute–”