an acquaintance of mine, suffering considerably from these symptoms,
sought my philosophy and my prescriptions. A very sharp irritant for
Epsomitis may be administered in the form of "I told you so? It's all
your own fault!" But this species of blister and douche bath combined is
rarely given unless the patient be mad enough to let his wife, if he
unluckily have one, learn what ails him. As far as I was concerned, I
was much too sympathetic with the sufferer to be down upon him with the
triumphant reminder that I had cautioned him all along not to place his
trust in Russley. I, instead, prescribed him cool wines, and led him on
to talk of other people's misfortunes, the very best way to get
reconciled with your own. We talked of old times, of old memories, of
old acquaintance, in the twilight, between Derby and Oaks. We got a
little melancholy; too much champagne is always productive on the morrow
of a gently sentimental tinge, and a man is always inclined to look on
the world as a desert when he has the conviction that he himself has
been made a fool in it. Among other names, that of Deadly Dash came up
between us. What had become of him? I did not know; he did. He told me;
and I will tell it here, for the story is of the past now.
"Deadly Dash! What a shot he was! Never missed," said my friend, whose
own gun is known well enough at Hornsey-wood House; therewith falling
into a reverie, tinged with the Jacques-like gloom of Epsomitis in its
severest form, from which he awoke to tell me slowly, between long
draughts of iced drinks, what I write now. I alter his tale in nothing,
save in filling in with words the gaps and blanks that he made,
all-eloquent in his halting oratory, by meditative, plaintive,
moralizing puffs from his tonic, the _brule gueule_, and an occasional
appeal to my imagination in the customary formula of "Oh, bother!--_you_
understand--all the rest of it you know," which, though it tells
everything over claret, is not so clear a mode of relation in type. For
all else here the story is as he gave it to me.
* * * * *
"Deadly Dash!" It was a fatal sounding sobriquet, and had a fatal
fascination for many, for me as well as the rest, when I was in my salad
days and joined the old ----th, amongst whose Light Dragoons, it was so
signally and ominously famous. The nickname had a wide significance;
"_he always kills_," was said with twofold truth, in twofold meaning of
Dash; in a _barriere_ duel he would wheel lightly, aim carelessly, and
send the ball straight as any arrow through heart or lung, just as he
fancied, in the neatest style anybody could dream of; and in an intrigue
he took just the same measures, and hit as invariably with the self-same
skill and the self-same indifference. "He always kills" applied equally
to either kind of affair, and got him his sobriquet, which he received
with as laughing an equanimity as a riding man gets the Gilt Vase, or a
"lover of the leash" the Ravensworth Stakes, or the Puppy Cup and
Goblet. He was proud of it, and had only one regret, that he lived in
the dead days of the duel, and could only go out when he was on French
soil. In dare-devilry of every sort he out-Heroded Herod, and distanced
any who were mad enough to try the pace with him in that steeple-chase
commonly called "going to the bad." It was a miracle how often he used
to reach the stage of "_complete_ ruin" that the Prince de Soubise once
sighed for as an unattainable paradise; and picked himself up again,
without a hair turned, as one may say, and started off with as fresh a
pace as though nothing had knocked him over. Other men got his speed
sometimes; but nobody could ever equal his stay. For an "out and out
goer" there was nobody like Deadly Dash; and though only a Captain of
Horse, with few "expectations," he did what Dukes daren't have done, and
lived at a faster rate than all the elder sons in the kingdom put
together. Dash had the best bow and the brightest wits, the lightest
morals and the heaviest debts of any _sabreur_ in the Service; very
unscrupulous fellows were staggered at _his_ devil-me-care vices; and as
for reputation,--"a deuced pleasant fellow, Dash," they used to say at
the Curragh, in the Guards' Club, at Thatched House anniversary dinners,
in North Indian cantonments, in Brighton barrack-rooms, or in any of the
many places where Deadly Dash was a household word; "a very pleasant
fellow; no end 'fit' always, best fun in life over the olives when you
get him in humor; shoot you dead though next morning, if he want, and
you be handy for him in a neat snug little Bad; make some devil of a
_mot_ on you too afterwards, just as pleasantly as if he were offering
you a Lopez to smoke!"
Now, that was just the sort of celebrity that made me mad to see the
owner of it; there wasn't a living being, except that year's favorite
out of the Whitewall establishment, that I was half so eager to look at,
or so reverent when I thought of, as "the Killer." I was very young
then. I had gone through a classic course of yellow covers from Jeffs'
and Rolandi's, and I had a vague impression that a man who had had a
dozen _barriere_ affairs abroad, and been "_enfant_" to every lovely
_lionne_ of his day, must of necessity be like the heroes of Delphine
Demireps' novels, who had each of them always a "je ne sais quoi de
farouche et de fier dans ses grands yeux noirs, et toute la revelation
d'une ame usee, mais dominee par des passions encore inepuisables,
ecrite sur son sombre et pale visage," &c, &c, in the Demireps' most
telling style.
I don't know quite what I expected to see in the Killer, but I think it
was a sort of compound of Monte Christo, Mephistopheles, and Murat mixed
in one; what I did see was a slight delicate man with a face as fair and
soft as a girl's, the gentlest possible manners, and a laugh like music.
Deadly Dash had led a life as bad as he could lead, had lit his cigar
without a tremor in the wrist, on many gray mornings, while his
adversary lay dying hard among the red rank grasses, had gamed so deep
twenty-four hours at a stretch that the most reckless _galerie_ in
Europe held their breath to watch his play; had had a tongue of silver
for his intrigues and a nerve of steel for his _vendetta_; had lived in
reckless rioting and drunk deep; but the Demirep would not have had him
at any price in her romance; he looked so simply and quietly
thorough-bred, he was so utterly guiltless of all her orthodox traits.
The gentlest of mortals was Deadly Dash; when you first heard his sweet
silvery voice, and his laughter as light and airy as a woman's, you
would never believe how often abroad there a dead man had been left to
get stiff and cold among the clotted herbage, while the Killer went out
of the town by the early express, smoking and reading the "Charivari,"
and sipping some cold Curacoa punch out of his flask.
"Of course!" growled a man to me once in the Guards' smoking-room, an
order of the Scots Fusilleers to Montreal having turned him misanthrope.
"Did Mephistopheles ever come out in full harness, with horns and tail
complete, eh? Not such a fool. He looked like a gentleman, and talked
like a wit. Would the most dunder-headed Cain in Christendom, I should
be glad to know, be such an ass as to go about town with the brand on
his forehead, when he could turn down Bond Street any day and get a
dash of the ladies' pearl powder? Who ever _shows_ anything now, my good
fellow? Not that Dash 'paints,' to give the deuce his due--except
himself a little blacker even than he is; he don't cant; he couldn't
cant; not to save his life, I believe. But as to his bewitching you,
almost as bad as he does the women, I know all about that. I used to
swear by him till----"
"Till what?"
"Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the
woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was
rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn't speak after that, you see.
Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Curacoa punch in
Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let
the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed
Charlie,--" and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in
doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn't humbug, and an uncalled-for
sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Curacoa
brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate
fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail;--on the
whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? "Keep clear of the Killer,
though, young one," he added, as he sauntered out. "He's like that
cheetah cub of Berkeley's; soft as silk, you know, _patte de velours_,
and what d'ye call 'em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to
deal with."
I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from
the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were
done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and
husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other
preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their
characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft,
in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all
the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo
Apollyon--Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep,
that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice
always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his
own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm
linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly
steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the
twenty yards of green turf.
At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian
Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched
little chorus-singer of the Cafe Alcazar, who took their fancies both at
once. The _mondes_ thought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know,
but the audacity of a cavalry man's having potted a Very Serene High
Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet,
would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the
strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to
plenty of "floating little bills," could not bid high enough to purchase
his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of
virtue, "Oblivion cannot be hired,--unless," adds Society, dropping to
mellowest murmur her whisper, "unless you can give us a premium!" So
Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from
the Horse Guards--sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so
often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the
Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally,
irretrievably, struck out.
Certainly the fellow was a bad fellow, and deserved his crash so far; he
had no scruples, and no conscience; he spared neither woman nor man; of
remorse he had never felt a twinge, and if you were in his path he would
pick you off some way or other as indifferently as if you were one of
the pigeons at Hornsey. And yet, he had been kind to me, though I was a
young one; with his own variable Free Lance sort of liberality, the man
would give his last sou to get you out of any difficulty, and would
carry off your mistress, or beggar you at chicken-hazard, with the
self-same pleasant air the next day: and I could not help being sorry
that things had come to this pass with him. He shot so superbly! Put him
where you would, in a warm corner while the bouquets of pheasants were
told off; in a punt, while a square half-mile of wild-ducks whirred up
from the marshes; in a dark forest alley in Transylvania, while the
great boar rushed down through the twilight, foaming blood and roaring
fury; in a still Indian night with the only target here and there a
dusky head diving amidst the jhow jungle three hundred yards away: put
him where you would, he was such a magnificent shot! The sins of a
Frankenstein should not have lost such a marksman as Deadly Dash to the
Service.
But the authorities thought otherwise; they were not open to the fact,
that the man who had been out in more _barriere_ affairs, and had won
more Grand Military stakes than any other, should, by all laws of
war-policy, have had his blackest transgressions forgiven him, till he
could have been turned to account against Ghoorkas, Maories, or Caffres.
The authorities instead, made him send in his papers, not knowing the
grand knack of turning a scamp into a hero--a process that requires some
genius and some clairvoyance in the manipulator,--and Deadly Dash, with
his lightest and airiest laugh, steamed down channel one late autumn
night, marked, disgraced, and outlawed, for creditors by the score were
after him, knowing very well that he and his old gay lawless life, and
his own wild pleasant world, and his old lands yonder in the green heart
of the grass countries that had gone rood by rood to the Hebrews, were
all divorced for ever with a great gulf between them that could never
close.
So he dropped out of the Service, out of the country, out of
remembrance, out of regret; nobody said a De Profundis over him, and
some men breathed the freer. We can rarely be sure of any who will be
sorry to miss us; but we can always be certain of some to be glad we are
gone. And in the Killer's case these last were legion. Here and there
were one or two who owed him a wayward, inconstant bizarre fit of
generosity; but there were on the other hand hundreds who owed him
nothing less than entire ruin.
So Deadly Dash went with nobody to regret him and nobody to think of him
for a second, after the nine hours' wonder in the clubs and the
mess-rooms that his levanting "under a cloud" occasioned; and so the old
sobriquet, that had used to have so signal a notoriety, dropped out of
men's mouths and was forgotten. Where he was gone no one knew; and to be
sure no one asked. Metaphorically, he was gone to the devil; and when a
man takes that little tour, if he furnish talk for a day he has had very
distinguished and lengthened obsequies as friendship goes in this world.
Now and then in the course of half-a-dozen years I remembered him, when
I looked up at the head of a Royal over my mantelpiece, with thirteen
points, that he had stalked once in Ayrshire and given to me; but nobody
else gave a thought to the Killer. Time passed, and whether he had been
killed fighting in Chili or Bolivia, shot himself at Homburg, become
Mussulman and entered the Sultan's army, gone to fight with the Kabyles
and Bedouins, turned brigand for the Neapolitan Bourbons, or sunk
downward by the old well-worn stage, so sadly and so often travelled,
into an adventurer living by the skill of his ecarte and the dread
surety of his shot, we did not know; we did not care. When society has
given a man the sack, it matters uncommonly little whether he has given
himself a shroud.
* * * * *
Seven or eight years after the name of Deadly Dash had ceased to be
heard among cavalry men, and quoted on all things "horsey," whether of
the flat or of the ridge and furrow, I was in the Confederate States, on
leave for a six months' tour there. It was after Lee's raid across the
border and the days of Gettysburgh. I had run the blockade in a
fast-built clipper, and pushed on at once into the heart of Virginia, to
be in the full heat of whatever should come on the cards; cutting the
cities rather, and keeping as much as I could to the camps and the
woods, for I wanted to see the real thing in the rough. In my relish for
adventure, however, I was a trifle, as it proved, too foolhardy.
Starting alone one day to cross the thirty miles or so that parted me
from the encampment of some Virginian Horse, with no other companions
than a very weedy-looking steel gray, and a brace of revolvers, I fairly
"lost tracks," and had not a notion of my way out of a wilderness of
morass and forest, all glowing with the scarlet and the green of the
Indian summer. Here and there were beautiful wild pools and lakes shut
in by dense vegetation, so dense, that at noon it was dark as twilight,
and great tablelands of rock jutted out black and rugged in places; but
chiefly as far as was to be seen stretched the deep entangled woodland,
with nothing else to break it, brooding quietly over square leagues of
swamp. The orioles were singing their sweetest, wildest music overhead;
sign of war there was none, save to be sure, now and then when I came on
a black, arid circle, where a few charred timbers showed where a hut had
been burnt down and deserted, or my horse shied and snorted uneasily,
and half stumbled over some shapeless log on the ground--a log that when
you looked closer was the swollen shattered body of a man who had died
hard, with the grasses wrenched up in his fingers that the ants had
eaten bare, and the hollows of his eyes staring open where the carrion
birds had plucked the eyeballs out. And near him there were sure to be,
half sunk in swamp, or cleaned to skeletons by the eagles and hawks,
five, or ten, or twenty more, lying nameless and unburied there, where
they had fallen in some scuffle with pickets, or some stray cavalry
skirmish, to be told off as "missing," and to be thought of no more.
These groups I came upon more than once rotting among the rich Virginian
soil, while the scarlet and purple weight of blossoming boughs swayed
above, and the bright insect life fluttered humming around them; they
were the only highway marks through the wooded wilderness.
So lonely was it mile after mile, and so little notion had I of either
the way in or the way out, that the _hallali!_ of a boar-hunt, or the
sweet mellow tongues of the hounds when they have found in the coverts
at home, were never brighter music to me than the sharp crack of rifles
and the long sullen roll of musketry as they suddenly broke the silence,
while I rode along, firing from the west that lay on my left. The gray,
used to powder, pointed his ears and quickened his pace. Though a weedy,
fiddle-headed beast, his speed was not bad, and I rattled him over the
ground, crashing through undergrowth and wading through pools, with all
my blood up at the tune of those ringing cheery shots; the roar growing
louder and louder with every moment, and the sulphur scent of the smoke
borne stronger and stronger down on the wind, till the horse broke
_pele-mele_ through a network of parasites; dashed downward along a
slope of dank herbage, slipping at every step, and with his hind legs
tucked under him; and shot, like a run-in for a race, on to a green
plateau, where the skirmish was going on in hot earnest.
A glance told me how the land lay. A handful of Southern troopers held
their own with tremendous difficulty against three divisions of Federal
infantry, whom they had unexpectedly encountered, as the latter were
marching across the plateau with some batteries of foot artillery,--the
odds were probably scarcely less than five to one. The Southerners were
fighting magnificently, as firm in their close square of four hundred as
the Consular Guard at Marengo, but so surrounded by the Northern host,
that they looked like a little island circled round by raging breakers.
Glancing down on the plain as my horse scoured and slid along the
incline, the nucleus of Southerners looked hopelessly lost amidst the
belching fire and pressing columns of the enemy. The whole was
surrounded and hidden by the whirling clouds of dust and smoke that
swirled above in a white heavy mist; but through this the sabres
flashed, the horses' heads reared, maddened and foam-covered, like so
many bas-reliefs of Bucephalus, the lean rifle-barrels glittered, and
for a moment I saw the Southern leader, steady as a rock in the centre,
hewing like a trooper right and left, and with a gray heron's feather
floating from his sombrero, a signal that seemed as well known and as
closely followed as the snowy plume of Murat.
To have looked on at this and not have taken a share in it, one would
have been a stone, not a man, and much less a cavalry-man; I need not
tell you that I smashed the gray across the plateau, hurled him into the
thick of the melee, dashed _somehow_ through the Federal ranks, and was
near the gray plume and fighting for the Old Dominion before you could
have shouted a stave of "Dixie." I was a "non-combatant," I was a
"neutral"--delicate Anglo-euphemism for coward, friend to neither and
traitor to both!--I was on a tour of observation, and had no business to
fire a shot for one or the other perhaps, but I forgot all that, and
with the bridle in my teeth and a pistol in each hand, I rode down to
give one blow the more for the weak side.
How superbly that Gray Feather fought!--keeping his men well up round
him, though saddle after saddle was emptied, and horse after horse tore
riderless out of the ranks, or reeled over on their heads, spurting
blood, he sat like a statue, he fought like a Titan, his sabre seemed
flashing unceasingly in the air, so often was it raised to come down
again like lightning through a sword-arm, or lay open a skull to the
brains; the shots ploughed up the earth round him, and rattled like hail
through the air, a score of balls were aimed at him alone, a score of
sabres crossed his own; but he was cool as St. Lawrence ice, and laid
the men dead in struggling heaps under his charger's hoofs; only to
fight near the man was a glorious intoxication; you seemed to "breathe
blood" till you got drunk with it.
The four hundred had been mowed down to two; I did as good work as I
could, having wrenched a sword out of some dead trooper's hand; but I
was only one, and the Northerners counted by thousands. Come out of it
alive I never expected to do; but I vow it was the happiest day of my
life--the pace was so splendidly fast! The Gray Feather at last glanced
anxiously around; his men stuck like death to him, ready to be hewed
down one by one, and die game; his teeth were set tight, and his eyes
had a flash in them like steel. "Charge! and cut through!" he shouted,
his voice rolling out like a clarion, giving an order that it seemed
could be followed by nothing short of supernatural aid. The Southrons
thought otherwise; they only heard to obey; they closed up as steadily
as though they were a squadron on parade, despite the great gaps between
them of dying chargers, and of heaped-up killed and wounded, that broke
their ranks like so much piled stones and timber; they halted a moment,
the murderous fire raking them right and left, front and rear; then,
with that dense mass of troops round them, they charged; shivered the
first line that wedged them in; pierced by sheer force of impetus the
columns that opened fire in their path; wrenched themselves through as
through the steel jaws of a trap, and swept out on to the green level of
the open plateau, with a wild rallying Virginian shout that rings in my
ears now!
I have been in a good many hot things in my time; but I never knew
anything that for pace and long odds could be anything near to that.
I had kept with them through the charge with no other scratch than a
shoulder cut; and I had been close to their chief through it all. When
we were clean out on the plains beyond pursuit--for the Union-men had
not a squadron of cavalry, though their guns at long range belched a
storm in our wake--he turned in his saddle without checking his mare's
thundering gallop, and levelled his rifle that was slung at his aide.
"I'll have the General, anyhow," he said, quietly taking aim--still
without checking his speed--at the knot of staff-officers that now were
scarce more than specks in a blurred mass of mist. He fired; and the
centre figure in that indistinct and fast-vanishing group fell from the
saddle, while the yell of fury that the wind faintly floated nearer told
us that the shot had been deadly. The Gray Feather laughed, a careless
airy laugh of triumph, while he swept on at topmost pace; a little more,
and we should dive down into the dark aisles of grand forest-trees and
cavernous ravines of timber roads, safe from all pursuit; a second, and
we should reach the green core of the safe and silent woods, the cool
shelter of mountain-backed lakes, the sure refuge of tangled coverts. It
was a guinea to a shilling that we gained it; it was all but won; a
moment's straight run-in, and we should have it! But that moment was not
to be ours.