UNDER TWO FLAGS
by Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
TO COLONEL POULETT CAMERON whose family has given so many brilliant
soldiers to the armies of France and England and made the battle-fields
of Europe ring with “The War-Cry of Lochiel” this story of a soldier's
life is dedicated in sincere friendship.
AVIS AU LECTEUR.
This Story was originally written for a military periodical. It has been
fortunate enough to receive much commendation from military men, and
for them it is now specially issued in its present form. For the general
public it may be as well to add that, where translations are appended to
the French phrases, those translations usually follow the idiomatic and
particular meaning attached to these expressions in the argot of the
Army of Algeria, and not the correct or literal one given to such words
or sentences in ordinary grammatical parlance.
OUIDA.
UNDER TWO FLAGS.
CHAPTER I.
“BEAUTY OF THE BRIGADES.”
“I don't say but what he's difficult to please with his Tops,” said Mr.
Rake, factotum to the Hon. Bertie Cecil, of the 1st Life Guards, with
that article of hunting toggery suspended in his right hand as
he paused, before going upstairs, to deliver his opinions with
characteristic weight and vivacity to the stud-groom, “he is uncommon
particular about 'em; and if his leathers aint as white as snow he'll
never touch 'em, tho' as soon as the pack come nigh him at Royallieu,
the leathers might just as well never have been cleaned, them hounds
jump about him so; old Champion's at his saddle before you can say
Davy Jones. Tops are trials, I aint denying that, specially when you've
jacks, and moccasins, and moor boots, and Russia-leather crickets, and
turf backs, and Hythe boots, and waterproofs, and all manner of varnish
things for dress, that none of the boys will do right unless you look
after 'em yourself. But is it likely that he should know what a worry a
Top's complexion is, and how hard it is to come right with all the Fast
Brown polishing in the world? How should he guess what a piece of work
it is to get 'em all of a color, and how like they are to come mottled,
and how a'most sure they'll ten to one go off dark just as they're
growing yellow, and put you to shame, let you do what you will to make
'em cut a shine over the country? How should he know? I don't complain
of that; bless you, he never thinks. It's 'do this, Rake,' 'do that';
and he never remembers 'tisn't done by magic. But he's a true gentleman,
Mr. Cecil; never grudge a guinea, or a fiver to you; never out of temper
either, always have a kind word for you if you want, thoro'bred every
inch of him; see him bring down a rocketer, or lift his horse over the
Broad Water! He's a gentleman--not like your snobs that have nothing
sound about 'em but their cash, and swept out their shops before they
bought their fine feathers!--and I'll be d----d if I care what I do for
him.”
With which peroration to his born enemy the stud-groom, with whom he
waged a perpetual and most lively feud, Rake flourished the tops that
had been under discussion, and triumphant, as he invariably was, ran
up the back stairs of his master's lodgings in Piccadilly, opposite the
Green Park, and with a rap on the panels entered his master's bedroom.
A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, rather more luxuriously
accommodated than a young Duchess, and Bertie Cecil was never behind his
fellows in anything; besides, he was one of the cracks of the Household,
and women sent him pretty things enough to fill the Palais Royal. The
dressing-table was littered with Bohemian glass and gold-stoppered
bottles, and all the perfumes of Araby represented by Breidenback and
Rimmel. The dressing-case was of silver, with the name studded on the
lid in turquoises; the brushes, bootjack, boot-trees, whip-stands, were
of ivory and tortoiseshell; a couple of tiger skins were on the
hearth with a retriever and blue greyhound in possession; above the
mantel-piece were crossed swords in all the varieties of gilt, gold,
silver, ivory, aluminum, chiseled and embossed hilts; and on the walls
were a few perfect French pictures, with the portraits of a greyhound
drawn by Landseer, of a steeple-chaser by Harry Hall, one or two of
Herring's hunters, and two or three fair women in crayons. The hangings
of the room were silken and rose-colored, and a delicious confusion
prevailed through it pell-mell; box-spurs, hunting-stirrups, cartridge
cases, curb-chains, muzzle-loaders, hunting flasks, and white gauntlets,
being mixed up with Paris novels, pink notes, point-lace ties,
bracelets, and bouquets to be dispatched to various destinations, and
velvet and silk bags for banknotes, cigars, or vesuvians, embroidered by
feminine fingers and as useless as those pretty fingers themselves.
On the softest of sofas, half dressed, and having half an hour before
splashed like a waterdog out of the bath, as big as a small pond, in
the dressing-chamber beyond was the Hon. Bertie himself, second son of
Viscount Royallieu, known generally in the Brigades as “Beauty.” The
appellative, gained at Eton, was in no way undeserved; when the smoke
cleared away that was circling round him out of a great meerschaum
bowl, it showed a face of as much delicacy and brilliancy as a woman's;
handsome, thoroughbred, languid, nonchalant, with a certain latent
recklessness under the impressive calm of habit, and a singular softness
given to the large, dark hazel eyes by the unusual length of the lashes
over them. His features were exceedingly fair--fair as the fairest
girl's; his hair was of the softest, silkiest, brightest chestnut; his
mouth very beautifully shaped; on the whole, with a certain gentle,
mournful love-me look that his eyes had with them, it was no wonder that
great ladies and gay lionnes alike gave him the palm as the handsomest
man in all the Household Regiments--not even excepting that splendid
golden-haired Colossus, his oldest friend and closest comrade, known as
“the Seraph.”
He looked at the new tops that Rake swung in his hand, and shook his
head.
“Better, Rake; but not right yet. Can't you get that tawny color in the
tiger's skin there? You go so much to brown.”
Rake shook his head in turn, as he set down the incorrigible tops beside
six pairs of their fellows, and six times six of every other sort of
boots that the covert side, the heather, the flat, or the sweet shady
side of “Pall Mall” ever knew.
“Do my best, sir; but Polish don't come nigh Nature, Mr. Cecil.”
“Goes beyond it, the ladies say; and to do them justice they favor
it much the most,” laughed Cecil to himself, floating fresh clouds of
Turkish about him. “Willon up?”
“Yes, sir. Come in this minute for orders.”
“How'd Forest King stand the train?”
“Bright as a bird, sir; he never mind nothing. Mother o' Pearl she
worreted a little, he says; she always do, along of the engine noise,
but the King walked in and out just as if the station were his own
stable-yard.”
“He gave them gruel and chilled water after the shaking before he let
them go to their corn?”
“He says he did, sir.”
Rake would by no means take upon himself to warrant the veracity of
his sworn foe, the stud-groom; unremitting feud was between them; Rake
considered that he knew more about horses than any other man living, and
the other functionary proportionately resented back his knowledge and
his interference, as utterly out of place in a body-servant.
“Tell him I'll look in at the stable after duty and see the screws are
all right; and that he's to be ready to go down with them by my train
to-morrow--noon, you know. Send that note there, and the bracelets, to
St. John's Wood: and that white bouquet to Mrs. Delamaine. Bid Willon
get some Banbury bits; I prefer the revolving mouths, and some of Wood's
double mouths and Nelson gags; we want new ones. Mind that lever-snap
breech-loader comes home in time. Look in at the Commission stables,
and if you see a likely black charger as good as Black Douglas, tell me.
Write about the stud fox-terrier, and buy the blue Dandy Dinmont; Lady
Guinevere wants him. I'll take him down with me, but first put me into
harness, Rake; it's getting late.”
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----”
Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lad's young,
fair, womanish face, were very gentle under the long shade of their
lashes.
“Sell the mare! Nonsense! How should anybody live without a hack? I
can pull you through, I dare say. Ah! by George, there's the quarters
chiming. I shall be too late, as I live.”
Not hurried still, however; even by that near prospect, he sauntered to
his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet and gold-filigreed
absurdities, and shook out all the banknotes there were in it. There
were fives and tens enough to count up 45 pounds. He reached over
and caught up a five from a little heap lying loose on a novel of Du
Terrail's, and tossed the whole across the room to the boy.
“There you are, young one! But don't borrow of any but your own people
again, Berk. We don't do that. No, no!--no thanks! Shut up all that. If
ever you get in a hole, I'll take you out if I can. Good-by--will you
go to the Lords? Better not--nothing to see, and still less to hear. All
stale. That's the only comfort for us--we are outside!” he said, with
something that almost approached hurry in the utterance; so great was
his terror of anything approaching a scene, and so eager was he to
escape his brother's gratitude. The boy had taken the notes with
delighted thanks indeed, but with that tranquil and unprotesting
readiness with which spoiled childishness or unhesitating selfishness
accepts gifts and sacrifices from another's generosity, which have
been so general that they have ceased to have magnitude. As his brother
passed him, however, he caught his hand a second, and looked up with a
mist before his eyes, and a flush half of shame, half of gratitude, on
his face.
“What a trump you are!--how good you are, Bertie!”
Cecil laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“First time I ever heard it, my dear boy,” he answered, as he lounged
down the staircase, his chains clashing and jingling; while, pressing
his helmet on to his forehead and pulling the chin scale over his
mustaches, he sauntered out into the street where his charger was
waiting.
“The deuce!” he thought, as he settled himself in his stirrups, while
the raw morning wind tossed his white plume hither and thither. “I
never remembered!--I don't believe I've left myself money enough to
take Willon and Rake and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I
shouldn't have kept enough to take my own ticket with!--that would be
no end of a sell. On my word I don't know how much there's left on the
dressing-table. Well! I can't help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I can't
have Berk's name show in anything that looks shady.”
The 50 pounds had been the last remnant of a bill, done under great
difficulties with a sagacious Jew, and Cecil had no more certainty of
possessing any more money until next pay-day should come round than he
had of possessing the moon; lack of ready money, moreover, is a serious
inconvenience when you belong to clubs where “pounds and fives” are the
lowest points, and live with men who take the odds on most events in
thousands; but the thing was done; he would not have undone it at the
boy's loss, if he could; and Cecil, who never was worried by the loss of
the most stupendous “crusher,” and who made it a rule never to think of
disagreeable inevitabilities two minutes together, shook his charger's
bridle and cantered down Piccadilly toward the barracks, while Black
Douglas reared, curveted, made as if he would kick, and finally ended by
“passaging” down half the length of the road, to the imminent peril of
all passers-by, and looking eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and
foam-flecked, while he thus expressed his disapprobation of forming part
of the escort from Palace to Parliament.
“Home Secretary should see about it; it's abominable! If we must come
among them, they ought to be made a little odoriferous first. A couple
of fire-engines now, playing on them continuously with rose-water and
bouquet d'Ess for an hour before we come up, might do a little good.
I'll get some men to speak about it in the house; call it 'Bill for
the Purifying of the Unwashed, and Prevention of their Suffocating Her
Majesty's Brigades,'” murmured Cecil to the Earl of Broceliande, next
him, as they sat down in their saddles with the rest of the “First
Life,” in front of St. Stephen's, with a hazy fog steaming round them,
and a London mob crushing against their chargers' flanks, while Black
Douglas stood like a rock, though a butcher's tray was pressed against
his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable
apple-woman, of Cecil's prophetic horror, was wildly plunging between
his legs, as the hydra-headed rushed down in insane, headlong haste to
stare at, and crush on to, that superb body of Guards.
“I would give a kingdom for a soda and brandy. Bah! ye gods! What a
smell of fish and fustian,” signed Bertie, with a yawn of utter famine
for want of something to drink and something to smoke, were it only a
glass of brown sherry and a little papelito, while he glanced down
at the snow-white and jet-black masterpieces of Rake's genius, all
smirched, and splashed, and smeared.
He had given fifty pounds away, and scarcely knew whether he should have
enough to take his ticket next day into the Shires, and he owed fifty
hundred without having the slightest grounds for supposing he should
ever be able to pay it, and he cared no more about either of these
things than he cared about the Zu-Zu's throwing the half-guinea
peaches into the river after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit
dragon-flies with them; but to be half a day without a cigarette, and to
have a disagreeable odor of apples and corduroys wafted up to him, was a
calamity that made him insupportably depressed and unhappy.
Well, why not? It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all.
Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a
ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunter's spine broken over the
double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just
when you wanted to rally the pack; it's the whip who carries you off
to a division just when you've sat down to your turbot; it's the ten
seconds by which you miss the train; it's the dust that gets in your
eyes as you go down to Epsom; it's the pretty little rose note that went
by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from
madame; it's the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it's the
cook who always will season the white soup wrong--it is these that are
the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.
An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having lost heavy sums
through a swindler, with as placid an indifference as if he had lost a
toothpick; but he swore like a trooper because a thief had stolen the
steel-mounted hoof of a dead pet hunter.
“Insufferable!” murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn behind his gauntlet;
“the Line's nothing half so bad as this; one day in a London mob beats
a year's campaigning; what's charging a pah to charging an oyster-stall,
or a parapet of fascines to a bristling row of umbrellas?”
Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms was a
question of military interest never answered, as Cecil scattered the
umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the Houses of Parliament
full trot with the rest of the escort on the return to the Palace; the
afternoon sun breaking out with a brightened gleam from the clouds,
and flashing off the drawn swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering
breastplates, the gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers.
But a mere sun-gleam just when the thing was over, and the escort was
pacing back to Hyde Park barracks, could not console Cecil for fog,
wind, mud, oyster-vendors, bad odors, and the uproar and riff-raff of
the streets; specially when his throat was as dry as a lime-kiln,
and his longing for the sight of a cheroot approaching desperation.
Unlimited sodas, three pipes smoked silently over Delphine Demirep's
last novel, a bath well dashed with eau de cologne, and some glasses of
Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him a little;
but he was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever
through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy,
and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the Duchess of
Lydiard-Tregoze, where the prettiest French Countess of her time asked
him if anything was the matter.
“Yes!” said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melancholy in what the
woman called his handsome Spanish eyes, “I have had a great misfortune;
we have been on duty all day!”
He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though his temper
was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition of a villa, prescribed Crème
de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession, with a considerable amount
of pine-apple ice at three o'clock in the morning, which restorative
prescription succeeded.
Indeed, it took something as tremendous as divorce from all forms of
smoking for five hours to make an impression on Bertie. He had the most
serene insouciance that ever a man was blessed with; in worry he did not
believe--he never let it come near him; and beyond a little difficulty
sometimes in separating too many entangled rose-chins caught round him
at the same time, and the annoyance of a miscalculation on the flat, or
the ridge-and-furrow, when a Maldon or Danebury favorite came nowhere,
or his book was wrong for the Grand National, Cecil had no cares of any
sort or description.
True, the Royallieu Peerage, one of the most ancient and almost one of
the most impoverished in the kingdom, could ill afford to maintain its
sons in the expensive career on which it had launched them, and
the chief there was to spare usually went between the eldest son, a
Secretary of Legation in that costly and charming City of Vienna, and
the young one, Berkeley, through the old Viscount's partiality; so that,
had Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position, he would
have probably confessed that it was, to say the least, awkward; but then
he never did this, certainly never did it thoroughly. Sometimes he
felt himself near the wind when settling-day came, or the Jews appeared
utterly impracticable; but, as a rule, things had always trimmed
somehow, and though his debts were considerable, and he was literally as
penniless as a man can be to stay in the Guards at all, he had never in
any shape realized the want of money. He might not be able to raise a
guinea to go toward that long-standing account, his army tailor's bill,
and post obits had long ago forestalled the few hundred a year that,
under his mother's settlements, would come to him at the Viscount's
death; but Cecil had never known in his life what it was not to have a
first-rate stud, not to live as luxuriously as a duke, not to order the
costliest dinners at the clubs, and be among the first to lead all the
splendid entertainments and extravagances of the Household; he had never
been without his Highland shooting, his Baden gaming, his prize-winning
schooner among the R. V. Y. Squadron, his September battues, his
Pytchley hunting, his pretty expensive Zu-Zus and other toys, his drag
for Epsom and his trap and hack for the Park, his crowd of engagements
through the season, and his bevy of fair leaders of the fashion to
smile on him, and shower their invitation-cards on him, like a rain of
rose-leaves, as one of the “best men.”
“Best,” that is, in the sense of fashion, flirting, waltzing, and
general social distinction; in no other sense, for the newest of
debutantes knew well that “Beauty,” though the most perfect of flirts,
would never be “serious,” and had nothing to be serious with; on
which understanding he was allowed by the sex to have the run of their
boudoirs and drawing-rooms, much as if he were a little lion-dog; they
counted him quite “safe.” He made love to the married women, to be
sure; but he was quite certain not to run away with the marriageable
daughters.
Hence, Bertie had never felt the want of all that is bought by and
represents money, and imbibed a vague, indistinct impression that
all these things that made life pleasant came by Nature, and were
the natural inheritance and concomitants of anybody born in a decent
station, and endowed with a tolerable tact; such a matter-of-fact
difficulty as not having gold enough to pay for his own and his stud's
transit to the Shires had very rarely stared him in the face, and
when it did he trusted to chance to lift him safely over such a social
“yawner,” and rarely trusted in vain.
According to all the canons of his Order he was never excited, never
disappointed, never exhilarated, never disturbed; and also, of course,
never by any chance embarrassed. “Votre imperturbabilite,” as the Prince
de Ligne used to designate La Grande Catherine, would have been an
admirable designation for Cecil; he was imperturbable under everything;
even when an heiress, with feet as colossal as her fortune, made him a
proposal of marriage, and he had to retreat from all the offered honors
and threatened horrors, he courteously, but steadily declined them. Nor
in more interesting adventures was he less happy in his coolness.
When my Lord Regalia, who never knew when he was not wanted, came in
inopportunely in a very tender scene of the young Guardsman's (then
but a Cornet) with his handsome Countess, Cecil lifted his long lashes
lazily, turning to him a face of the most plait-il? and innocent
demureness--or consummate impudence, whichever you like. “We're playing
Solitaire. Interesting game. Queer fix, though, the ball's in that's
left all alone in the middle, don't you think?” Lord Regalia felt his
own similarity to the “ball in a fix” too keenly to appreciate the
interesting character of the amusement, or the coolness of the chief
performer in it; but “Beauty's Solitaire” became a synonym thenceforth
among the Household to typify any very tender passages “sotto quartr'
occhi.”
This made his reputation on the town; the ladies called it very wicked,
but were charmed by the Richelieu-like impudence all the same, and
petted the sinner; and from then till now he had held his own with them;
dashing through life very fast, as became the first riding man in the
Brigades, but enjoying it very fully, smoothly, and softly; liking the
world and being liked by it.
To be sure, in the background there was always that ogre of money, and
the beast had a knack of growing bigger and darker every year; but
then, on the other hand, Cecil never looked at him--never thought about
him--knew, too, that he stood just as much behind the chairs of men whom
the world accredited as millionaires, and whenever the ogre gave him a
cold grip, that there was for the moment no escaping, washed away the
touch of it in a warm, fresh draft of pleasure.