THE LOOSE BOX, AND THE TABAGIE.
“How long before the French can come up?” asked Wellington, hearing of
the pursuit that was thundering close on his rear in the most critical
hours of the short, sultry Spanish night. “Half an hour, at least,” was
the answer. “Very well, then I will turn in and get some sleep,” said
the Commander-in-Chief, rolling himself in a cloak, and lying down in
a ditch to rest as soundly for the single half hour as any tired
drummer-boy.
Serenely as Wellington, another hero slept profoundly, on the eve of a
great event--of a great contest to be met when the day should break--of
a critical victory, depending on him alone to save the Guards of
England from defeat and shame; their honor and their hopes rested on his
solitary head; by him they would be lost or saved; but, unharassed by
the magnitude of the stake at issue, unhaunted by the past, unfretted by
the future, he slumbered the slumber of the just.
Not Sir Tristram, Sir Caledore, Sir Launcelot--no, nor Arthur
himself--was ever truer knight, was ever gentler, braver, bolder, more
stanch of heart, more loyal of soul, than he to whom the glory of the
Brigades was trusted now; never was there spirit more dauntless and
fiery in the field; never temper kindlier and more generous with friends
and foes. Miles of the ridge and furrow, stiff fences of terrible
blackthorn, double posts and rails, yawners and croppers both, tough as
Shire and Stewards could make them, awaited him on the morrow; on his
beautiful lean head capfuls of money were piled by the Service and
the Talent; and in his stride all the fame of the Household would
be centered on the morrow; but he took his rest like the cracker he
was--standing as though he were on guard, and steady as a rock, a hero
every inch of him. For he was Forest King, the great steeple-chaser,
on whom the Guards had laid all their money for the Grand Military--the
Soldiers' Blue Ribbon.
His quarters were a loose box; his camp-bed a litter of straw fresh
shaken down; his clothing a very handsome rug, hood, and quarter-piece
buckled on and marked “B. C.”; above the manger and the door was
lettered his own name in gold. “Forest King”; and in the panels of the
latter were miniatures of his sire and of his dam: Lord of the Isles,
one of the greatest hunters that the grass countries ever saw sent
across them; and Bayadere, a wild-pigeon-blue mare of Circassia. How,
furthermore, he stretched up his long line of ancestry by the Sovereign,
out of Queen of Roses; by Belted Earl, out of Fallen Star; by Marmion,
out of Court Coquette, and straight up to the White Cockade blood, etc.,
etc., etc.--is it not written in the mighty and immortal chronicle,
previous as the Koran, patrician as the Peerage, known and beloved to
mortals as the “Stud Book”?
Not an immensely large, or unusually powerful horse, but with race in
every line of him; steel-gray in color, darkening well at all points,
shining and soft as satin, with the firm muscles quivering beneath
at the first touch of excitement to the high mettle and finely-strung
organization; the head small, lean, racer-like, “blood” all over;
with the delicate taper ears, almost transparent in full light; well
ribbed-up, fine shoulders, admirable girth and loins; legs clean,
slender, firm, promising splendid knee action; sixteen hands high, and
up to thirteen stone; clever enough for anything, trained to close and
open country, a perfect brook jumper, a clipper at fencing; taking a
great deal of riding, as anyone could tell by the set-on of his neck,
but docile as a child to a well-known hand--such was Forest King with
his English and Eastern strains, winner at Chertsey, Croydon, the
National, the Granby, the Belvoir Castle, the Curragh, and all the
gentleman-rider steeple-chases and military sweepstakes in the kingdom,
and entered now, with tremendous bets on him, for the Gilt Vase.
It was a crisp, cold night outside; starry, wintry, but open weather,
and clear; the ground would be just right on the morrow, neither hard
as the slate of a billiard-table, nor wet as the slush of a quagmire.
Forest King slept steadily on in his warm and spacious box, dreaming
doubtless of days of victory, cub-hunting in the reedy October woods and
pastures, of the ringing notes of the horn, and the sweet music of
the pack, and the glorious quick burst up-wind, breasting the icy cold
water, and showing the way over fence and bullfinch. Dozing and dreaming
pleasantly; but alert for all that; for he awoke suddenly, shook
himself, had a hilarious roll in the straw, and stood “at attention.”
Awake only, could you tell the generous and gallant promise of his
perfect temper; for there are no eyes that speak more truly, none on
earth that are so beautiful, as the eyes of a horse. Forest King's were
dark as a gazelle's, soft as a woman's, brilliant as stars, a little
dreamy and mournful, and as infinitely caressing when he looked at what
he loved, as they could blaze full of light and fire when danger was
near and rivalry against him. How loyally such eyes have looked at me
over the paddock fence, as a wild, happy gallop was suddenly broken for
a gentle head to be softly pushed against my hand with the gentlest of
welcomes! They sadly put to shame the million human eyes that so fast
learn the lie of the world, and utter it as falsely as the lips.
The steeple-chaser stood alert, every fiber of his body strung to
pleasurable excitation; the door opened, a hand held him some sugar, and
the voice he loved best said fondly, “All right, old boy?”
Forest King devoured the beloved dainty with true equine unction, rubbed
his forehead against his master's shoulder, and pushed his nose into the
nearest pocket in search for more of his sweetmeat.
“You'd eat a sugar-loaf, you dear old rascal. Put the gas up, George,”
said his owner, while he turned up the body clothing to feel the firm,
cool skin, loosened one of the bandages, passed his hand from thigh to
fetlock, and glanced round the box to be sure the horse had been well
suppered and littered down.
“Think we shall win, Rake?”
Rake, with a stable lantern in his hand and a forage cap on one side of
his head, standing a little in advance of a group of grooms and helpers,
took a bit of straw out of his mouth, and smiled a smile of sublime
scorn and security. “Win, sir? I should be glad to know as when was that
ere King ever beat yet; or you either, sir, for that matter?”
Bertie Cecil laughed a little languidly.
“Well, we take a good deal of beating, I think, and there are not very
many who can give it us; are there, old fellow?” he said to the horse,
as he passed his palm over the withers; “but there are some crushers in
the lot to-morrow; you'll have to do all you know.”
Forest King caught the manger with his teeth, and kicked in a bit of
play and ate some more sugar, with much licking of his lips to express
the nonchalance with which he viewed his share in the contest, and his
tranquil certainty of being first past the flags. His master looked at
him once more and sauntered out of the box.
“He's in first-rate form, Rake, and right as a trivet.”
“Course he is, sir; nobody ever laid leg over such cattle as all that
White Cockade blood, and he's the very best of the strain,” said Rake,
as he held up his lantern across the stable-yard, that looked doubly
dark in the February night after the bright gas glare of the box.
“So he need be,” thought Cecil, as a bull terrier, three or four Gordon
setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyes dashed at their chains,
giving tongue in frantic delight at the sound of his step, while the
hounds echoed the welcome from their more distant kennels, and he went
slowly across the great stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot
glimmering through the gloom. “So he need be, to pull me through. The
Ducal and the October let me in for it enough; I never was closer in
my life. The deuce! If I don't do the distance to-morrow I shan't have
sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night! I don't know what a
man's to do; if he's put into this life, he must go the pace of it. Why
did Royal send me into the Guards, if he meant to keep the screw on in
this way? He'd better have drafted me into a marching regiment at once,
if he wanted me to live upon nothing.”
Nothing meant anything under 60,000 pounds a year with Cecil, as the
minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look of genuine
annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was on his face, the picture
of carelessness and gentle indifference habitually, though shadowed
now as he crossed the courtyard after his after-midnight visit to his
steeple-chaser. He had backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or
lose a cracker on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found
sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough lying on
his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to pay his groom's
book, or a notion where to get more, if the King should find his match
over the ridge and furrow in the morning!
It was not pleasant: a cynical, savage, world-disgusted Timon derives on
the whole a good amount of satisfaction from his break-down in the fine
philippics against his contemporaries that it is certain to afford, and
the magnificent grievances with which it furnishes him; but when life is
very pleasant to a man, and the world very fond of him; when existence
is perfectly smooth,--bar that single pressure of money,--and is an
incessantly changing kaleidoscope of London seasons, Paris winters,
ducal houses in the hunting months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs,
dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproachable everywhere;
cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the R. V. Y. Club, Derby handicaps
at Hornsey, pretty chorus-singers set up in Bijou villas, dashing
rosieres taken over to Baden, warm corners in Belvoir, Savernake, and
Longeat battues, and all the rest of the general programme, with no
drawback to it, except the duties at the Palace, the heat of a review,
or the extravagance of a pampered lionne--then to be pulled up in that
easy, swinging gallop for sheer want of a golden shoe, as one may say,
is abominably bitter, and requires far more philosophy to endure than
Timon would ever manage to master. It is a bore, an unmitigated bore;
a harsh, hateful, unrelieved martyrdom that the world does not see, and
that the world would not pity if it did.
“Never mind! Things will come right. Forest King never failed me yet; he
is as full of running as a Derby winner, and he'll go over the yawners
like a bird,” thought Cecil, who never confronted his troubles with
more than sixty seconds' thought, and who was of that light, impassible,
half-levity, half-languor of temperament that both throws off worry
easily and shirks it persistently. “Sufficient for the day,” etc., was
the essence of his creed; and if he had enough to lay a fiver at night
on the rubber, he was quite able to forget for the time that he wanted
five hundred for settling-day in the morning, and had not an idea how
to get it. There was not a trace of anxiety on him when he opened a low
arched door, passed down a corridor, and entered the warm, full light of
that chamber of liberty, that sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple
of refuge, thrice blessed in all its forms throughout the land,
that consecrated Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the
meerschaum, and the paradise of the nargile--the smoking-room.
A spacious, easy chamber, too; lined with the laziest of divans, seen
just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly a score of men
in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and with faces as well known
in the Park at six o'clock in May, and on the Heath in October; in Paris
in January, and on the Solent in August; in Pratt's of a summer's night,
and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features that
came round as regularly as the “July” or the Waterloo Cup. Some were
puffing away in calm, meditative comfort, in silence that they would not
have broken for any earthly consideration; others were talking hard
and fast, and through the air heavily weighted with the varieties of
tobacco, from tiny cigarettes to giant cheroots, from rough bowls full
of cavendish to sybaritic rose-water hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose
together: “Gave him too much riding, the idiot.” “Take the field, bar
one.” “Nothing so good for the mare as a little niter and antimony in
her mash.” “Not at all! The Regent and Rake cross in the old strain,
always was black-tan with a white frill.” “The Earl's as good a fellow
as Lady Flora; always give you a mount.” “Nothing like a Kate Terry
though, on a bright day, for salmon.” “Faster thing I never knew; found
at twenty minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown Water
at ten to twelve.” All these various phrases were rushing in among each
other, and tossed across the eddies of smoke in the conflicting tongues
loosened in the tabagie and made eloquent, though slightly inarticulate,
by pipe-stems; while a tall, fair man, with the limbs of a Hercules, the
chest of a prize-fighter, and the face of a Raphael Angel, known in the
Household as Seraph, was in the full blood of a story of whist played
under difficulties in the Doncaster express.
“I wanted a monkey; I wanted monkeys awfully,” he was stating as Forest
King's owner came into the smoking-room.
“Did you, Seraph? The 'Zoo' or the Clubs could supply you with apes
fully developed to any amount,” said Bertie, as he threw himself down.
“You be hanged!” laughed the Seraph, known to the rest of the world
as the Marquis of Rockingham, son of the Duke of Lyonnesse. “I wished
monkeys, but the others wished ponies and hundreds, so I gave in;
Vandebur and I won two rubbers, and we'd just begun the third when the
train stopped with a crash; none of us dropped the cards though, but
the tricks and the scores all went down with the shaking. 'Can't play in
that row,' said Charlie, for the women were shrieking like mad, and the
engine was roaring like my mare Philippa--I'm afraid she'll never be
cured, poor thing!--so I put my head out and asked what was up? We'd run
into a cattle train. Anybody hurt? No, nobody hurt; but we were to get
out. 'I'll be shot if I get out,' I told 'em, 'till I've finished the
rubber.' 'But you must get out,' said the guard; 'carriages must be
moved.' 'Nobody says “must” to him,' said Van (he'd drank more Perles du
Rhin than was good for him in Doncaster); 'don't you know the Seraph?'
Man stared. 'Yes, sir; know the Seraph, sir; leastways, did, sir, afore
he died; see him once at Moulsey Mill, sir; his “one two” was amazin'.
Waters soon threw up the sponge.' We were all dying with laughter, and
I tossed him a tenner. 'There, my good fellow,' said I, 'shunt the
carriage and let us finish the game. If another train comes up, give it
Lord Rockingham's compliments and say he'll thank it to stop, because
collisions shake his trumps together.' Man thought us mad; took tenner
though, shunted us to one side out of the noise, and we played two
rubbers more before they'd repaired the damage and sent us on to town.”
And the Seraph took a long-drawn whiff from his silver meerschaum, and
then a deep draught of soda and brandy to refresh himself after the
narrative--biggest, best-tempered, and wildest of men in or out of the
Service, despite the angelic character of his fair-haired head, and blue
eyes that looked as clear and as innocent as those of a six-year-old
child.
“Not the first time by a good many that you've 'shunted off the
straight,' Seraph?” laughed Cecil, substituting an amber mouth-piece for
his half-finished cheroot. “I've been having a good-night look at the
King. He'll stay.”
“Of course he will,” chorused half a dozen voices.
“With all our pots on him,” added the Seraph. “He's too much of a
gentleman to put us all up a tree; he knows he carries the honor of the
Household.”
“There are some good mounts, there's no denying that,” said Chesterfield
of the Blues (who was called Tom for no other reason than that it was
entirely unlike his real name of Adolphus), where he was curled up
almost invisible, except for the movement of the jasmine stick of his
chibouque. “That brute, Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook
jumper, it would be heard to best Wild Geranium, though her shoulders
are not quite what they ought to be. Montacute, too, can ride a good
thing, and he's got one in Pas de Charge.”
“I'm not much afraid of Monti, he makes too wild a burst first; he never
saves on atom,” yawned Cecil, with the coils of his hookah bubbling
among the rose-water; “the man I'm afraid of is that fellow from the
Tenth; he's as light as a feather and as hard as steel. I watched him
yesterday going over the water, and the horse he'll ride for Trelawney
is good enough to beat even the King if he's properly piloted.”
“You haven't kept yourself in condition, Beauty,” growled “Tom,” with
the chibouque in his mouth, “else nothing could give you the go-by. It's
tempting Providence to go in for the Gilt Vase after such a December and
January as you spent in Paris. Even the week you've been in the Shires
you haven't trained a bit; you've been waltzing or playing baccarat till
five in the morning, and taking no end of sodas after to bring you right
for the meet at nine. If a man will drink champagnes and burgundies as
you do, and spend his time after women, I should like to know how he's
to be in hard riding condition, unless he expects a miracle.”
With which Chesterfield, who weighed fourteen stone himself, and was,
therefore, out of all but welter-races, and wanted a weight-carrier
of tremendous power even for them, subsided under a heap of velvet and
cashmere, and Cecil laughed; lying on a divan just under one of the gas
branches, the light fell full on his handsome face, with its fair hue
and its gentle languor on which there was not a single trace of the
outrecuidance attributed to him. Both he and the Seraph could lead the
wildest life of any men in Europe without looking one shadow more worn
than the brightest beauty of the season, and could hold wassail in
riotous rivalry till the sun rose, and then throw themselves into saddle
as fresh as if they had been sound asleep all night; to keep up with the
pack the whole day in a fast burst or on a cold scent, or in whatever
sport Fortune and the coverts gave them, till their second horses wound
their way homeward through muddy, leafless lanes, when the stars had
risen.
“Beauty don't believe in training. No more do I. Never would train for
anything,” said the Seraph now, pulling the long blond mustaches that
were not altogether in character with his seraphic cognomen. “If a
man can ride, let him. If he's born to the pigskin he'll be in at the
distance safe enough, whether he smokes or don't smoke, drink or don't
drink. As for training on raw chops, giving up wine, living like the
very deuce and all, as if you were in a monastery, and changing yourself
into a mere bag of bones--it's utter bosh. You might as well be in
purgatory; besides, it's no more credit to win then than if you were a
professional.”
“But you must have trained at Christ Church, Rock, for the Eight?” asked
another Guardsman, Sir Vere Bellingham; “Severe,” as he was christened,
chiefly because he was the easiest-going giant in existence.
“Did I! men came to me; wanted me to join the Eight; coxswain came,
awful strict little fellow, docked his men of all their fun--took plenty
himself though! Coxswain said I must begin to train, do as all his
crew did. I threw up my sleeve and showed him my arm;” and the Seraph
stretched out an arm magnificent enough for a statue of Milo. “I said,
'there, sir, I'll help you thrash Cambridge, if you like, but train I
won't for you or for all the University. I've been Captain of the
Eton Eight; but I didn't keep my crew on tea and toast. I fattened 'em
regularly three times a week on venison and champagne at Christopher's.
Very happy to feed yours, too, if you like; game comes down to me every
Friday from the Duke's moors; they look uncommonly as if they wanted
it!' You should have seen his face!--fatten the Eight! He didn't let me
do that, of course; but he was very glad of my oar in his rowlocks, and
I helped him beat Cambridge without training an hour myself, except so
far as rowing hard went.”
And the Marquis of Rockingham, made thirsty by the recollection, dipped
his fair mustaches into a foaming seltzer.
“Quite right, Seraph!” said Cecil; “when a man comes up to the weights,
looking like a homunculus, after he's been getting every atom of flesh
off him like a jockey, he ought to be struck out for the stakes, to
my mind. 'Tisn't a question of riding, then, nor yet of pluck, or of
management; it's nothing but a question of pounds, and of who can stand
the tamest life the longest.”
“Well, beneficial for one's morals, at any rate,” suggested Sir Vere.
“Morals be hanged!” said Bertie, very immorally. “I'm glad you remind us
of them, Vere; you're such a quintessence of decorum and respectability
yourself! I say--anybody know anything of this fellow of the Tenth
that's to ride Trelawney's chestnut?”
“Jimmy Delmar! Oh, yes; I know Jimmy,” answered Lord Cosmo Wentworth, of
the Scots Fusileers, from the far depths of an arm-chair. “Knew him at
Aldershot. Fine rider; give you a good bit of trouble, Beauty. Hasn't
been in England for years; troop been such a while at Calcutta. The
Fancy take to him rather; offering very freely on him this morning in
the village; and he's got a rare good thing in the chestnut.”
“Not a doubt of it. The White Lily blood, out of that Irish mare
D'Orleans Diamonds, too.”
“Never mind! Tenth won't beat us. The Household will win safe enough,
unless Forest King goes and breaks his back over Brixworth--eh, Beauty?”
said the Seraph, who believed devoutly in his comrade, with all the
loving loyalty characteristic of the House of Lyonnesse, that to
monarchs and to friends had often cost it very dear.
“You put your faith in the wrong quarter, Rock; I may fail you, he never
will,” said Cecil, with ever so slight a dash of sadness in his words;
the thought crossed him of how boldly, how straightly, how gallantly
the horse always breasted and conquered his difficulties--did he himself
deal half so well with his own?
“Well! you both of you carry all our money and all our credit; so for
the fair fame of the Household do 'all you know.' I haven't hedged a
shilling, not laid off a farthing, Bertie; I stand on you and the King,
and nothing else--see what a sublime faith I have in you.”
“I don't think you're wise then, Seraph; the field will be very
strong,” said Cecil languidly. The answer was indifferent, and certainly
thankless; but under his drooped lids a glance, frank and warm, rested
for the moment on the Seraph's leonine strength and Raphaelesque head;
it was not his way to say it, or to show it, or even much to think it;
but in his heart he loved his old friend wonderfully well.
And they talked on of little else than of the great steeple-chase of
the Service, for the next hour in the Tabak-Parliament, while the great
clouds of scented smoke circled heavily round; making a halo of Turkish
above the gold locks of the Titanic Seraph, steeping Chesterfield's
velvets in strong odors of Cavendish, and drifting a light rose-scented
mist over Bertie's long, lithe limbs, light enough and skilled enough to
disdain all “training for the weights.”
“That's not the way to be in condition,” growled “Tom,” getting up with
a great shake as the clock clanged the strokes of five; they had only
returned from a ball three miles off, when Cecil had paid his visit
to the loose box. Bertie laughed; his laugh was like himself--rather
languid, but very light-hearted, very silvery, very engaging.
“Sit and smoke till breakfast time if you like, Tom; it won't make any
difference to me.”
But the Smoke Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion of the Household
over the ridge and furrow risking the steadiness of his wrist and the
keenness of his eye by any such additional tempting of Providence, and
went off itself in various directions, with good-night iced drinks,
yawning considerably like most other parliaments after a sitting.
It was the old family place of the Royallieu House in which he had
congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the great event, and
consequently the bachelor chambers in it were of the utmost comfort and
spaciousness, and when Cecil sauntered into his old quarters, familiar
from boyhood, he could not have been better off in his own luxurious
haunts in Piccadilly. Moreover, the first thing that caught his eye was
a dainty scarlet silk riding jacket broidered in gold and silver, with
the motto of his house, “Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume,” all circled
with oak and laurel leaves on the collar.
It was the work of very fair hands, of very aristocratic hands, and
he looked at it with a smile. “Ah, my lady, my lady!” he thought half
aloud, “do you really love me? Do I really love you?”
There was a laugh in his eyes as he asked himself what might be termed
an interesting question; then something more earnest came over his face,
and he stood a second with the pretty costly embroideries in his hand,
with a smile that was almost tender, though it was still much more
amused. “I suppose we do,” he concluded at last; “at least quite as
much as is ever worth while. Passions don't do for the drawing-room, as
somebody says in 'Coningsby'; besides--I would not feel a strong emotion
for the universe. Bad style always, and more detrimental to 'condition,'
as Tom would say, than three bottles of brandy!”
He was so little near what he dreaded, at present at least, that the
scarlet jacket was tossed down again, and gave him no dreams of his fair
and titled embroideress. He looked out, the last thing, at some ominous
clouds drifting heavily up before the dawn, and the state of the
weather, and the chance of its being rainy, filled his thoughts, to the
utter exclusion of the donor of that bright gold-laden dainty gift. “I
hope to goodness there won't be any drenching shower. Forest King can
stand ground as hard as a slate, but if there's one thing he's weak in
it's slush!” was Bertie's last conscious thought, as he stretched his
limbs out and fell sound asleep.