UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE.
“You're a lad o' wax, my beauty!” cried Mr. Rake enthusiastically,
surveying the hero of the Grand Military with adoring eyes as that
celebrity, without a hair turned or a muscle swollen from his exploit,
was having a dressing down after a gentle exercise. “You've pulled it
off, haven't you? You've cut the work out for 'em! You've shown 'em what
a luster is! Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is in blood. The
littlest pippin that ever threw a leg across the pigskin knows that in
the stables; then why the dickens do the world run against such a plain
fact out of it?”
And Rake gazed with worship at the symmetrical limbs of the champion
of the “First Life,” and plunged into speculation on the democratic
tendencies of the age, as clearly contradicted by all the evidences of
the flat and furrow, while Forest King drank a dozen go-downs of
water, and was rewarded for the patience with which he had subdued
his inclination to kick, fret, spring, and break away throughout the
dressing by a full feed thrown into his crib, which Rake watched him,
with adoring gaze, eat to the very last grain.
“You precious one!” soliloquized that philosopher, who loved the horse
with a sort of passion since his victory over the Shires. “You've won
for the gentlemen, my lovely--for your own cracks, my boy!”
And Rake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts, went out of the
box to get into saddle and ride off on an errand of his master's to the
Zu-Zu at her tiny hunting-lodge, where the snow-white ponies made her
stud, and where she gave enchanting little hunting-dinners, at which she
sang equally enchanting little hunting-songs, and arrayed herself, in
the Fontainebleau hunting costume, gold-hilted knife and all, and spent
Cecil's winnings for him with a rapidity that threatened to leave very
few of them for the London season. She was very pretty, sweetly pretty;
with hair that wanted no gold powder, the clearest, sauciest eyes, and
the handsomest mouth in the world; but of grammar she had not a notion,
of her aspirates she had never a recollection, of conversation she had
not an idea; of slang she had, to be sure, a repertoire, but to this was
her command of language limited. She dressed perfectly, but she was a
vulgar little soul; drank everything, from Bass' ale to rum-punch, and
from cherry-brandy to absinthe; thought it the height of wit to stifle
you with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice, and the climax of repartee
to cram your hat full of peach stones and lobster shells; was thoroughly
avaricious, thoroughly insatiate, thoroughly heartless, pillaged with
both hands, and then never had enough; had a coarse good nature when
it cost her nothing, and was “as jolly as a grig,” according to her
phraseology, so long as she could stew her pigeons in champagne, drink
wines and liqueurs that were beyond price, take the most dashing trap
in the Park up to Flirtation Corner, and laugh and sing and eat Richmond
dinners, and show herself at the Opera with Bertie or some other “swell”
attached to her, in the very box next to a Duchess.
The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy; and as for the pathetic pictures that
novelists and moralists draw, of vice sighing amid turtle and truffles
for childish innocence in the cottage at home where honeysuckles
blossomed and brown brooks made melody, and passionately grieving on
the purple cushions of a barouche for the time of straw pallets and
untroubled sleep, why--the Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the
box-seat of a drag, and told you “to stow all that trash”; her childish
recollections were of a stifling lean-to with the odor of pigsty and
straw-yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all the other six
days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a general atmosphere of beer and
wash-tubs; she hated her past, and loved her cigar on the drag. The
Zu-Zu is fact; the moralists' pictures are moonshine.
The Zu-Zu is an openly acknowledged fact, moreover, daily becoming more
prominent in the world, more brilliant, more frankly recognized, and
more omnipotent. Whether this will ultimately prove for the better or
the worse, it would be a bold man who should dare say; there is at least
one thing left to desire in it--i. e., that the synonym of “Aspasia,”
which serves so often to designate in journalistic literature these
Free Lances of life, were more suitable in artistic and intellectual
similarity, and that, when the Zu-Zu and her sisterhood plunge their
white arms elbow-deep into so many fortunes, and rule the world right
and left as they do, they could also sound their H's properly, and knew
a little orthography, if they could not be changed into such queens of
grace, of intellect, of sovereign mind and splendid wit as were their
prototypes when she whose name they debase held her rule in the City of
the Violet Crown, and gathered about her Phidias the divine, haughty
and eloquent Antipho, the gay Crates, the subtle Protagorus, Cratinus so
acrid and yet so jovial, Damon of the silver lyre, and the great poets
who are poets for all time. Author and artist, noble and soldier, court
the Zu-Zu order now; but it must be confessed that the Hellenic idols
were of a more exalted type than are the Hyde Park goddesses!
However, the Zu-Zu was the rage, and spent Bertie's money, when he got
any, just as her willful sovereignty fancied, and Rake rode on now with
his master's note, bearing no very good will to her; for Rake had very
strong prejudices, and none stronger than against these fair pillagers
who went about seeking whom they should devour, and laughing at the
wholesale ruin they wrought while the sentimentalists babbled in “Social
Science” of “pearls lost” and “innocence betrayed.”
“A girl that used to eat tripe and red herring in a six-pair pack, and
dance for a shilling a night in gauze, coming it so grand that she'll
only eat asparagus in March, and drink the best Brands with her
truffles! Why, she ain't worth sixpence thrown away on her, unless it's
worth while to hear how hard she can swear at you!” averred Rake, in his
eloquence; and he was undoubtedly right for that matter; but then--the
Zu-Zu was the rage, and if ever she should be sold up, great ladies
would crowd to her sale and buy with eager curiosity at high prices her
most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most flimsy gew-gaws of marqueterie!
Rake had seen a good deal of men and manners, and, in his own opinion at
least, was “up to every dodge on the cross” that this iniquitous world
could unfold. A bright, lithe, animated, vigorous, yellow-haired, and
sturdy fellow; seemingly with a dash of the Celt in him that made him
vivacious and peppery; Mr. Rake polished his wits quite as much as he
polished the tops, and considered himself a philosopher. Of whose son he
was he had not the remotest idea; his earliest recollections were of the
tender mercies of the workhouse; but even that chill foster-mother, the
parish, had not damaged the liveliness of his temper or the independence
of his opinions, and as soon as he was fifteen Rake had run away and
joined a circus; distinguishing himself there by his genius for standing
on his head and tying his limbs into a porter's knot.
From the circus he migrated successively into the shape of a comic
singer, a tapster, a navvy, a bill-sticker, a guacho in Mexico (working
his passage out), a fireman in New York, a ventriloquist in Maryland,
a vaquero in Spanish California, a lemonade seller in San Francisco, a
revolutionist in the Argentine (without the most distant idea what he
fought for), a boatman on the bay of Mapiri, a blacksmith in Santarem, a
trapper in the Wilderness, and finally, working his passage home
again, took the Queen's shilling in Dublin, and was drafted into a
light-cavalry regiment. With the --th he served half a dozen years in
India; a rough-rider, a splendid fellow in a charge or a pursuit, with
an astonishing power over horses, and the clearest back-handed sweep of
a saber that ever cut down a knot of natives; but--insubordinate. Do his
duty whenever fighting was in question, he did most zealously; but to
kick over the traces at other times was a temptation that at last became
too strong for that lawless lover of liberty.
From the moment that he joined the regiment a certain Corporal Warne and
he had conceived an antipathy to one another, which Rake had to control
as he might, and which the Corporal was not above indulging in every
petty piece of tyranny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active
service Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage to keep
the curb on himself tolerably well though he was always regarded in his
troop rather as a hound that will “riot” is regarded in the pack; but
when the --th came back to Brighton and to barracks, the evil spirit of
rebellion began to get a little hotter in him under th Corporal's “Idees
Napoliennes” of justifiable persecution. Warne indisputably provoked his
man in a cold, iron, strictly lawful sort of manner, moreover, all the
more irritating to a temper like Rake's.
“Hanged if I care how the officers come it over me; they're gentlemen,
and it don't try a fellow,” would Rake say in confidential moments over
purl and a penn'orth of bird's-eye, his experience in the Argentine
Republic having left him with strongly aristocratic prejudices; “but
when it comes to a duffer like that, that knows no better than me,
what ain't a bit better than me, and what is as clumsy a duffer about a
horse's plates as ever I knew, and would almost let a young 'un buck him
out of his saddle--why, then I do cut up rough, I ain't denying it; and
I don't see what there is in his Stripes to give him such a license to
be aggravating.”
With which Rake would blow the froth off his pewter with a puff of
concentrated wrath, and an oath against his non-commissioned officers
that might have let some light in upon the advocates for “promotion
from the ranks,” had they been there to take the lesson. At last, in the
leisure of Brighton, the storm broke. Rake had a Scotch hound that
was the pride of his life; his beer-money often going instead to buy
dainties for the dog, who became one of the channels through which Warne
could annoy and thwart him. The dog did no harm, being a fine, well-bred
deerhound; but it pleased the Corporal to consider that it did, simply
because it belonged to Rake, whose popularity in the corps, owing to
his good nature, his good spirits, and his innumerable tales of American
experience and amorous adventures, increased the jealous dislike which
his knack with an unbroken colt and his abundant stable science had
first raised in his superior.
One day in the chargers' stables the hound ran out of a loose box with a
rush to get at Rake, and upset a pailful of warm mash. The Corporal, who
was standing by in harness, hit him over the head with a heavy whip he
had in his hand; infuriated by the pain, the dog flew at him, tearing
his overalls with a fierce crunch of his teeth. “Take the brute off, and
string him up with a halter; I've put up with him too long!” cried Warne
to a couple of privates working near in their stable dress. Before the
words were out of his mouth Rake threw himself on him with a bound
like lightning, and, wrenching the whip out of his hands, struck him a
slashing, stinging blow across his face.
“Hang my hound, you cur! If you touch a hair of him, I'll double-thong
you within an inch of your life!”
And assuredly he would have kept his word, had he not been made a
prisoner and marched off to the guardroom.
Rake learned the stern necessity of the law, which, for the sake of
morale, must make the soldiers, whose blood is wanted to be like fire
on the field, patient, pulseless, and enduring of every provocation,
cruelty, and insolence in the camp and barrack, as though they were
statues of stone--a needful law, a wise law, an indispensable law,
doubtless, but a very hard law to be obeyed by a man full of life and
all life's passions.
At the court-martial on his mutinous conduct, which followed, many
witnesses brought evidence, on being pressed, to the unpopularity of
Warne in the regiment and to his harshness and his tyranny to Rake. Many
men spoke out what had been chained down in their thoughts for years;
and, in consideration of the provocation received, the prisoner, who was
much liked by the officers, was condemned to six months' imprisonment
for his insubordination and blow to his superior officer, without being
tied up to the triangles. At the court-martial, Cecil, who chanced to
be in Brighton after Goodwood, was present one day with some
other Guardsmen; and the look of Rake, with his cheerfulness under
difficulties, his love for the hound, and his bright, sunburnt, shrewd,
humorous countenance, took his fancy.
“Beauty” was the essence of good nature. Indolent himself, he hated to
see anything or anybody worried; lazy, gentle, wayward, and spoilt
by his own world, he was still never so selfish and philosophic as he
pretended but what he would do a kindness, if one came in his way; it is
not a very great virtue, perhaps, but it is a rare one.
“Poor devil! Struck the other because he wouldn't have his dog hanged.
Well, on my word, I should have done the same in his place, if I could
have got up the pace for so much exertion,” murmured Cecil to his
cheroot, careless of the demoralizing tendency of his remarks for the
army in general. Had it occurred in the Guards, and he had “sat” on the
case, Rake would have had one very lenient judge.
As it was, Bertie actually went the lengths of thinking seriously about
the matter; he liked Rake's devotion to his dumb friend, and he heard of
his intense popularity in his troop; he wished to save, if he could, so
fine a fellow from the risks of his turbulent passion and from the stern
fetters of a trying discipline; hence, when Rake found himself condemned
to his cell, he had a message sent him by Bertie's groom that, when his
term of punishment should be over, Mr. Cecil would buy his discharge
from the service and engage him as extra body-servant, having had a good
account of his capabilities; he had taken the hound to his own kennels.
Now, the fellow had been thoroughly devil-may-care throughout the
whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence with sublime
impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels with an utterly reckless
nonchalance; but somehow or other, when that message reached him, a
vivid sense that he was a condemned and disgraced man suddenly flooded
in on him; a passionate gratitude seized him to the young aristocrat
who had thought of him in his destitution and condemnation, who had even
thought of his dog; and Rake the philosophic and undauntable, could
have found it in his heart to kneel down in the dust and kiss the
stirrup-leather when he held it for his new master, so strong was the
loyalty he bore from that moment to Bertie.
Martinets were scandalized at a Life-Guardsman taking as his private
valet a man who had been guilty of such conduct in the Light Cavalry;
but Cecil never troubled his head about what people said; and so
invaluable did Rake speedily become to him that he had kept him about
his person wherever he went from then until now, two years after.
Rake loved his master with a fidelity very rare in these days; he loved
his horses, his dogs, everything that was his, down to his very rifle
and boots; slaved for him cheerfully, and was as proud of the deer he
stalked, of the brace he bagged, of his winnings when the Household
played the Zingari, or his victory when his yacht won the Cherbourg Cup,
as though those successes had been Rake's own.
“My dear Seraph,” said Cecil himself once, on this point, to the
Marquis, “if you want generosity, fidelity, and all the rest of the
cardinal what-d'ye-call-'ems--sins, ain't it?--go to a noble-hearted
Scamp; he'll stick to you till he kills himself. If you want to be
cheated, get a Respectable Immaculate; he'll swindle you piously, and
decamp with your Doncaster Vase.”
And Rake, who assuredly had been an out-and-out scamp, made good
Bertie's creed; he “stuck to him” devoutly, and no terrier was ever more
alive to an otter than he was to the Guardsman's interests. It was that
very vigilance which made him, as he rode back from the Zu-Zu's in
the twilight, notice what would have escaped any save one who had been
practiced as a trapper in the red Canadian woods; namely, the head of a
man, almost hidden among the heavy, though leafless, brushwood and
the yellow gorse of a spinney which lay on his left in Royallieu Park.
Rake's eyes were telescopic and microscopic; moreover, they had been
trained to know such little signs as a marsh from a hen harrier in full
flight, by the length of wing and tail, and a widgeon or a coot from
a mallard or a teal, by the depth each swam out of the water. Gray and
foggy as it was, and high as was the gorse, Rake recognized his born-foe
Willon.
“What's he up to there?” thought Rake, surveying the place, which was
wild, solitary, and an unlikely place enough for a head groom to be
found in. “If he ain't a rascal, I never seen one; it's my belief he
cheats the stable thick and thin, and gets on Mr. Cecil's mounts to a
good tune--aye, and would nobble 'em as soon as not, if it just suited
his book. That blessed King hates the man; how he lashes his heels at
him!”
It was certainly possible that Willon might be passing an idle hour
in potting rabbits, or be otherwise innocently engaged enough; but the
sight of him, there among the gorse, was a sight of suspicion to Rake.
Instantaneous thoughts darted through his mind of tethering his horse,
and making a reconnaissance, safely and unseen, with the science of
stalking brute or man that he had learned of his friends the Sioux. But
second thoughts showed him that was impossible. The horse he was on was
a mere colt, just breaking in, who had barely had so much as a “dumb
jockey” on his back; and stand for a second, the colt would not.
“At any rate, I'll unearth him,” thought Rake, with his latent animosity
to the head groom and his vigilant loyalty to Cecil overruling any
scruple as to his right to overlook his foe's movements; and with a
gallop that was muffled on the heathered turf he dashed straight at the
covert, unperceived till he was within ten paces. Willon started and
looked up hastily; he was talking to a square-built man very quietly
dressed in shepherd's plaid, chiefly remarkable by a red-hued beard and
whiskers.
The groom turned pale, and laughed nervously as Rake pulled up with a
jerk.
“You on that young 'un again? Take care you don't get bucked out o'
saddle in the shape of a cocked-hat.”
“I ain't afraid of going to grass, if you are!” retorted Rake
scornfully; boldness was not his enemy's strong point. “Who's your pal,
old fellow?”
“A cousin o' mine, out o' Yorkshire,” vouchsafed Mr. Willon, looking
anything but easy, while the cousin aforesaid nodded sulkily on the
introduction.
“Ah! looks like a Yorkshire tyke,” muttered Rake, with a volume of
meaning condensed in these innocent words. “A nice, dry, cheerful sort
of place to meet your cousin in, too; uncommon lively; hope it'll raise
his spirits to see all his cousins a-grinning there; his spirits don't
seem much in sorts now,” continued the ruthless inquisitor, with a
glance at the “keeper's tree” by which they stood, in the middle of dank
undergrowth, whose branches were adorned with dead cats, curs, owls,
kestrels, stoats, weasels, and martens. To what issue the passage of
arms might have come it is impossible to say, for at that moment the
colt took matters into his own hands, and bolted with a rush that even
Rake could not pull in till he had had a mile-long “pipe-opener.”
“Something up there,” thought that sagacious rough-rider; “if that
red-haired chap ain't a rum lot, I'll eat him. I've seen his face, too,
somewhere; where the deuce was it? Cousin; yes, cousins in Queer Street,
I dare say! Why should he go and meet his 'cousin' out in the fog there,
when, if you took twenty cousins home to the servants' hall, nobody'd
ever say anything? If that Willon ain't as deep as Old Harry----”
And Rake rode into the stable-yard, thoughtful and intensely suspicious
of the rendezvous under the keeper's tree in the out-lying coverts. He
would have been more so had he guessed that Ben Davis' red beard and
demure attire, with other as efficient disguises, had prevented even his
own keen eyes from penetrating the identity of Willon's “Cousin” with
the welsher he had seen thrust off the course the day before by his
master.