THE END OF A RINGING RUN.
“Tally-ho! is the word, clap spurs and let's follow. The world has no
charm like a rattling view-halloa!”
Is hardly to be denied by anybody in this land of fast bursts and
gallant M. F. H.'s, whether they “ride to hunt,” or “hunt to ride,” in
the immortal distinction of Assheton Smith's old whip; the latter class,
by the bye, becoming far and away the larger, in these days of rattling
gallops and desperate breathers. Who cares to patter after a sly old dog
fox, that, fat and wary, leads the pack a tedious, interminable wind,
in and out through gorse and spinney, bricks himself up in a drain, and
takes an hour to be dug out, dodges about till twilight, and makes
the hounds pick the scent slowly and wretchedly over marsh and through
water? Who would not give fifty guineas a second for the glorious thirty
minutes of racing that show steam and steel over fence and fallow in a
clipping rush, without a check from find to finish? So be it ever! The
riding that graces the Shires, that makes Tedworth and Pytchley, the
Duke's and the Fitzwilliam's, household words and “names beloved”--that
fills Melton and Market Harborough, and makes the best flirts of the
ballroom gallop fifteen miles to covert, careless of hail or rain, mire
or slush, mist or cold, so long as it is a fine scenting wind--is
the same riding that sent the Six Hundred down in to the blaze of the
Muscovite guns; that in our fathers' days gave to Grant's Hussars their
swoop, like eagles, on to the rearguard at Morales, and that, in the
grand old East and the rich trackless West, makes exiled campaigners
with high English names seek and win an aristeia of their own at the
head of their wild Irregular Horse, who would charge hell itself at
their bidding.
Now in all the service there was not a man who loved hunting better than
Bertie. Though he was incorrigibly lazy, and inconceivably effeminate in
every one of his habits; though he suggested a portable lounging-chair
as an improvement at battues, so that you might shoot sitting; drove to
every breakfast and garden party in the season in his brougham with the
blinds down lest a grain of dust should touch him; thought a waltz too
exhaustive, and a saunter down Pall Mall too tiring, and asked to
have the end of a novel told him in the clubs, because it was too much
trouble to read on a warm day; though he was more indolent than any
spoiled Creole--“Beauty” never failed to head the first flight, and
adored a hard day cross country, with an east wind in his eyes and the
sleet in his teeth. The only trouble was to make him get up in time for
it.
“Mr. Cecil, sir; if you please, the drag will be round in ten minutes,”
said Rake, with a dash of desperation for the seventh time into his
chamber, one fine scenting morning.
“I don't please,” answered Cecil sleepily, finishing his cup of coffee,
and reading a novel of La Demirep's.
“The other gentlemen are all down, sir, and you will be too late.”
“Not a bit. They must wait for me,” yawned Bertie.
Crash came the Seraph's thunder on the panels of the door, and a strong
volume of Turkish through the keyhole: “Beauty, Beauty, are you dead?”
“Now, what an inconsequent question!” expostulated Cecil, with appealing
rebuke. “If a fellow were dead, how the devil could he say he was? Do be
logical, Seraph.”
“Get up!” cried the Seraph with a deafening rataplan, and a final dash
of his colossal stature into the chamber. “We've all done breakfast; the
traps are coming round; you'll be an hour behind time at the meet.”
Bertie lifted his eyes with plaintive resignation from the Demirep's
yellow-papered romance.
“I'm really in an interesting chapter: Aglae has just had a marquis kill
his son, and two brothers kill each other in the Bois, about her, and
is on the point of discovering a man she's in love with to be her own
grandfather; the complication is absolutely thrilling,” murmured Beauty,
whom nothing could ever “thrill”--not even plunging down the Matterhorn,
losing “long odds in thou'” over the Oaks, or being sunned in the eyes
of the fairest woman of Europe.
The Seraph laughed, and tossed the volume straight to the other end of
the chamber.
“Confound you, Beauty; get up!”
“Never swear, Seraph; not ever so mildly,” yawned Cecil, “it's gone out,
you know; only the cads and the clergy can damn one nowadays; it's
such bad style to be so impulsive. Look! You have broken the back of my
Demirep!”
“You deserve to break the King's back over the first cropper,” laughed
the Seraph. “Do get up!”
“Bother!” sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, while the
Seraph disappeared in a cloud of Turkish.
Neither Bertie's indolence nor his insouciance was assumed; utter
carelessness was his nature, utter impassability was his habit, and he
was truly for the moment loath to leave his bed, his coffee, and his
novel; he must have his leg over the saddle, and feel the strain on his
arms of that “pulling” pace with which the King always went when once he
settled into his stride, before he would really think about winning.
The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present squires
found no favor with Bertie; a slice of game and a glass of Curacoa were
all he kept the drag waiting to swallow; and the four bays going at
a pelting pace, he and the rest of the Household who were gathered at
Royallieu were by good luck in time for the throw-off of the Quorn,
where the hero o' the Blue Ribbon was dancing impatiently under Willon's
hand, scenting the fresh, keen, sunny air, and knowing as well what all
those bits of scarlet straying in through field and lane, gate and
gap, meant, as well as though the merry notes of the master's horn were
winding over the gorse. The meet was brilliant and very large; showing
such a gathering as only the Melton country can; and foremost among the
crowd of carriages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare
Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite peeress in
her violet habit and her tiny velvet hat; and the pony equipage of the
Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure and silver, leopard rugs, and snowy
reins: the breadth of half an acre of grassland was between them, but
the groups of men about them were tolerably equal for number and for
rank.
“Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph; there's a good
fellow,” murmured Cecil, as he swung himself into saddle. The Seraph
gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced. He detested women in the
hunting-field, but that sweetest tempered giant of the Brigades never
refused anything to anybody--much less to “Beauty.”
To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in
its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the
delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his
two claimants--bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that
assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival
might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the
pony-trap under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and
restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little
gold sherry-flash, studded with turquoises, just ordered for her from
Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously contemned, because she
thought it had only cost twenty guineas; anchoring the victimized Seraph
beside her by an adroit “Ah! by the way, Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your
rose-scented papelitos; she's been wild to smoke them”; and leaving the
Zu-Zu content at securing a future Duke, was free to canter back and
flirt on the offside of Vivandiere, till the “signal,” the “cast,”
made with consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the
brushwood, the tightening of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the
challenge, the whimper, and the “stole away!” sent the field headlong
down the course after as fine a long-legged greyhound fox as ever
carried a brush.
Away he went in a rattling spin, breaking straight at once for the open,
the hounds on the scent like mad: with a tally-ho that thundered through
the cloudless, crisp, cold, glittering noon, the field dashed off
pell-mell; the violet habit of her ladyship, and the azure skirts of the
Zu-Zu foremost of all in the rush through the spinneys while Cecil
on the King, and the Seraph on a magnificent white weight-carrier, as
thoroughbred and colossal as himself, led the way with them. The scent
was hot as death in the spinneys, and the pack raced till nothing but
a good one could live with them; few but good ones, however, were to
be found with the Quorn, and the field held together superbly over the
first fence, and on across the grassland, the game old fox giving no
sign of going to covert, but running straight as a crow flies, while the
pace grew terrific.
“Beats cock-fighting!” cried the Zu-Zu, while her blue skirts fluttered
in the wind, as she lifted Cecil's brown mare, very cleverly, over
a bilberry hedge, and set her little white teeth with a will on the
Seraph's attar-of-rose cigarette. Lady Guenevere heard the words as
Vivandiere rose in the air with the light bound of a roe, and a slight
superb dash of scorn came into her haughty eyes for the moment; she
never seemed to know that “that person” in the azure habit even existed,
but the contempt awoke in her, and shone in her glance, while she rode
on as that fair leader of the Belvoir and Pytchley alone could ride over
the fallows.
The steam was on at full pressure, the hounds held close to his
brush,--heads up, sterns down,--running still straight as an arrow over
the open, past coppice and covert, through gorse and spinney, without a
sign of the fox making for shelter. Fence and double, hedge and brook,
soon scattered the field; straying off far and wide, and coming to grief
with lots of “downers,” it grew select, and few but the crack men could
keep the hounds in view. “Catch 'em who can,” was the one mot d'ordre,
for they were literally racing; the line-hunters never losing the scent
a second, as the fox, taking to dodging, made all the trouble he could
for them through the rides of the woods. Their working was magnificent,
and, heading him, they ran him round and round in a ring, viewed him for
a second, and drove him out of covert once more into the pastures, while
they laid on at a hotter scent and flew after him like staghounds.
Only half a dozen were up with them now; the pace was tremendous, though
all over grass; here a flight of posts and rails tried the muscle of
the boldest; there a bullfinch yawned behind the blackthorn; here a big
fence towered; there a brook rushed angrily among its rushes; while the
keen, easterly wind blew over the meadows, and the pack streamed
along like the white trail of a plume. Cecil “showed the way” with the
self-same stride and the self-same fencing as had won him the Vase. Lady
Guenevere and the Seraph were running almost even with him; three of the
Household farther down; the Zu-Zu and some Melton men two meadows off;
the rest of the field, nowhere. Fifty-two minutes had gone by in that
splendid running, without a single check, while the fox raced as gamely
and as fast as at the find; the speed was like lightning past the brown
woods, the dark-green pine plantations, the hedges, bright with scarlet
berries; through the green low-lying grasslands, and the winding drives
of coverts, and the boles of ash-hued beech trunks, whose roots the
violets were just purpling with their blossom; while far away stretched
the blue haze of the distance, and above-head a flight of rooks cawed
merrily in the bright air, soon left far off as the pack swept onward in
the most brilliant thing of the hunting year.
“Water! Take care!” cried Cecil, with a warning wave of his hand as
the hounds, with a splash like a torrent, dashed up to their necks in
a broad, brawling brook that Reynard had swam in first-rate style, and
struggled as best they could after him. It was an awkward bit, with
bad taking-off and a villainous mud-bank for landing; and the water,
thickened and swollen with recent rains, had made all the land that
sloped to it miry and soft as sponge. It was the risk of life and limb
to try it; but all who still viewed the hounds, catching Bertie's shout
of warning, worked their horses up for it, and charged toward it as
hotly as troops charge a square. Forest King was over like a bird;
the winner of the Grand Military was not to be daunted by all the
puny streams of the Shires; the artistic riding of the Countess landed
Vivandiere, with a beautiful clear spring, after him by a couple of
lengths: the Seraph's handsome white hunter, brought up at a headlong
gallop with characteristic careless dash and fine science mingled,
cleared it; but, falling with a mighty crash, gave him a purler on the
opposite side, and was within an inch of striking him dead with his hoof
in frantic struggles to recover. The Seraph, however, was on his legs
with a rapidity marvelous in a six-foot-three son of Anak, picked up
the horse, threw himself into saddle, and dashed off again quick
as lightning, with his scarlet stained all over, and his long fair
mustaches floating in the wind. The Zu-Zu turned Mother of Pearl back
with a fiery French oath; she hated to be “cut down,” but she liked
still less to risk her neck; and two of the Household were already
treated to “crackers” that disabled them for the day, while one Melton
man was pitched head foremost into the brook, and another was sitting
dolorously on the bank with his horse's head in his lap, and the poor
brute's spine broken. There were only three of the first riders in
England now alone with the hounds, who, with a cold scent as the fox led
them through the angular corner of a thick pheasant covert, stuck like
wax to the line, and working him out, viewed him once more, for one
wild, breathless, tantalizing second; and through the straggling street
of a little hamlet, and got him out again on the level pasture and
across a fine line of hunting country, with the leafless woods and the
low gates of a park far away to their westward.
“A guinea to a shilling that we kill him,” cried the flute-voice of her
brilliant ladyship, as she ran a moment side by side with Forest King,
and flashed her rich eyes on his rider; she had scorned the Zu-Zu,
but on occasion she would use betting slang and racing slang with the
daintiest grace in the world herself, without their polluting her lips.
As though the old fox heard the wager, he swept in a bend round toward
the woods on the right; making, with all the craft and speed there were
in him, for the deep shelter of the boxwood and laurel. “After him, my
beauties, my beauties--if he run there he'll go to ground and save his
brush!” thundered the Seraph, as though he were hunting his own hounds
at Lyonnesse, who knew every tone of his rich clarion notes as well as
they knew every wind of his horn. But the young ones of the pack saw
Reynard's move and his meaning as quickly as he did; having run fast
before, they flew now; the pace was terrific. Two fences were crossed as
though they were paper; the meadows raced with lightning speed, a ha-ha
leaped, a gate cleared with a crashing jump, and in all the furious
excitement of “view,” they tore down the mile-long length of an avenue,
dashed into a flower garden, and smashing through a gay trellis-work of
scarlet creeper, plunged into the home-paddock and killed with as loud
a shout ringing over the country in the bright, sunny day as ever was
echoed by the ringing cheers of the Shire; Cecil, the Seraph, and her
victorious ladyship alone coming in for the glories of the “finish.”
“Never had a faster seventy minutes up-wind,” said Lady Guenevere,
looking at the tiny jeweled watch, the size of a sixpence, that was
set in the handle of her whip, as the brush, with all the compliments
customary, was handed to her. She had won twenty before.
The park so unceremoniously entered belonged to a baronet, who, though
he hunted little himself, honored the sport and scorned a vulpecide, he
came out naturally and begged them to lunch. Lady Guenevere refused to
dismount, but consented to take a biscuit and a little Lafitte, while
clarets, liqueurs, and ales, with anything else they wanted, were
brought to her companions. The stragglers strayed in; the M. F. H. came
up just too late; the men, getting down, gathered about the Countess or
lounged on the gray stone steps of the Elizabethan house. The sun
shone brightly on the oriole casements, the antique gables, the twisted
chimneys, all covered with crimson parasites and trailing ivy; the
horses, the scarlet, the pack in the paddock adjacent, the shrubberies
of laurel and araucaria, the sun-tinted terraces, made a bright and
picturesque grouping. Bertie, with his hand on Vivandiere's pommel,
after taking a deep draught of sparkling Rhenish, looked on at it all
with a pleasant sigh of amusement.
“By Jove!” he murmured softly, with a contented smile about his lips,
“that was a ringing run!”
At that very moment, as the words were spoken, a groom approached him
hastily; his young brother, whom he had scarcely seen since the find,
had been thrown and taken home on a hurdle; the injuries were rumored to
be serious.
Bertie's smile faded, he looked very grave; world-spoiled as he
was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long been by
profession, he loved the lad.
When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloroform odor, the
boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered on the pillow, his
chest bare, and his right arm broken and splintered. The deathlike coma
was but the result of the chloroform; but Cecil never stayed to ask or
remember that; he was by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down
by it, his head bent on his arms.
“It was my fault. I should have looked to him.”
The words were very low; he hated that any should see he could still be
such a fool as to feel. A minute, and he conquered himself; he rose,
and with his hand on the boy's fair tumbled curls, turned calmly to
the medical men who, attached to the household, had been on the spot at
once.
“What is the matter?”
“Fractured arm, contusion; nothing serious, nothing at all, at his age,”
replied the surgeon. “When he wakes out of the lethargy he will tell you
so himself, Mr. Cecil.”
“You are certain?”--do what he would his voice shook a little; his hand
had not shaken, two days before, when nothing less than ruin or ransom
had hung on his losing or winning the race.
“Perfectly certain,” answered the surgeon cheerfully. “He is not
overstrong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight; he will be out of
that bed in a fortnight.”
“How did he fall?”
But while they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking at the
handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay stretched helpless
and stricken before him; and he was remembering the death-bed of their
mother, when the only voice he had ever reverenced had whispered, as she
pointed to the little child of three summers: “When you are a man take
care of him, Bertie.” How had he fulfilled the injunction? Into how much
brilliantly tinted evil had he not led him--by example, at least?
The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a lengthened silence:
“Your brother will be best unexcited when he comes to himself, sir;
look--his eyes are unclosing now. Could you do me the favor to go to his
lordship? His grief made him perfectly wild--so dangerous to his life at
his age. We could only persuade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the
plea of Mr. Berkeley's safety. If you could see him----”
Cecil went, mechanically almost, and with a grave, weary depression on
him; he was so unaccustomed to think at all, so utterly unaccustomed to
think painfully, that he scarcely knew what ailed him. Had he had his
old tact about him, he would have known how worse than useless it would
be for him to seek his father in such a moment.
Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened the door of his
private apartments, heavily darkened and heavily perfumed; at the turn
of the lock he started up eagerly.
“What news of him?”
“Good news, I hope,” said Cecil gently, as he came forward. “The
injuries are not grave, they tell me. I am so sorry that I never watched
his fencing, but--”
The old man had not recognized him till he heard his voice, and he
waved him off with a fierce, contemptuous gesture; the grief for his
favorite's danger, the wild terrors that his fears had conjured up, his
almost frantic agony at the sight of the accident, had lashed him into
passion well-nigh delirious.
“Out of my sight, sir,” he said fiercely, his mellow tones quivering
with rage. “I wish to God you had been dead in a ditch before a hair of
my boy's had been touched. You live, and he lies dying there!”
Cecil bowed in silence; the brutality of the words wounded, but they did
not offend him, for he knew his father was in that moment scarce better
than a maniac, and he was touched with the haggard misery upon the old
Peer's face.
“Out of my sight, sir,” re-echoed Lord Royallieu as he strode forward,
passion lending vigor to his emaciated frame, while the dignity of his
grand carriage blent with the furious force of his infuriated blindness.
“If you had had the heart of a man, you would have saved such a child as
that from his peril; warned him, watched him, succored him at least when
he fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, if death
comes to him! You are safe, you are always safe. You try to kill
yourself with every vice under heaven, and only get more strength, more
grace, more pleasure from it--you are always safe because I hate you.
Yes! I hate you, sir!”
No words can give the force, the malignity, the concentrated meaning
with which the words were hurled out, as the majestic form of the
old Lord towered in the shadow, with his hands outstretched as if in
imprecation.
Cecil heard him in silence, doubting if he could hear aright, while the
bitter phrases scathed and cut like scourges, but he bowed once more
with the manner that was as inseparable from him as his nature.
“Hate is so exhausting; I regret I give you the trouble of it. May I ask
why you favor me with it?”
“You may!” thundered his father, while his hawk's eyes flashed their
glittering fire. “You are like the man I cursed living and curse dead.
You look at me with Alan Bertie's eyes, you speak to me with Alan
Bertie's voice; I loved your mother, I worshiped her; but--you are his
son, not mine!”
The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The blood
flushed Bertie's face a deep and burning scarlet; he started with an
irrepressible tremor, like a man struck with a shot; he felt like one
suddenly stabbed in the dark by a sure and a cruel hand. The insult and
the amazement of the words seemed to paralyze him for the moment, the
next he recovered himself, and lifted his head with as haughty a gesture
as his father's, his features perfectly composed again, and sterner than
in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked.
“You lie, and you know you lie. My mother was pure as the angels.
Henceforth you can be only to me a slanderer who has dared to taint the
one name holy in my sight.”
And without another word, he turned and went out of the chamber. Yet,
as the door closed, old habit was so strong on him that, even in his hot
and bitter pain, and his bewildered sense of sudden outrage, he almost
smiled at himself. “It is a mania; he does not know what he says,” he
thought. “How could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the
Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such bad form!”
But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, and gentle
though his nature was, beyond all forgiveness from him was the dishonor
of his mother's memory.