CHAPTER VII.
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER.
It was the height of the season, and the duties of the Household wereproportionately and insupportably heavy. The Brigades were fairly workedto death, and the Indian service, in the heat of the Afghan war, wasnever more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derbyto Ducal.
Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field-days inthe Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of it. Far moresevere, and still less to be shirked, were the morning exercise in theRide; the daily parade in the Lady's Mile; the reconnaissances fromclub windows, the vedettes at Flirtation Corner; the long campaigns atmess-breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and thefortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse andChambertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases whena fashionable drum beat the rataplan; the skirmishes with sharpshootersof the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the foraging duty when faircommanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties; theball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the terrible risk of crossing theenemy's lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at thejails of St. George's, or of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge; the constantinspections of the Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the picketsafterward in the Wood of St. John; the anxieties of the Clubcommissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines; the fatigueduty of ballrooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on theclause in the Regulations never to wear the same gloves twice; allthese, without counting the close battles of the Corner and theunremitting requirements of the Turf, worked the First Life and therest of the Brigades, Horse and Foot, so hard and incessantly that somealmost thought of changing into the dreary depot of St. Stephen's; andone mutinous Coldstreamer was even rash enough and false enough to hiscolors to meditate deserting to the enemy's camp, and giving himself upat St. George's--"because a fellow once hanged is let alone, you know!"
The Household were very hard pressed through the season--a crowded andbrilliant one; and Cecil was in request most of all. Bertie, somehowor other, was the fashion--marvelous and indefinable word, that gives amore powerful crown than thrones, blood, beauty, or intellect can everbestow. And no list was "the thing" without his name; no reception,no garden party, no opera-box, or private concert, or rose-shadowedboudoir, fashionably affiche without being visited by him. How he, inespecial, had got his reputation it would have been hard to say, unlessit were that he dressed a shade more perfectly than anyone, and withsuch inimitable carelessness in the perfection, too, and had an almostunattainable matchlessness in the sangfroid of his soft, languidinsolence, and incredible, though ever gentle, effrontery. Howevergained, he had it; and his beautiful hack Sahara, his mail-phaeton withtwo blood grays dancing in impatience over the stones, or his littledark-green brougham for night-work, were, one or another of them, alwaysseen from two in the day till four or five in the dawn about the park orthe town.
And yet this season, while he made a prima donna by a bravissima,introduced a new tie by an evening's wear, gave a cook the cordonwith his praise, and rendered a fresh-invented liqueur the rage by hisrecommendation, Bertie knew very well that he was ruined.
The breach between his father and himself was irrevocable. He had leftRoyallieu as soon as his guests had quitted it and young Berkeley wasout of all danger. He had long known he could look for no help from theold lord, or from his elder brother, the heir; and now every chance ofit was hopelessly closed; nothing but the whim or the will of those whoheld his floating paper, and the tradesmen who had his name on theirbooks at compound interest of the heaviest, stood between him and thefatal hour when he must "send in his papers to sell," and be "nowhere"in the great race of life.
He knew that a season, a month, a day, might be the only respite lefthim, the only pause for him, 'twixt his glittering luxurious world andthe fiat of outlawry and exile. He knew that the Jews might be downon him any night that he sat at the Guards' mess, flirted with foreignprincesses, or laughed at the gossamer gossip of the town over iceddrinks in the clubs. His liabilities were tremendous, his resourcestotally exhausted; but such was the latent recklessness of the carelessRoyallieu blood, and such the languid devil-may-care of his trainingand his temper, that the knowledge scarcely ever seriously disturbed hisenjoyment of the moment. Somehow, he never realized it.
If any weatherwise had told the Lisbon people of the coming of the greatearthquake, do you think they could have brought themselves to realizethat midnight darkness, that yawning desolation which were nigh, whilethe sun was still so bright and the sea so tranquil, and the bloom sosweet on purple pomegranate and amber grape, and the scarlet of odorousflowers, and the blush of a girl's kiss-warmed cheek?
A sentimental metaphor with which to compare the difficulties of a dandyof the Household, because his "stiff" was floating about in too manydirections at too many high figures, and he had hardly enough tillnext pay-day came round to purchase the bouquets he sent and meet theclub-fees that were due! But, after all, may it not well be doubted if asharp shock and a second's blindness, and a sudden sweep down underthe walls of the Cathedral or the waters of the Tagus, were not, onthe whole, a quicker and pleasanter mode of extinction than that socialearthquake--"gone to the bad with a crash"? And the Lisbonites did notmore disbelieve in, and dream less of their coming ruin than Cecil didhis, while he was doing the season, with engagements enough in a nightto spread over a month, the best known horses in the town, a dozenrose-notes sent to his clubs or his lodgings in a day, and the newestthing in soups, colts, beauties, neckties, perfumes, tobaccos, or squaredances waiting his dictum to become the fashion.
"How you do go on with those women, Beauty," growled the Seraph, oneday after a morning of fearful hard work consequent on having played theFoot Guards at Lord's, and, in an unwary moment, having allowed himselfto be decoyed afterward to a private concert, and very nearly proposedto in consequence, during a Symphony in A; an impending terror fromwhich he could hardly restore himself of his jeopardized safety. "You'rehorribly imprudent!"
"Not a bit of it," rejoined Beauty serenely. "That is the superiorwisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbor'swife--she can't marry you!"
"But she may get you into the D. C.," mused the Seraph, who had gloomypersonal recollection of having been twice through that phase of law andlife, and of having been enormously mulcted in damages because he was aDuke in future, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion,"You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran awaywith me each time!"
"Oh, everybody goes through the D. C. somehow or other," answered Cecil,with philosophy. "It's like the Church, the Commons, and the Gallows,you know--one of the popular Institutions."
"And it's the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better figure thanthe robbed," laughed the Seraph; consoling himself that he had escapedthe future chance of showing in the latter class of marital defrauded,by shying that proposal during the Symphony in A, on which his thoughtsran, as the thoughts of one who has just escaped from an Alpine crevasserun on the past abyss in which he had been so nearly lost forever. "Isay, Beauty, were you ever near doing anything serious--asking anybodyto marry you, eh? I suppose you have been--they do make such awful hardrunning on one" and the poor hunted Seraph stretched his magnificentlimbs with the sigh of a martyred innocent.
"I was once--only once!"
"Ah, by Jove! And what saved you?"
The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying, sympathizingcuriosity toward a fellow-sufferer.
"Well, I'll tell you," said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man who hatedlong sentences, and who was about to plunge into a painful past. "It'sages ago; day I was at a Drawing room; year Blue Ruin won the Clearwellfor Royal, I think. Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw such aface--the deuce, it almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She was justout--an angel with a train! She had delicious eyes--like a spaniel's youknow--a cheek like this peach, and lips like that s
trawberry there, onthe top of your ice. She looked at me, and I was in love! I knew who shewas--Irish lord's daughter--girl I could have had for the asking; and Ivow that I thought I would ask her--I actually was as far gone as that;I actually said to myself, I'd hang about her a week or two, and thenpropose. You'll hardly believe it, but I did. Watched her presented;such grace, such a smile, such a divine lift of the lashes. I was reallyin love, and with a girl who would marry me! I was never so near a fatalthing in my life----"
"Well?" asked the Seraph, pausing to listen till he let the ice in hissherry-cobbler melt away. When you have been so near breaking your neckdown the Matrimonial Matterhorn, it is painfully interesting to hear howyour friend escaped the same risks of descent.
"Well," resumed Bertie, "I was very near it. I did nothing but watchher; she saw me, and I felt she was as flattered and as touched as sheought to be. She blushed most enchantingly; just enough, you know; shewas conscious I followed her; I contrived to get close to her as shepassed out, so close that I could see those exquisite eyes lighten andgleam, those exquisite lips part with a sigh, that beautiful face beamwith the sunshine of a radiant smile. It was the dawn of love I hadtaught her! I pressed nearer and nearer, and I caught her soft whisperas she leaned to her mother: 'Mamma, I'm so hungry! I could eat awhole chicken!' The sigh, the smile, the blush, the light, were forher dinner--not for me! The spell was broken forever. A girl whom I hadlooked at could think of wings and merry-thoughts and white sauce! Ihave never been near a proposal again."
The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung a hautboyat him.
"Hang you, Beauty! If I didn't think you were going to tell one how youreally got out of a serious thing; it is so awfully difficult to keepclear of them nowadays. Those before-dinner teas are only just so manynew traps! What became of her--eh?"
"She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, somewhere amongthe Hebrides. Served her right," murmured Cecil sententiously. "Onlythink what she lost just through hungering for a chicken; if Ihadn't proposed for her,--for one hardly keeps the screw up to suchself-sacrifice as that when one is cool the next morning,--I would havemade her the fashion!"
With which masterly description in one phrase of all he could have donefor the ill-starred debutante who had been hungry in the wrong place,Cecil lounged out of the club to drive with half a dozen of his set to awater-party--a Bacchanalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sistersfor the Naiads and the Household for their Tritons.
A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in drivingdown to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours over the courses,contributing seven guineas apiece for the repast, listening to the songsof the Cafe Alcazar, reproduced with matchless elan by a pretty Frenchactress, being pelted with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing theirbest cigars thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and drivingback again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythmsringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretchinggallop down the Kew Road. It certainly had no other more aquatic featurein it save a little drifting about for twenty minutes before dining,in toy boats and punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, thebrunette actress, sang a barcarolle.
"Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop."
"Where be all those Dear dead women, with such hair too; what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old;"
It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion,because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to thinkat all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knewnothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, wherethey worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'dyou if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it wereever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women,he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at thatmoment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, makinghim eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.
As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil'sbox-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in the dining room. Acashmere is a Parisian's soul, idol, and fetich; servants could not findit; Cecil, who, to do him this justice, was always as courteous to acomedienne as to a countess, went himself. Passing the open window ofanother room, he recognized the face of his little brother among a setof young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They had nowomen with them; but they had brought what was perhaps worse--dicefor hazard--and were turning the unconscious Star and Garter unto animpromptu Crockford's over their wine.
Little Berk's pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set tight, hiseyes were glittering; the boy had the gambler's passion of the Royallieublood in its hottest intensity. He was playing with a terrible eagernessthat went to Bertie's heart with the same sort of pang of remorse withwhich he had looked on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bedat home.
Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window.
"Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; willyou come?" he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the youngfellows.
Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance.
"No, I can't," he said irritably; "don't you see we are playing,Bertie?"
"I see," answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of sadness inhim, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in histeeth.
"Come away," he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, whochanced to be close to the casement. "Hazard is the very deuce foranybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's acapital set here, and I'm going to half a dozen good houses to-night,when we get back. I'll take you with me. Come! you like waltzing, andall that sort of thing, you know."
The lad shook himself peevishly; a sullen cloud over his fair,picturesque, boyish face.
"Let me alone before the fellows," he muttered impatiently. "I won'tcome, I tell you."
"Soit!"
Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Lelas'cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any moreexpostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never be annoyed, butalso he never troubled himself to utter useless words. Moreover, he hadnever been in is life much in earnest about anything; it was not worthwhile.
"A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins enough onmy own shoulders for twenty," he thought; as he shook the ribbons andstarted the leaders off to the gay music of Laura Lelas' champagne-tunedlaughter.
The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on hisbrother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he feltsomething like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summerdawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale withthe premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous,half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, withall the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him fromhis recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk,though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, andunstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant,and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterwardhe would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentfulof interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. AndCecil--the last man in the world to turn mentor--would light a cheroot,as he did to-night, and forget all about it. The boy would be rightenough when he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy wasthe essence of laissez-faire.
He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer's Field, to belong pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived inthe right set. "If it be very severe," he would say, "it may give hima pang once a twelvemonth--say the morning after a whitebait dinner.Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition maygenerally be traced to too many truffles or olives."
Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; would not havethought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly skimmed over in bed,was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading thepapers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, hewas too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement andvariety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietlyfanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, withouteven the trouble of pulling the strings. He had naturally considerabletalents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might havebeen as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.
"If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I'd use such wits as Ihave: but why should I now?" he said on one occasion, when a fair ladyreproached him with this inertia. "The best style is only just to sayyes or no--and be bored even in saying that--and a very comfortablestyle it is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening yourlips."
"But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then? You would not getamused," suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.
"Well--everybody is, pretty nearly," said Bertie; "but there are alwaysa lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners--socialrockets, you know--who will always fire themselves off to sparkleinstead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get thema card for good houses. It saves you so much trouble; it is such a boreto have to talk."
He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses,midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow ina Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the sameflirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment ata Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminentlyweary in an ambassadress' drawing room, and winding up the series by adainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling partyof French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.
When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about fiveo'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to thatcherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands ofthe Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, withoutthe slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy,dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.
"Here--get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake," he murmured, droppinginto an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standingby him instead the boy Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of rawinexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief,or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never haveexcited it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted hiseyebrows and said, "Be a fearful bore!" in the second he would have donethe same, and murmured, "Queer old cad!"
Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy's untimely apparition; buthis eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but oneword:
"Amber-Amulet?"
Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieuestablishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derbyas a certainty. An accident to the young chestnut was the only thingthat suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make hisbrother wait for him at five o'clock on a June morning.
Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently:
"You are never thinking but of horses or women," he said peevishly;"there may be others things in the world, surely."
"Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy; but noneso much to my taste," said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with ayawn. "With every regard to hospitality and the charms of your society,might I hint that five o'clock in the morning is not precisely the mostsuitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?"
"For God's sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most miserable wretch increation."
Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanishedfrom them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the sereneinsouciance of his face.
"Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard," he thought, but hewas not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and itsrejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himselfwith a sigh.
"Dear boy, why didn't you sleep upon it? I never think of disagreeablethings till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with thecup and put them down with it. You don't know how well it answers; itdisposes of them wonderfully."
The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in thegaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.
"How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and you care nomore than if you were a stone. You only think of yourself; you only livefor yourself!"
He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that verytable the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts thathad been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race. There is achildish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits receivedsave as title-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him withjust a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in hisglance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish,passionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.
"'Brutal'! What a word, little one. Nobody's brutal now; you never seethat form nowadays. Come, what is the worst this time?"
Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows leaned;scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and thegold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was somethingdogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, uponhim, that was new there.
"The worst is soon told," he said huskily, and his teeth chatteredtogether slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. "I lost two hundredto-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing;I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am underage; and--and"--his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knewthat the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father andhis brothers was the thing he had now to tell--"and--I borrowed threeponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lotof banknotes after settling-day. I told him I would pay them to-morrow;I made sure I should have won to-night."
The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to thebelief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though abank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spokenin all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy'sconfession.
Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on hisface the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored hismother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter andunmentionable degradation--it was to borrow of a friend.
"You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley," he said,with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in hisvoice. "Have you no common knowledge of honor?"
The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of angerrather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly downon the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.
"You are severe enough," he said gloomily, and yet insolently. "Are yousuch a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, areabout one-fifth of yours."
For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way. Behis debts what they would, there was not one among them to his friends,or one for which the law could not seize him. He was silent; he did notwish to have a scene of discussion with one who was but a child to him;moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to averteven a dispute, at any cost.
He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting hischeroot in his mouth.
"Tres cher, you are not courteous," he said wearily; "but it may bethat you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anythingexcept the fit of my coats; I don't thin
k I ever told you I was. I amnot altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a modelfor anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in BondStreet to show the muffs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; yousay you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow--to-day rather. I can suggestnothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royalstraight out; he never refuses you."
Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at astroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenlymoved by fear.
"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration thatwas but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live Iwould! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--andnow of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage onRoyallieu--"
"What? Foreclose what?"
"The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childishegotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should beconsidered save his own. "You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply asMonti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose--Ithink that's the word--and Royal has had God knows what work to stavethem off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now thanI dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard."
Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learnthe evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to findhow entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him fromall the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left himignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.
"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languidstretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects."And--I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would helpyou?"
"I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him."
Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; heshunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it cameto him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divesthimself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,--lessextravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,--he mighthave exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life mighthave been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with asharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggaryin which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the sum thatthe boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set, and with his habits,that he had betted it over and over again in a clubroom, on a singlegame of whist. It cut him with a bitter, impatient pain; he was asgenerous as the winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temperthan the poverty that paralyzes its power to give.
"It is no use to give you false hopes, young one," he said gently. "Ican do nothing! You ought to know me by this time; and if you do, youknow too that if the money was mine it would be yours at a word--if youdon't, no matter! Frankly, Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may becalled in any moment; when they are I must send in my papers to sell,and cut the country, if my duns don't catch me before, whichthey probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents andpurposes--dead. This is not lively conversation, but you will do me thejustice to say that it was not I who introduced it. Only--one word forall, my boy; understand this: if I could help you I would, cost what itmight, but as matters stand--I cannot."
And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to envelope him; thesubject was painful, the denial wounded him by whom it had to be givenfull as much as it could wound him whom it refused. Berkeley heard itin silence; his head still hung down, his color changing, his handsnervously playing with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening theirgold tops.
"No--yes--I know," he said hurriedly; "I have no right to expect it, andhave been behaving like a cur, and--and--all that, I know. But--there isone way you could save me, Bertie, if it isn't too much for a fellow toask."
"I can't say I see the way, little one," said Cecil, with a sigh. "Whatis it?"
"Why--look here. You see I'm not of age; my signature is of no use; theywon't take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come tome when Royal dies; though 'tisn't enough to make the Jews 'melt' at arisk. Now--now--look here. I can't see that there could be any harm init. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he's as rich as all theJews put together. What could there be in it if you just asked him tolend you a monkey for me? He'd do it in a minute, because he'd givehis head away to you--they all say so--and he'll never miss it. Now,Bertie--will you?"
In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal waspanted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hotcolor burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so fullof dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose fromhis chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the lookdisarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.
"What you ask is impossible," he said briefly. "If I did such a thing asthat, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow."
The boy's face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he stillbent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother's.
"You speak as if it would be a crime," he muttered savagely, with aplaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealtwith and unjustly punished.
"It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of agentleman," said Cecil, as briefly still. "That is answer enough."
"Then you will not do it?"
"I have replied already."
There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he pausedbefore the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before;something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature ofthe boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of thehaughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in thetoo feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil's disposition.
"You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you sowretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel," he moanedpassionately. "The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is yourpride--nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are pennilessbeggars!"
"If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of othermen?"
"You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!"
Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He didnot attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent todefend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene fargreater than his heed of misconstruction.
"You are a brute to me!" went on the lad, with his querulous and bitterpassion rising almost to tears like a woman's. "You pretend you canrefuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turnon me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You'lllet me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to saveme; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor'sprison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helpinga fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrugyour shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jestpicked out of your cursed French novels!"
"Melodramatic, and scarcely correct," murmured Bertie.
The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was notgiven to making much of anything that was due to himself--partly throughcarelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brotherof that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which mencall Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it didto-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.
There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperamentcreated without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will neverown a reality.
"Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say," he began verygently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight inthe boy's eyes. "Don't be down about t
his; you will pull through, neverfear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I knowhim better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sellevery stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see yousafe through this. Only bear one thing in mind--tell him all. No halfmeasures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. Youwill not come back without it."
Berkeley listened; his eyes shunning his brother's, the red color darkeron his face.
"Do as I say," said Cecil, very gently still. "Tell him, if you like,that it is through following my follies that you have come to grief; hewill be sure to pity you then."
There was a smile, a little sad, on his lips, as he said the last words,but it passed at once as he added:
"Do your hear me? will you go?"
"If you want me--yes."
"On your word, now?"
"On my word."
There was an impatience in the answer, a feverish eagerness in the wayhe assented that might have made the consent rather a means to evade thepressure than a genuine pledge to follow the advice; that darker, moreevil, more defiant look was still upon his face, sweeping its youthaway and leaving in its stead a wavering shadow. He rose with a suddenmovement; his tumbled hair, his disordered attire, his bloodshot eyes,his haggard look of sleeplessness and excitement in strange contrastwith the easy perfection of Cecil's dress and the calm languor of hisattitude. The boy was very young, and was not seasoned to his life andacclimatized to his ruin, like his elder brother. He looked at him witha certain petulant envy; the envy of every young fellow for a man of theworld. "I beg your pardon for keeping you up, Bertie," he said huskily."Good-night."
Cecil gave a little yawn.
"Dear boy, it would have been better if you could have come in withthe coffee. Never be impulsive; don't do a bit of good, and is such badform!"
He spoke lightly, serenely; both because such was as much his nature asit was to breathe, and because his heart was heavy that he had to sendaway the young one without help, though he knew that the course hehad made him adopt would serve him more permanently in the end. But heleaned his hand a second on Berk's shoulder, while for one single momentin his life he grew serious.
"You must know I could not do what you asked; I could not meet any manin the Guards face to face if I sunk myself and sunk them so low. Can'tyou see that, little one?"
There was a wistfulness in the last words; he would gladly have believedthat his brother had at length some perception of his meaning.
"You say so, and that is enough," said the boy pettishly; "I cannotunderstand that I asked anything so dreadful; but I suppose you have toomany needs of your own to have any resources left for mine."
Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly again, and let him go. But hecould not altogether banish a pang of pain at his heart, less even forhis brother's ingratitude than at his callousness to all those finer,better instincts of which honor is the concrete name.
For the moment, thought--grave, weary, and darkened--fell on him; he hadpassed through what he would have suffered any amount of misconstructionto escape--a disagreeable scene; he had been as unable as though hewere a Commissionaire in the streets to advance a step to succor thenecessities for which his help had been asked; and he was forced,despite all his will, to look for the first time blankly in the face theruin that awaited him. There was no other name for it: it would be ruincomplete and wholly inevitable. His signature would have been acceptedno more by any bill-discounter in London; he had forestalled all, to theuttermost farthing; his debts pressed heavier every day; he could haveno power to avert the crash that must in a few weeks, or at most a fewmonths, fall upon him. And to him an utter blankness and darkness laybeyond.
Barred out from the only life he knew, the only life that seemed to himendurable or worth the living; severed from all the pleasures, pursuits,habits, and luxuries of long custom; deprived of all that had become tohim as second nature from childhood; sold up, penniless, driven out fromall that he had known as the very necessities of existence; his veryname forgotten in the world of which he was now the darling; a manwithout a career, without a hope, without a refuge--he could not realizethat this was what awaited him then; this was the fate that must withinso short a space be his. Life had gone so smoothly with him, and hisworld was a world from whose surface every distasteful thought was sohabitually excluded, that he could no more understand this desolationlying in wait for him than one in the fullness and elasticity of healthcan believe the doom that tells him he will be a dead man before the sunhas set.
As he sat there, with the gas of the mirror branches glancing on thegold and silver hilts of the crossed swords above the fireplace, and thesmoke of his cheroot curling among the pile of invitation cards to allthe best houses in town, Cecil could not bring himself to believe thatthings were really come to this pass with him. It is so hard for a manwho has the magnificence of the fashionable clubs open to him day andnight to beat into his brain the truth that in six months hence he maybe lying in the debtors' prison at Baden; it is so difficult for a manwho has had no greater care on his mind than to plan the courtesies of aGuards' Ball or of a yacht's summer-day banquet, to absolutely conceivethe fact that in a year's time he will thank God if he have a few francsleft to pay for a wretched dinner in a miserable estaminet in a foreignbathing-place.
"It mayn't come to that," he thought; "something may happen. If I couldget my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should winsome heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I mustwin; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only bethe French horses between us and an absolute 'walk over.' Things mayn'tcome to the worst, after all."
And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was histemperament, that he read himself to sleep with Terrail's "Club desValets de Coeur," and slept in ten minutes' time as composedly as thoughhe had inherited fifty thousand a year.