Under Two Flags Part 26

"But reckless at whist; a wild game there--uncommonly wild. Drove Cis Delareux half mad one night at Royallieu with the way he threw his trumps out. Old Cis dashed his cards down at last, and looked him full in the face. 'Beauty, do you know, or do you not know, that a whist-table is not to be taken as you take a timber in a hunting-field, on the principle of clear it or smash it?' 'Faith!' said Bertie, 'clear it or smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a trifle too energetic for me.'"

"The deuce, he's had enough of 'smashing' at last! I wish he hadn't come to grief in that style; it's a shocking bore for the Guards--such an ugly story."

"It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did--best possible taste."

"Only thing he could do."

"Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always wondered he stopped for the row."

"Oh, never thought it would turn up; trusted to a fluke."

He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, but who held in polite society the t.i.tle of Lord Kergenven, drank some hock slowly, and murmured as his sole quota to the conversation, very lazily and languidly:

"Bet you he isn't dead at all."

"The deuce you do? And why?" chorused the table; "when a fellow's body's found with all his traps round him!"

"I don't believe he's dead," murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous eyes.

"But why? Have you heard anything?"

"Not a word."

"Why do you say he's alive, then?"

My lord lifted his brows ever so little.

"I think so, that's all."

"But you must have a reason, Ker?"

Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following:

"It don't follow one has reasons for anything; pray don't get logical.

Two years ago I was out in a cha.s.se au sanglier, central France; perhaps you don't know their work? It's uncommonly queer. Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack to hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for coming to grief; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, you'll get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don't get flattened under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger.

Uncommonly good sport."

Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency sherry.

"Hang it, Ker!" cried the Dauphin. "What's that to do with Beauty?"

My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under his black lashes, that said mutely, "Do I, who hate talking, ever talk wide of any point?"

"Why, this," he murmured. "He was with us down at Veille-roc--Louis D'Auvrai's place, you know; and we were out after an old boar--not too old to race; but still tough enough to be likely to turn and trust to his tusks if the pace got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the finish. We hadn't found till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to the work, and the November day was short, of course; the pack got on the slot of a roebuck too, and were off the boar's scent in a little while, running wild. Altogether we got scattered, and in the forest it grew almost as dark as pitch; you followed just as you could, and could only guide yourself by your ear when the hounds gave cry, or the horns sounded. On you blundered, hit or miss, headlong down the rocks and through the branches; horses warmed wonderfully to the business, scrambled like cats, slid down like otters, kept their footing where n.o.body'd have thought anything but a goat could stand. Our hunting bloods wouldn't live an hour in a French forest. You see we just look for pace and strength in the shoulders; we don't much want anything else--except good jumping power. What a lot of fellows--even in the crack packs--will always funk water! Horses will fly, but they can't swim. Now, to my fancy, a clever beast ought to take even a swelling bit of water like a duck. How poor Standard breasted rivers till that fool staked him!"

He dropped more walnuts into his wine, wistfully recalling a mighty hero of Leicestershire fame, that had given him many a magnificent day out, and had been the idol of his stables, till in his twelfth year the n.o.ble old sorrel had been killed by a groom's recklessness; recklessness that met with such chastis.e.m.e.nt as told how and why the hill-tribes'

sobriquet had been given to the hand that would lie so long in indolent rest, to strike with such fearful force when once raised.

"Well," he went on once more, "we were all of us scattered; scarcely two kept together anywhere; where the pack was, where the boar was, where the huntsmen were, n.o.body knew. Now and then I heard the hounds giving tongue at the distance, and I rode after that to the best of my science; and uncommonly bad was the best. That forest work perplexes one, after the gra.s.s-country. You can't view the beauties two minutes together; and as for sinning by overriding 'em, you're very safe not to do that! At last I heard a crashing sound, loud and furious; I thought they had got him to bay at last. There was a great oak thicket as hard as iron, and as close as a net, between me and the place; the boughs were all twisted together, G.o.d knows how, and grew so low down that the naked branches had to be broken though at every step by the horse's fore hoofs, before he could force a step. We did force it somehow at last, and came into a green, open s.p.a.ce, where there were fewer trees, and the moon was shining in; there, without a hound near, true enough was the boar rolling on the ground, and somebody rolling under him. They were locked in so close they looked just like one huge beast, pitching here and there, as you've seen the rhinos wallow in Indian jheels. Of course, I leveled my rifle, but I waited to get a clear aim; for which was man and which was boar, the deuce a bit could I tell; just as I had pointed, Beauty's voice called out to me; 'Keep your fire, Ker! I want to have him myself.' It was he that was under the brute. Just as he spoke they rolled toward me, the boar foaming and spouting blood, and plunging his tusks into Cecil; he got his right arm out from under the beast, and crushed under there as he was, drew it free, with the knife well gripped; then down he dashed it three times into the veteran's hide, just beneath the ribs; it was the coup de grace; the boar lay dead, and Beauty lay half dead too; the blood rushing out of him where the tusks had dived. Two minutes, though, and a draught of my brandy brought him all round; and the first words he spoke were, 'Thanks Ker; you did as you would be done by--a shot would have spoilt it all.' The brute had crossed his path far away from the pack, and he had flung himself out of saddle and had a neck-and-neck struggle. And that night we played baccarat by his bedside to amuse him; and he played just as well as ever. Now this is why I don't think he's dead; a fellow who served a wild boar like that won't have let a train knock him over. And I don't believe he forged that stiff, though all the evidence says so; Beauty hadn't a touch of the blackguard in him."

With which declaration of his views, Kergenven lapsed into immutable silence and slumberous apathy, from whose shelter nothing could tempt him afresh; and the Colonel, with all the rest, lounged into the anteroom, where the tables were set, and began "plunging" in earnest at sums that might sound fabulous, were they written here. The players staked heavily; but it was the gallery who watched around, making their bets, and backing their favorites, that lost on the whole the most.

"Horse Guards have heard of the plunging; think we're going too fast,"

murmured the Chief to Kergenven, his Major, who lifted his brows, and murmured back with the demureness of a maiden:

"Tell 'em it's our only vice; we're models of propriety."

Which possibly would not have been received with the belief desirable by the skeptics of Pall Mall.

So the De Profundis was said over Bertie Cecil; and "Beauty of the Brigades" ceased to be named in the service, and soon ceased to be even remembered. In the steeple-chase of life there is no time to look back at the failures, who have gone down over a "double and drop," and fallen out of the pace.

CHAPTER XV.

"L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU."

"Did I not say he would eat fire?"

"Pardieu! C'est un brave."

"Rides like an Arab."

"Smokes like a Zouave."

"Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep--ah--h----h!

magnificent!"

"And dances like an Aristocrat; not like a tipsy Spahi!"

The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the circle of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of inimitable canteen-slang and camp-a.s.surance, from a speaker who had perched astride on a broken fragment of wall, with her barrel of wine set up on end on the stones in front of her, and her six soldiers, her gros bebees, as she was given maternally to calling them, lounging at their ease on the arid, dusty turf below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was cut as short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular feature in it. But then--regularity! who wanted it, who would have thought the most pure cla.s.sic type a change for the better, with those dark, dancing, challenging eyes; with that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never so handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not seldom a short pipe itself?

She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss off her brandy or her vermouth like a trooper; she would on occasion clinch her little brown hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice; she was an enfant de Paris and had all its wickedness at her fingers; she would sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and she would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest giant of a Cuira.s.sier there. And yet with all that, she was not wholly uns.e.xed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance of youth, and had not left a certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a vivandiere's uniform, and had been born in a barrack, and meant to die in a battle; it was the blending of the two that made her piquante, made her a notoriety in her own way; known at pleasure, and equally, in the Army of Africa as "Cigarette," and "L'Amie du Drapeau."

"Not like a tipsy Spahi!" It was a cruel cut to her gros bebees, mostly Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the foot of the wall, singing the praises--with magnanimity beyond praise--of a certain Cha.s.seur d'Afrique.

"Ho, Cigarette!" growled a little Zouave, known as Tata Leroux. "That is the way thou forsakest thy friends for the first fresh face."

"Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, Tata!"

responded Cigarette, with a puff of her namesake; the repartee of the camp is apt to be rough. "He is Bel-a-faire-peur, as you nickname him."

"A woman's face!" growled the injured Tata; whose own countenance was of the color and well-nigh of the flatness of one of the red bricks of the wall.

"Ouf!" said the Friend of the Flag, with more expression in that single exclamation than could be put in a volume. "He does woman's deeds, does he? He has woman's hands, but they can fight, I fancy? Six Arabs to his own sword the other day in that skirmish! Superb!"

"Sapristi! And what did he say, this droll, when he looked at them lying there? Just shrugged his shoulders and rode away. 'I'd better have killed myself; less mischief, on the whole!' Now who is to make anything of such a man as that?"

"Ah! he did not stop to cut their gold b.u.t.tons off, and steal their cangiars, as thou wouldst have done, Tata? Well! he has not learned la guerre," laughed Cigarette. "It was a waste; he should have brought me their sashes, at least. By the way--when did he join?"