Under Two Flags Part 9

"Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; will you come?" he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the young fellows.

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 in him, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in his teeth.

"Come away," he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, who chanced to be close to the cas.e.m.e.nt. "Hazard is the very deuce for anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's a capital 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, and all 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't come, I tell you."

"Soit!"

Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Lelas'

cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any more expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never be annoyed, but also he never troubled himself to utter useless words. Moreover, he had never been in is life much in earnest about anything; it was not worth while.

"A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins enough on my own shoulders for twenty," he thought; as he shook the ribbons and started the leaders off to the gay music of Laura Lelas' champagne-tuned laughter.

The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, with all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk, though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and unstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant, and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. And Cecil--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 right enough when he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy was the essence of laissez-faire.

He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer's Field, to be long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived in the right set. "If it be very severe," he would say, "it may give him a pang once a twelvemonth--say the morning after a whitebait dinner.

Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may generally be traced to too many truffles or olives."

Cecil had no time or s.p.a.ce for thought; he never thought; would not have thought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amus.e.m.e.nt and variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without even the trouble of pulling the strings. He had naturally considerable talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have been 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 I have: but why should I now?" he said on one occasion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia. "The best style is only just to say yes or no--and be bored even in saying that--and a very comfortable style it is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening your lips."

"But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then? You would not get amused," suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.

"Well--everybody is, pretty nearly," said Bertie; "but there are always a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners--social rockets, you know--who will always fire themselves off to sparkle instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses. It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore to 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 in a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same flirtation at three different b.a.l.l.s; showing himself for a moment at a Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an amba.s.sadress' drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.

When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, without the 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, dropping into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing by him instead the boy Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of raw inexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief, or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have excited it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted his eyebrows and said, "Be a fearful bore!" in the second he would have done the same, and murmured, "Queer old cad!"

Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy's untimely apparition; but his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but one word:

"Amber-Amulet?"

Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieu establishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby as a certainty. An accident to the young chestnut was the only thing that suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his brother 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 none so much to my taste," said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with a yawn. "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 most suitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?"

"For G.o.d's sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most miserable wretch in creation."

Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanished from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the serene insouciance of his face.

"Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard," he thought, but he was not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and its rejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himself with a sigh.

"Dear boy, why didn't you sleep upon it? I never think of disagreeable things till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with the cup and put them down with it. You don't know how well it answers; it disposes of them wonderfully."

The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in the gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.

"How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and you care no more than if you were a stone. You only think of yourself; you only live for yourself!"

He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that very table the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts that had been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race. There is a childish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits received save as t.i.tle-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him with just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his glance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish, pa.s.sionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.

"'Brutal'! What a word, little one. n.o.body's brutal now; you never see that 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 the gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was something dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, upon him, that was new there.

"The worst is soon told," he said huskily, and his teeth chattered together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. "I lost two hundred to-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 under age; and--and"--his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and his brothers was the thing he had now to tell--"and--I borrowed three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot of 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 the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's confession.

Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable 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 his voice. "Have you no common knowledge of honor?"

The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.

"You are severe enough," he said gloomily, and yet insolently. "Are you such a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, are about one-fifth of yours."

For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way. Be his 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 not wish 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 avert even a dispute, at any cost.

He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting his cheroot in his mouth.

"Tres cher, you are not courteous," he said wearily; "but it may be that you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anything except the fit of my coats; I don't think I ever told you I was. I am not altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a model for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond Street to show the m.u.f.fs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; you say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow--to-day rather. I can suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal straight out; he never refuses you."

Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly moved by fear.

"I would rather cut my throat," he said, with a wild exaggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; "as I live I would! I have had so much from him lately--you don't know how much--and now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on Royallieu--"

"What? Foreclose what?"

"The mortgage!" answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be considered save his own. "You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as Monti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose--I think that's the word--and Royal has had G.o.d knows what work to stave them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard."

Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find how entirely his father's morbid mania against him severed him from all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.

"Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one," he said, with a languid stretch 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 help you?"