Under Two Flags

“It mayn’t come to that,” he thought; “something may happen. If I could get my troop now, that would stave off the Jews; or, if I should win some heavy pots on the Prix de Dames, things would swim on again. I must win; the King will be as fit as in the Shires, and there will only be the French horses between us and an absolute ‘walk over.’ Things mayn’t come to the worst, after all.”

And so careless and quickly oblivious, happily or unhappily, was his temperament, that he read himself to sleep with Terrail’s “Club des Valets de Coeur,” and slept in ten minutes’ time as composedly as though he had inherited fifty thousand a year.

That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, Forest King stood without any body-covering, for the night was close and sultry, a lock of the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and his favorite wheaten-gruel standing uncared-for under his very nose; the King was in the height of excitation, alarm, and haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his head, his nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with a nervous, angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite wall, with a force that reverberated through the stables and made his companions start and edge away. It was precisely these companions that the aristocratic hero of the Soldiers’ Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred.

They had just been looking him over—to their own imminent peril; and the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant six-year-old of Paris, and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the knightly descendant of the White Cockade blood and of the coursers of Circassia, had resented the familiarity proportionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was a very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would suffer liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were very just; and if his clever heels had caught—and it was not his fault that they did not—the heads of his two companions, instead of coming with that ponderous crash into the panels of his box, society would certainly have been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than had ever before hung in the careless balance of his life.

But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught the oak of his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in their mouths.

“It’s almost a pity—he’s in such perfect condition. Tip-top. Cool as a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats up to the last grain; leads the whole string such a rattling spin as never was spun but by a Derby cracker before him. It’s almost a pity,” said Willon meditatively, eyeing his charge, the King, with remorseful glances.

“Prut-tush-tish!” said his companion, with a whistle in his teeth that ended with a “damnation!” “It’ll only knock him over for the race; he’ll be right as a trivet after it. What’s your little game; coming it soft like that, all of a sudden? You hate that ere young swell like p’ison.”

“Aye,” assented the head groom with a tigerish energy, viciously consuming his bit of straw. “What for am I—head groom come nigh twenty years; and to Markisses and Wiscounts afore him—put aside in that ere way for a fellow as he’s took into his service out of the dregs of a regiment; what was tied up at the triangles and branded D, as I know on, and sore suspected of even worse games than that, and now is that set up with pride and sich-like that nobody’s woice ain’t heard here except his; I say what am I called on to bear it for?”: and the head groom’s tones grew hoarse and vehement, roaring louder under his injuries. “A man what’s attended a Duke’s ‘osses ever since he was a shaver, to be put aside for that workhus blackguard! A ‘oss had a cold—it’s Rake what’s to cure him. A ‘oss is entered for a race—it’s Rake what’s to order his morning gallops, and his go-downs o’ water. It’s past bearing to have a rascally chap what’s been and gone and turned walet, set up over one’s head in one’s own establishment, and let to ride the high ‘oss over one, roughshod like that!”

And Mr. Willon, in his disgust at the equestrian contumely thus heaped on him, bit the straw savagely in two, and made an end of it, with a vindictive “Will yer be quiet there; blow yer,” to the King, who was protesting with his heels against the conversation.

“Come, then, no gammon,” growled his companion—the “cousin out o’ Yorkshire” of the keeper’s tree.

“What’s yer figure, you say?” relented Willon meditatively.

“Two thousand to nothing—come!—can’t no handsomer,” retorted the Yorkshire cousin, with the air of a man conscious of behaving very nobly.

“For the race in Germany?” pursued Mr. Willon, still meditatively.

“Two thousand to nothing—come!” reiterated the other, with his arms folded to intimate that this and nothing else was the figure to which he would bind himself.

Willon chewed another bit of straw, glanced at the horse as though he were a human thing to hear, to witness, and to judge, grew a little pale; and stooped forward.

“Hush! Somebody’ll spy on us. It’s a bargain.”

“Done! And you’ll paint him, eh?”

“Yes—I’ll—paint him.”

The assent was very husky, and dragged slowly out, while his eyes glanced with a furtive, frightened glance over the loose-box. Then—still with that cringing, terrified look backward to the horse, as an assassin may steal a glance before his deed at his unconscious victim—the head groom and his comrade went out and closed the door of the loose-box and passed into the hot, lowering summer night.

Forest King, left in solitude, shook himself with a neigh; took a refreshing roll in the straw, and turned with an appetite to his neglected gruel. Unhappily for himself, his fine instincts could not teach him the conspiracy that lay in wait for him and his; and the gallant beast, content to be alone, soon slept the sleep of the righteous.

CHAPTER VIII

A STAG HUNT AU CLAIR DE LA LUNE

“Seraph—I’ve been thinking,” said Cecil musingly, as they paced homeward together from the Scrubs, with the long line of the First Life stretching before and behind their chargers, and the hands of the Household Cavalry plying mellowly in their rear.

“You don’t mean it. Never let it ooze out, Beauty; you’ll ruin your reputation!”

Cecil laughed a little, very languidly; to have been in the sun for four hours, in full harness, had almost taken out of him any power to be amused at anything.

“I’ve been thinking,” he went on undisturbed, pulling down his chin-scale. “What’s a fellow to do when he’s smashed?”

“Eh?” The Seraph couldn’t offer a suggestion; he had a vague idea that men who were smashed never did do anything except accept the smashing; unless, indeed, they turned up afterward as touts, of which he had an equally vague suspicion.

“What do they do?” pursued Bertie.

“Go to the bad,” finally suggested the Seraph, lighting a great cigar, without heeding the presence of the Duke, a Field-Marshal, and a Serene Highness far on in front.

Cecil shook his head.

“Can’t go where they are already. I’ve been thinking what a fellow might do that was up a tree; and on my honor there are lots of things one might turn to–”

“Well, I suppose there are,” assented the Seraph, with a shake of his superb limbs in his saddle till his cuirass and chains and scabbard rang again. “I should try the P. R., only they will have you train.”

“One might do better than the P. R. Getting yourself into prime condition, only to be pounded out of condition and into a jelly, seems hardly logical or satisfactory—specially to your looking-glass, though, of course, it’s a matter of taste. But now, if I had a cropper, and got sold up–”

“You, Beauty?” The Seraph puffed a giant puff of amazement from his Havana, opening his blue eyes to their widest.

“Possible!” returned Bertie serenely, with a nonchalant twist to his mustaches. “Anything’s possible. If I do now, it strikes me there are vast fields open.”

“Gold fields!” suggested the Seraph, wholly bewildered.

“Gold fields? No! I mean a field for—what d’ye call it—genius. Now, look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world don’t know how to put on a glove. It’s an art, and an art that requires long study. If a few of us were to turn glove-fitters when we are fairly crushed, we might civilize the whole world, and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting glove ever blotting creation and prostituting Houbigant. What do you say?”

“Don’t be such a donkey, Beauty!” laughed the Seraph, while his charger threatened to passage into an oyster cart.

“You don’t appreciate the majesty of great plans,” rejoined Beauty reprovingly. “There’s an immense deal in what I’m saying. Think what we might do for society—think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we just dedicated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, where the traders might go through a course of polite training before they blossomed out as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of dropped h’s and bad bows. We might have a Bureau where we registered all our social experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map of Belgravia, with all the pitfalls marked; all the inaccessible heights colored red, and all the hard-up great people dotted with gold to show the amount they’d be bought for—with directions to the ignoramuses whom to know, court, and avoid. We might form a Courier Company, and take Brummagem abroad under our guidance, so that the Continent shouldn’t think Englishwomen always wear blue veils and gray shawls, and hear every Englishman shout for porter and beefsteak in Tortoni’s. We might teach them to take their hats off to women, and not to prod pictures with sticks, and to look at statutes without poking them with an umbrella, and to be persuaded that all foreigners don’t want to be bawled at, and won’t understand bad French any the better for its being shouted. Or we might have a Joint-Stock Toilette Association, for the purposes of national art, and receive Brummagem to show it how to dress; we might even succeed in making the feminine British Public drape itself properly, and the B. P. masculine wear boots that won’t creak, and coats that don’t wrinkle, and take off its hat without a jerk, as though it were a wooden puppet hung on very stiff strings. Or one might—”

“Talk the greatest nonsense under the sun!” laughed the Seraph. “For mercy’s sake, are you mad, Bertie?”

“Inevitable question addressed to Genius!” yawned Cecil. “I’m showing you plans that might teach a whole nation good style if we just threw ourselves into it a little. I don’t mean you, because you’ll never smash, and one don’t turn bear-leader, even to the B. P., without the primary impulse of being hard-up. And I don’t talk for myself, because, when I go to the dogs I have my own project.”

“And what’s that?”

“To be groom of the chambers at Meurice’s or Claridge’s,” responded Bertie solemnly. “Those sublime creatures with their silver chains round their necks and their ineffable supremacy over every other mortal!—one would feel in a superior region still. And when a snob came to poison the air, how exquisitely one could annihilate him with showing him his ignorance of claret; and when an epicure dined, how delightfully, as one carried in a turbot, one could test him with the eprouvette positive, or crush him by the eprouvette negative. We have been Equerries at the Palace, both of us, but I don’t think we know what true dignity is till we shall have risen to headwaiters at a Grand Hotel.”

With which Bertie let his charger pace onward, while he reflected thoughtfully on his future state. The Seraph laughed till he almost swayed out of saddle, but he shook himself into his balance again with another clash of his brilliant harness, while his eyes lightened and glanced with a fiery gleam down the line of the Household Cavalry.

“Well, if I went to the dogs I wouldn’t go to Grand Hotels; but I’ll tell you where I would go, Beauty.”

“Where’s that?”

“Into hot service, somewhere. By Jove, I’d see some good fighting under another flag—out in Algeria, there, or with the Poles, or after Garibaldi. I would, in a day—I’m not sure I won’t now, and I bet you ten to one the life would be better than this.”

Which was ungrateful in the Seraph, for his happy temper made him the sunniest and most contented of men, with no cross in his life save the dread that somebody would manage to marry him some day. But Rock had the true dash and true steel of the soldier in him, and his blue eyes flashed over his Guards as he spoke, with a longing wish that he were leading them on to a charge instead of pacing with them toward Hyde Park.

Cecil turned in his saddle and looked at him with a certain wonder and pleasure in his glance, and did not answer aloud. “The deuce—that’s not a bad idea,” he thought to himself; and the idea took root and grew with him.

Far down, very far down, so far that nobody had ever seen it, nor himself ever expected it, there was a lurking instinct in “Beauty,”—the instinct that had prompted him, when he sent the King at the Grand Military cracker, with that prayer, “Kill me if you like, but don’t fail me!”—which, out of the languor and pleasure-loving temper of his unruffled life, had a vague, restless impulse toward the fiery perils and nervous excitement of a sterner and more stirring career.