The Dowager went home in her brougham; the Countess drove in his mail-phaeton—objectionable, as she might be seen, but less objectionable than letting her servants know he had met her at Richmond. Besides, she obviated danger by bidding him set her down at a little villa across the park, where dwelt a confidential protegee of hers, whom she patronized; a former French governess, married tolerably well, who had the Countess’ confidences, and kept them religiously for sake of so aristocratic a patron, and of innumerable reversions of Spanish point and shawls that had never been worn, and rings, of which her lavish ladyship had got tired.
From here she would take her ex-governess’ little brougham, and get quietly back to her own home in Eaton Square, in due time for all the drums and crushes at which she must make her appearance. This was the sort of little device which really made them think themselves in love, and gave the salt to the whole affair. Moreover, there was this ground for it, that had her lord once roused from the straw-yards of his prize cattle, there was a certain stubborn, irrational, old-world prejudice of pride and temper in him that would have made him throw expediency to the winds, then and there, with a blind and brutal disregard to slander and to the fact that none would ever adorn his diamonds as she did. So that Cecil had not only her fair fame, but her still more valuable jewels in his keeping when he started from the Star and Garter in the warmth of the bright summer’s evening.
It was a lovely night; a night for lonely highland tarns, and southern shores by Baiae; without a cloud to veil the brightness of the stars. A heavy dew pressed the odors from the grasses, and the deep glades of the avenue were pierced here and there with a broad beam of silvery moonlight, slanting through the massive boles of the trees, and falling white and serene across the turf. Through the park, with the gleam of the water ever and again shining through the branches of the foliage, Cecil started his horses; his groom he had sent away on reaching Richmond, for the same reason as the Countess had dismissed her barouche, and he wanted no servant, since, as soon as he had set down his liege lady at her protegee’s, he would drive straight back to Piccadilly. But he had not noticed what he noted now, that instead of one of his carriage-grays, who had fallen slightly lame, they had put into harness the young one, Maraschino, who matched admirably for size and color, but who, being really a hunter, though he had been broken to shafts as well, was not the horse with which to risk driving a lady.
However, Beauty was a perfect whip and had the pair perfectly in hand, so that he thought no more of the change, as the grays dashed at a liberal half-speed through the park, with their harness flashing in the moonlight, and their scarlet rosettes fluttering in the pleasant air. The eyes beside him, the Titian-like mouth, the rich, delicate cheek, these were, to be sure, rather against the coolness and science that such a five-year-old as Maraschino required; they were distracting even to Cecil, and he had not prudence enough to deny his sovereign lady when she put her hands on the ribbons.
“The beauties! Give them to me, Bertie. Dangerous? How absurd you are; as if I could not drive anything? Do you remember my four roans at Longchamps?”
She could, indeed, with justice, pique herself on her skill; she drove matchlessly, but as he resigned them to her, Maraschino and his companion quickened their trot, and tossed their pretty thoroughbred heads, conscious of a less powerful hand on the reins.
“I shall let their pace out; there is nobody to run over here,” said her ladyship.
Maraschino, as though hearing the flattering conjuration swung off into a light, quick canter, and tossed his head again; he knew that, good whip though she was, he could jerk his mouth free in a second, if he wanted. Cecil laughed—prudence was at no time his virtue—and leaned back contentedly, to be driven at a slashing pace through the balmy summer’s night, while the ring of the hoofs rang merrily on the turf, and the boughs were tossed aside with a dewy fragrance. As they went, the moonlight was shed about their path in the full of the young night, and at the end of a vista of boughs, on a grassy knoll were some phantom forms—the same graceful shapes that stand out against the purple heather and the tawny gorse of Scottish moorlands, while the lean rifle-tube creeps up by stealth. In the clear starlight there stood the deer—a dozen of them, a clan of stags alone—with their antlers clashing like a clash of swords, and waving like swaying banners as they tossed their heads and listened.2
In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and twitched with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant and he had got his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, rushed down the glade.
Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the ribbons that in one instant had cut his companion’s gloves to stripes.
“Sit still,” he said calmly, but under his breath. “He had been always ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer as sure as we live!”
Race the deer he did.
Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the stags were off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the horses tore after them; no skill, no strength, no science could avail to pull them in; they had taken their bits between their teeth, and the devil that was in Maraschino lent the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare, who had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in her break.
Neither Cecil’s hands nor any other force could stop them now; on they went, hunting as straight in line as though staghounds streamed in front of them, and no phaeton rocked and swayed in a dead and dragging weight behind them. In a moment he gauged the closeness and the vastness of the peril; there was nothing for it but to trust to chance, to keep his grasp on the reins to the last, and to watch for the first sign of exhaustion. Long ere that should be given death might have come to them both; but there was a gay excitation in that headlong rush through the summer night; there was a champagne-draught of mirth and mischief in that dash through the starlit woodland; there was a reckless, breathless pleasure in that neck-or-nothing moonlight chase!
Yet danger was so near with every oscillation; the deer were trooping in fast flight, now clear in the moonlight, now lost in the shadow, bounding with their lightning grace over sward and hillock, over briar and brushwood, at that speed which kills most living things that dare to race the “Monarch of the Glens.” And the grays were in full pursuit; the hunting fire was in the fresh young horse; he saw the shadowy branches of the antlers toss before him, and he knew no better than to hunt down in their scenting line as hotly as though the field of the Queen’s or the Baron’s was after them. What cared he for the phaeton that rocked and reeled on his traces; he felt its weight no more than if it were a wicker-work toy, and, extended like a greyhound, he swerved from the road, swept through the trees, and tore down across the grassland in the track of the herd.
Through the great boles of the trunks, bronze and black in the shadows, across the hilly rises of the turf, through the brushwood pell-mell, and crash across the level stretches of the sward, they raced as though the hounds were streaming in front; swerved here, tossed there, carried in a whirlwind over the mounds, wheeled through the gloom of the woven branches, splashed with a hiss through the shallow rain-pools, shot swift as an arrow across the silver radiance of the broad moonlight, borne against the sweet south wind, and down the odors of the trampled grass, the carriage was hurled across the park in the wild starlight chase. It rocked, it swayed, it shook, at every yard, while it was carried on like a paper toy; as yet the marvelous chances of accident had borne it clear of the destruction that threatened it at every step as the grays, in the height of their pace now, and powerless even to have arrested themselves, flew through the woodland, neither knowing what they did, nor heeding where they went; but racing down on the scent, not feeling the strain of the traces, and only maddened the more by the noise of the whirling wheels behind them.
As Cecil leaned back, his hands clinched on the reins, his sinews stretched almost to bursting in their vain struggle to recover power over the loosened beasts, the hunting zest awoke in him too, even while his eyes glanced on his companion in fear and anxiety for her.
“Tally-ho! hark forward! As I live, it is glorious!” he cried, half unconsciously. “For God’s sake, sit still, Beatrice! I will save you.”
Inconsistent as the words were, they were true to what he felt; alone, he would have flung himself delightedly into the madness of the chase; for her he dreaded with horror the eminence of their peril.
On fled the deer, on swept the horses; faster in the gleam of the moonlight the antlered troop darted on through the gloaming; faster tore the grays in the ecstasy of their freedom; headlong and heedless they dashed through the thickness of leaves and the weaving of branches; neck to neck, straining to distance each other, and held together by the gall of the harness. The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew up beneath their hoofs; their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire from the stones, the carriage was whirled, rocking and tottering, through the maze of tree-trunks, towering like pillars of black stone up against the steel-blue clearness of the sky. The strain was intense; the danger deadly. Suddenly, straight ahead, beyond the darkness of the foliage, gleamed a line of light; shimmering, liquid, and glassy—here brown as gloom where the shadows fell on it, here light as life where the stars mirrored on it. That trembling line stretched right in their path. For the first time, from the blanched lips beside him a cry of terror rang.
“The river!—oh, heaven!—the river!”
There it lay in the distance, the deep and yellow water, cold in the moon’s rays, with its further bank but a dull gray line in the mists that rose from it, and its swamp a yawning grave as the horses, blind in their delirium and racing against each other, bore down through all obstacles toward its brink. Death was rarely ever closer; one score yards more, one plunge, one crash down the declivity and against the rails, one swell of the noisome tide above their heads, and life would be closed and passed for both of them. For one breathless moment his eyes met hers—in that moment he loved her, in that moment their hearts beat with a truer, fonder impulse to each other than they had ever done. Before the presence of a threatening death life grows real, love grows precious, to the coldest and most careless.
No aid could come; not a living soul was nigh; the solitude was as complete as though a western prairie stretched round them; there were only the still and shadowy night, the chilly silence, on which the beat of the plunging hoofs shattered like thunder, and the glisten of the flowing water growing nearer and nearer every yard. The tranquillity around only jarred more horribly on ear and brain; the vanishing forms of the antlered deer only gave a weirder grace to the moonlight chase whose goal was the grave. It was like the midnight hunt after Herne the Hunter; but here, behind them, hunted Death.
The animals neither saw nor knew what waited them, as they rushed down on to the broad, gray stream, veiled from them by the slope and the screen of flickering leaves; to save them there was but one chance, and that so desperate that it looked like madness. It was but a second’s thought; he gave it but a second’s resolve.
The next instant he stood on his feet, as the carriage swayed to and fro over the turf, balanced himself marvelously as it staggered in that furious gallop from side to side, clinched the reins hard in the grip of his teeth, measured the distance with an unerring eye, and crouching his body for the spring with all the science of the old playing-fields of his Eton days, cleared the dashboard and lighted astride on the back of the hunting five-year old—how, he could never have remembered or have told.
The tremendous pace at which they went swayed him with a lurch and a reel over the off-side; a woman’s cry rang again, clear, and shrill, and agonized on the night; a moment more, and he would have fallen, head downward, beneath the horses’ feet. But he had ridden stirrupless and saddleless ere now; he recovered himself with the suppleness of an Arab, and firm-seated behind the collar, with one leg crushed between the pole and Maraschino’s flanks, gathering in the ribbons till they were tight-drawn as a bridle, he strained with all the might and sinew that were in him to get the grays in hand before they could plunge down into the water. His wrists were wrenched like pulleys, the resistance against him was hard as iron; but as he had risked life and limb in the leap which had seated him across the harnessed loins of the now terrified beast, so he risked them afresh to get the mastery now; to slacken them, turn them ever so slightly, and save the woman he loved—loved, at least in this hour, as he had not loved her before. One moment more, while the half-maddened beast rushed through the shadows; one moment more, till the river stretched full before them in all its length and breadth, without a living thing upon its surface to break the still and awful calm; one moment—and the force of cool command conquered and broke their wills despite themselves. The hunter knew his master’s voice, his touch, his pressure, and slackened speed by an irresistible, almost unconscious habit of obedience; the carriage mare, checked and galled in the full height of her speed, stood erect, pawing the air with her forelegs, and flinging the white froth over her withers, while she plunged blindly in her nervous terror; then with a crash, her feet came down upon the ground, the broken harness shivered together with a sharp, metallic clash; snorting, panting, quivering, trembling, the pair stood passive and vanquished.
The carriage was overthrown; but the high and fearless courage of the peeress bore her unharmed, even as she was flung out on to the yielding fern-grown turf. Fair as she was in every hour, she had never looked fairer than as he swung himself from the now powerless horses and threw himself beside her.
“My love—my love, you are saved!”
The beautiful eyes looked up, half unconscious; the danger told on her now that it was passed, as it does most commonly with women.
“Saved!—lost! All the world must know, now, that you are with me this evening,” she murmured with a shudder. She lived for the world, and her first thought was of self.
He soothed her tenderly.
“Hush—be at rest! There is no injury but what I can repair, nor is there a creature in sight to have witnessed the accident. Trust in me; no one shall ever know of this. You shall reach town safely and alone.”
And, while he promised, he forgot that he thus pledged his honor to leave four hours of his life so buried that, however much he needed, he neither should nor could account for them.
CHAPTER IX
THE PAINTED BIT
Baden was at its brightest. The Victoria, the Badischer Hof, the Stephanie Bauer were crowded. The Kurliste had a dazzling string of names. Imperial grandeur sauntered in slippers; chiefs, used to be saluted with “Ave Caesar Imperator,” smoked a papelito in peace over “Galignani.” Emperors gave a good-day to ministers who made their thrones beds of thorns, and little kings elbowed great capitalists who could have bought them all up in a morning’s work in the money market. Statecraft was in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown. Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the hazard of European politics laughed good-humoredly as they laid their gold down on the color. Rivals who had lately been quarreling over the knotty points of national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the bouquetiere. Knights of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece, who had hated each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the Continent between them, got friends over a mutually good book on the Rastadt or Foret Noir. Brains that were the powder depot of one-half of the universe let themselves be lulled to tranquil amusement by a fair idiot’s coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could loosen the coursing slips of the wild hell-dogs of war, murmured love to a princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morning, or smiled over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or Cham.
Baden was full. The supreme empires of demi-monde sent their sovereigns, diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all other principalities and powers, while in breadth of marvelous skirts, in costliness of cobweb laces, in unapproachability of Indian shawls and gold embroideries, and mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced by none.
Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered under the pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there was not one in his way greater than the steeple-chaser, Forest King—certes, there was not one half so honest.
The Guards’ Crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the sole representative of England. There were two or three good things out of French stables,—specially a killing little boy, L’Etoile,—and there was an Irish sorrel, the property of an Austrian of rank, of which fair things were whispered; but it was scarcely possible that anything could stand against the King and that wonderful stride of his which spread-eagled his field like magic, and his countrymen were well content to leave their honor and their old renown to “Beauty” and his six-year-old.
Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort of conviction that the German race would set everything square. He stood either to make a very good thing on it or to be very heavily bit. There could be no medium. He never hedged in his life; and as it was almost a practical impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get together would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of the King. Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably too careless to take the chance of adverse accident into account, had come to Baden, and was amusing himself there dropping a Friedrich d’Or on the rouge, flirting in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady Guenevere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness, supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that a Russian Prince had had before him, with all the serenity of a millionaire, as far as memory of money went; with much more than the serenity in other matters of most millionaires, who, finding themselves uncommonly ill at ease in the pot-pourri of monarchs and ministers, of beau-monde and demi-monde, would have given half their newly turned thousands to get rid of the odor of Capel Court and the Bourse, and to attain the calm, negligent assurance, the easy, tranquil insolence, the nonchalance with Princes, and the supremacy among the Free Lances, which they saw and coveted in the indolent Guardsman.
Bertie amused himself. He might be within a day of his ruin, but that was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as old Herrick’s, and he would have paraphrased this poet’s famous quatrain into
Drink a pure claret while you may,
Your “stiff” is still a-flying;
And he who dines so well to-day
To-morrow may be lying,
Pounced down upon by Jews tout net,
Or outlawed in a French guinguette!
Bertie was a great believer—if the words are not too sonorous and too earnest to be applied to his very inconsequent views upon any and everything—in the philosophy of happy accident. Far as it was in him to have a conviction at all,—which was a thorough-going, serious sort of thing not by any means his “form,”—he had a conviction that the doctrine of “Eat, drink, and enjoy, for to-morrow we die” was a universal panacea. He was reckless to the uttermost stretch of recklessness, all serene and quiet though his pococurantism and his daily manner were; and while subdued to the undeviating monotone and languor of his peculiar set in all his temper and habits, the natural dare-devil in him took out its inborn instincts in a wildly careless and gamester-like imprudence with that most touchy tempered and inconsistent of all coquettes—Fortune.
Things, he thought, could not well be worse with him than they were now. So he piled all on one coup, and stood to be sunk or saved by the Prix de Dames. Meanwhile, all the same, he murmured Mussetism to the Guenevere under the ruins of the Alte Schloss, lost or won a rouleau at the roulette-wheel, gave a banknote to the famous Isabel for a tea-rose, drove the Zu-Zu four in hand to see the Flat races, took his guinea tickets for the Concerts, dined with Princes, lounged arm-in-arm with Grand Dukes, gave an Emperor a hint as to the best cigars, and charmed a Monarch by unfolding the secret of the aroma of a Guards’ Punch, sacred to the Household.
Bertie who believed in bivalves but not in heroics, thought it best to take the oysters first and eschew the despair entirely.
He had one unchangeable quality—insouciance; and he had, moreover, one unchangeable faith—the King. Lady Guenevere had reached home unnoticed after the accident of their moonlight stag-hunt. His brother, meeting him a day or two after their interview, had nodded affirmatively, though sulkily, in answer to his inquiries, and had murmured that it was “all square now.” The Jews and the tradesmen had let him leave for Baden without more serious measures than a menace, more or less insolently worded. In the same fashion he trusted that the King’s running at the Bad, with the moneys he had on it, would set all things right for a little while; when, if his family interest, which was great, would get him his step in the First Life, he thought, desperate as things were, they might come round again smoothly, without a notorious crash.
“You are sure the King will ‘stay,’ Bertie?” asked Lady Guenevere, who had some hundreds in gloves (and even under the rose “sported a pony” or so more seriously) on the event.
“Certain! But if he don’t I promise you as pretty a tableau as your Asnieres one; for your sake, I’ll make the finish as picturesque as possible. Wouldn’t it be well to give me a lock of hair in readiness?”
Her ladyship laughed and shook her head; if a man killed himself, she did not desire that her gracious name should be entangled with the folly.
“No; I don’t do those things,” she said, with captivating waywardness. “Besides, though the Oos looks cool and pleasant, I greatly doubt that under any pressure you would trouble it; suicides are too pronounced for your style, Bertie.”
“At all events, a little morphia in one’s own rooms would be quieter, and better taste,” said Cecil, while he caught himself listlessly wondering, as he had wondered at Richmond, if this badinage were to turn into serious fact—how much would she care.
“May your sins be forgiven you!” cried Chesterfield, the apostle of training, as he and the Seraph came up to the table where Cecil and Cos Wentworth were breakfasting in the garden of the Stephanien on the race-day itself. “Liqueurs, truffles, and every devilment under the sun?—cold beef, and nothing to drink, Beauty, if you’ve any conscience left!”
“Never had a grain, dear boy, since I can remember,” murmured Bertie apologetically. “You took all the rawness off me at Eton.”
“And you’ve been taking coffee in bed, I’ll swear!” pursued the cross-examiner.
“What if he have? Beauty’s condition can’t be upset by a little mocha, nor mine either,” said his universal defender; and the Seraph shook his splendid limbs with a very pardonable vanity.
“Ruteroth trains; Ruteroth trains awfully,” put in Cos Wentworth, looking up out of a great silver flagon of Badminton, with which he was ending his breakfast; and referring to that Austrian who was to ride the Paris favorite. “Remember him at La Marche last year, and the racing at Vincennes—didn’t take a thing that could make flesh—muscles like iron, you know—never touched a soda even–”
“I’ve trained, too,” said Bertie submissively; “look how I’ve been waltzing! There isn’t harder work than that for any fellow. A deuxtemps with the Duchess takes it out of you like any spin over the flat.”
His censurers laughed, but did not give in their point.
“You’ve run shocking risks, Beauty,” said Chesterfield; “the King’s in fine running-form; don’t say he isn’t; but you’ve said scores of times what a deal of riding he takes. Now, can you tell us yourself that you’re in as hard condition as you were when you won the Military, eh?”
Cecil shook his head with a sigh.
“I don’t think I am; I’ve had things to try me, you see. There was that Verschoyle’s proposal. I did absolutely think at one time she’d marry me before I could protest against it! Then there was that shock to one’s whole nervous system, when that indigo man, who took Lady Laura’s house, asked us to dinner, and actually thought we should go!—and there was a scene, you know, of all earthly horrors, when Mrs. Gervase was so near eloping with me, and Gervase cut up rough, instead of pitying me; and then the field-days were so many, and so late into the season; and I exhausted myself so at the Belvoir theatricals at Easter; and I toiled so atrociously playing ‘Almaviva’ at your place, Seraph—a private opera’s galley slave’s work!—and, altogether, I’ve had a good many things to pull me down since the winter,” concluded Bertie, with a plaintive self-condolence over his truffles.
The rest of his condemning judges laughed, and passed the plea of sympathy; the Coldstreamer alone remained censorious and untouched.
“Pull you down! You’ll never pull off the race if you sit drinking liqueurs all the morning!” growled that censor. “Look at that!”
Bertie glanced at the London telegram tossed across to him, sent from a private and confidential agent.
“Betting here—two to one on L’Etoile; Irish Roan offered and taken freely. Slight decline in closing prices for the King; getting on French bay rather heavily at midnight. Fancy there’s a commission out against the King. Looks suspicious.” Cecil shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows a little.
“All the better for us. Take all they’ll lay against me. It’s as good as our having a ‘Commission out’; and if any cads get one against us it can’t mean mischief, as it would with professional jocks.”
“Are you so sure of yourself, Beauty?”
Beauty shook his head repudiatingly.
“Never am sure of anything, much less of myself. I’m a chameleon, a perfect chameleon!”
“Are you so sure of the King, then?”
“My dear fellow, no! I ask you in reason, how can I be sure of what isn’t proved? I’m like that country fellow the old story tells of; he believed in fifteen shillings because he’d once had it in his hand; others, he’d heard, believed in a pound; but, for his part, he didn’t, because he’d never seen it. Now that was a man who’d never commit himself; he might had had the Exchequer! I’m the same; I believe the King can win at a good many things because I’ve seen him do ‘em; but I can’t possibly tell whether he can get this, because I’ve never ridden him for it. I shall be able to tell you at three o’clock—but that you don’t care for–”
And Bertie, exhausted with making such a lengthened exposition—the speeches he preferred were monosyllabic—completed his sins against training with a long draught of claret-cup.
“Then what the devil do you mean by telling us to pile our pots on you?” asked the outraged Coldstreamer, with natural wrath.
“Faith is a beautiful sight!” said Bertie, with solemnity.
“Offered on the altar of the Jews!” laughed the Seraph, as he turned him away from the breakfast table by the shoulders. “Thanks, Beauty; I’ve ‘four figures’ on you, and you’ll be good enough to win them for me. Let’s have a look at the King. They are just going to walk him over.”
Cecil complied; while he lounged away with the others to the stables, with a face of the most calm, gentle, weary indifference in the world, the thought crossed him for a second of how very near he was to the wind. The figures in his betting-book were to the tune of several thousands, one way or another. If he won this morning it would be all right, of course; if he lost—even Beauty, odd mixture of devil-may-care and languor though he was, felt his lips grow, for the moment, hot and cold by turns as he thought of that possible contingency.
The King looked in splendid condition; he knew well enough what was up again, knew what was meant by that extra sedulous dressing-down, that setting muzzle that had been buckled on him some nights previous, the limitation put to his drink, the careful trial spins in the gray of the mornings, the conclusive examination of his plates by a skillful hand; he knew what was required of him, and a horse in nobler condition never stepped out in body clothing, as he was ridden slowly down on to the plains of Iffesheim. The Austrian Dragoon, a Count and a Chamberlain likewise, who was to ride his only possible rival, the French horse L’Etoile, pulled his tawny silken mustaches as he saw the great English hero come up the course, and muttered to himself, “L’affaire est finie.” L’Etoile was a brilliant enough bay in his fashion, but Count Ruteroth knew the measure of his pace and powers too thoroughly to expect him to live against the strides of the Guards’ gray.
“My beauty, won’t you cut those German fellows down!” muttered Rake, the enthusiast, in the saddling inclosure. “As for those fools what go agin you, you’ll put them in a hole, and no mistake. French horse, indeed! Why, you’ll spread-eagle all them Mossoos’ and Meinherrs’ cattle in a brace of seconds—”