Under Two Flags. Ouida
him hastily; his young brother, whom he had scarcely seen since the find, had been thrown and taken home on a hurdle; the injuries were rumored to be serious.
Bertie’s smile faded, he looked very grave; world-spoiled as he was, reckless in everything, and egotist though he had long been by profession, he loved the lad.
When he entered the darkened room, with its faint chloroform odor, the boy lay like one dead, his bright hair scattered on the pillow, his chest bare, and his right arm broken and splintered. The deathlike coma was but the result of the chloroform; but Cecil never stayed to ask or remember that; he was by the couch in a single stride, and dropped down by it, his head bent on his arms.
“It was my fault. I should have looked to him.”
The words were very low; he hated that any should see he could still be such a fool as to feel. A minute, and he conquered himself; he rose, and with his hand on the boy’s fair tumbled curls, turned calmly to the medical men who, attached to the household, had been on the spot at once.
“What is the matter?”
“Fractured arm, contusion; nothing serious, nothing at all, at his age,” replied the surgeon. “When he wakes out of the lethargy he will tell you so himself, Mr. Cecil.”
“You are certain?”—do what he would his voice shook a little; his hand had not shaken, two days before, when nothing less than ruin or ransom had hung on his losing or winning the race.
“Perfectly certain,” answered the surgeon cheerfully. “He is not overstrong, to be sure, but the contusions are slight; he will be out of that bed in a fortnight.”
“How did he fall?”
But while they told him he scarcely heard; he was looking at the handsome Antinous-like form of the lad as it lay stretched helpless and stricken before him; and he was remembering the death-bed of their mother, when the only voice he had ever reverenced had whispered, as she pointed to the little child of three summers: “When you are a man take care of him, Bertie.” How had he fulfilled the injunction? Into how much brilliantly tinted evil had he not led him—by example, at least?
The surgeon touched his arm apologetically, after a lengthened silence:
“Your brother will be best unexcited when he comes to himself, sir; look—his eyes are unclosing now. Could you do me the favor to go to his lordship? His grief made him perfectly wild—so dangerous to his life at his age. We could only persuade him to retire, a few minutes ago, on the plea of Mr. Berkeley’s safety. If you could see him–”
Cecil went, mechanically almost, and with a grave, weary depression on him; he was so unaccustomed to think at all, so utterly unaccustomed to think painfully, that he scarcely knew what ailed him. Had he had his old tact about him, he would have known how worse than useless it would be for him to seek his father in such a moment.
Lord Royallieu was lying back exhausted as Cecil opened the door of his private apartments, heavily darkened and heavily perfumed; at the turn of the lock he started up eagerly.
“What news of him?”
“Good news, I hope,” said Cecil gently, as he came forward. “The injuries are not grave, they tell me. I am so sorry that I never watched his fencing, but—”
The old man had not recognized him till he heard his voice, and he waved him off with a fierce, contemptuous gesture; the grief for his favorite’s danger, the wild terrors that his fears had conjured up, his almost frantic agony at the sight of the accident, had lashed him into passion well-nigh delirious.
“Out of my sight, sir,” he said fiercely, his mellow tones quivering with rage. “I wish to God you had been dead in a ditch before a hair of my boy’s had been touched. You live, and he lies dying there!”
Cecil bowed in silence; the brutality of the words wounded, but they did not offend him, for he knew his father was in that moment scarce better than a maniac, and he was touched with the haggard misery upon the old Peer’s face.
“Out of my sight, sir,” re-echoed Lord Royallieu as he strode forward, passion lending vigor to his emaciated frame, while the dignity of his grand carriage blent with the furious force of his infuriated blindness. “If you had had the heart of a man, you would have saved such a child as that from his peril; warned him, watched him, succored him at least when he fell. Instead of that, you ride on and leave him to die, if death comes to him! You are safe, you are always safe. You try to kill yourself with every vice under heaven, and only get more strength, more grace, more pleasure from it—you are always safe because I hate you. Yes! I hate you, sir!”
No words can give the force, the malignity, the concentrated meaning with which the words were hurled out, as the majestic form of the old Lord towered in the shadow, with his hands outstretched as if in imprecation.
Cecil heard him in silence, doubting if he could hear aright, while the bitter phrases scathed and cut like scourges, but he bowed once more with the manner that was as inseparable from him as his nature.
“Hate is so exhausting; I regret I give you the trouble of it. May I ask why you favor me with it?”
“You may!” thundered his father, while his hawk’s eyes flashed their glittering fire. “You are like the man I cursed living and curse dead. You look at me with Alan Bertie’s eyes, you speak to me with Alan Bertie’s voice; I loved your mother, I worshiped her; but—you are his son, not mine!”
The secret doubt, treasured so long, was told at last. The blood flushed Bertie’s face a deep and burning scarlet; he started with an irrepressible tremor, like a man struck with a shot; he felt like one suddenly stabbed in the dark by a sure and a cruel hand. The insult and the amazement of the words seemed to paralyze him for the moment, the next he recovered himself, and lifted his head with as haughty a gesture as his father’s, his features perfectly composed again, and sterner than in all his careless, easy life they ever yet had looked.
“You lie, and you know you lie. My mother was pure as the angels. Henceforth you can be only to me a slanderer who has dared to taint the one name holy in my sight.”
And without another word, he turned and went out of the chamber. Yet, as the door closed, old habit was so strong on him that, even in his hot and bitter pain, and his bewildered sense of sudden outrage, he almost smiled at himself. “It is a mania; he does not know what he says,” he thought. “How could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such bad form!”
But the cruel stroke had not struck the less closely home, and gentle though his nature was, beyond all forgiveness from him was the dishonor of his mother’s memory.
CHAPTER VII
AFTER A RICHMOND DINNER
It was the height of the season, and the duties of the Household were proportionately and insupportably heavy. The Brigades were fairly worked to death, and the Indian service, in the heat of the Afghan war, was never more onerous than the campaigns that claimed the Guards from Derby to Ducal.
Escorts to Levees, guards of honor to Drawing rooms, or field-days in the Park and the Scrubs, were but the least portion of it. Far more severe, and still less to be shirked, were the morning exercise in the Ride; the daily parade in the Lady’s Mile; the reconnaissances from club windows, the vedettes at Flirtation Corner; the long campaigns at mess-breakfasts, with the study of dice and baccarat tactics, and the fortifications of Strasburg pate against the invasions of Chartreuse and Chambertin; the breathless, steady charges of Belgravian staircases when a fashionable drum beat the rataplan; the skirmishes with sharpshooters of the bright-eyed Irregular Lancers; the foraging duty when fair commanders wanted ices or strawberries at garden parties; the ball-practice at Hornsey Handicaps; the terrible risk of crossing the enemy’s lines, and being made to surrender as prisoners of war at the jails of St. George’s, or of St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge; the constant inspections of the Flying Battalions of the Ballet, and the pickets afterward in the Wood of St. John; the anxieties of the Club commissariats, and the close vigilance over the mess wines; the fatigue duty of ballrooms, and the continual unharnessing consequent on the clause in the Regulations never to wear the