Under Two Flags. Ouida
they were sharply hit by the day’s issue, never even by implication hinted at owing the disaster to their faith in him, but the very cordiality and sympathy they showed cut him the keenest—the very knowledge of their forbearance made his own thoughts darkest.
Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day’s calamity brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith these men had placed in him, and the losses which his own mistaken security had caused them. Granted he could neither guess nor avert the trickery which had brought about his failure; but none the less did he feel that he had failed them; none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed him sting him like a scourge.
He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into the gardens of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley shut him in in solitude, and the only echo of the gay world of Baden was the strain of a band, the light mirth of a laugh, or the roll of a carriage sounding down the summer air.
It was eight o’clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest. In another hour he was the expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house. No aid could serve him, for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps dishonored man—a debtor and an alien.
Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him—and to meet which not training, nor habit, nor a moment’s grave reflection had ever done the slightest to prepare him; gazing, blankly and unconsciously, at the dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and around above the green and leafy nest of Baden—he watched mechanically the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in distance through the firs.
“Those poor devils envy us!” he thought. “Better be one of them ten thousand times than be trained for the Great Race, and started with the cracks, dead weighted with the penalty-shot of Poverty!”
A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there; he looked up, surprised. Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all gay with white lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and floating hair fastened backward with a golden fillet; it was that of the little Lady Venetia,—the only daughter of the House of Lyonnesse, by a late marriage of his Grace,—the eight-year-old sister of the colossal Seraph; the plaything of a young and lovely mother, who had flirted in Belgravia with her future stepson before she fell sincerely and veritably in love with the gallant and still handsome Duke.
Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by months together at Lyonnesse most years of the child’s life, and had been gentle to her as he was to every living thing, though he had noticed her seldom.
“Well, Petite Reine,” he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts were; calling her by the name she generally bore. “All alone? Where are your playmates?”
“Petite Reine,” who, to justify her sobriquet, was a grand, imperial little lady, bent her delicate head—a very delicate head, indeed, carrying itself royally, young though it was.
“Ah! you know I never care for children!”
It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a touch of affectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a matured and contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment it amused him. She did not wait an answer, but bent nearer, with an infinite pity and anxiety in her pretty eyes.
“I want to know—you are so vexed; are you not? They say you have lost all your money!”
“Do they? They are not far wrong then. Who are ‘they,’ Petite Reine?”
“Oh! Prince Alexis, and the Duc de Lorance, and mamma, and everybody. Is it true?”
“Very true, my little lady.”
“Ah!” She gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, with her head on one side, and her lips parted; “I heard the Russian gentleman saying that you were ruined. Is that true, too?”
“Yes, dear,” he answered wearily, thinking little of the child in the desperate pass to which his life had come.
Petite Reine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young ladyship had a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she had understood what had been said before her of him vaguely indeed, and with no sense of its true meaning, yet still with the quick perception of a brilliant and petted child. Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes were filled with tears. He put out his hand and drew her to him.
“Why, little one, what do you know of these things? How did you find me out here?”
She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its bright gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting her face to his—earnest, beseeching, and very eager.
“I came—I came—please don’t be angry—because I heard them say you had no money, and I want you to take mine. Do take it! Look, it is all bright gold, and it is my own, my very own. Papa gives it to me to do just what I like with. Do take it; pray do!”
Coloring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct of generous natures,—a most sensitive delicacy for others,—but growing ardent in her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, she shook on to Cecil’s knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat box, twenty bright Napoleons that fell in a glittering shower on the grass.
He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook for offense. She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, and with her large eyes gleaming and melting with passionate entreaty.
“Don’t be angry; pray take it; it is all my own, and you know I have bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, and dogs till I am tired of them; I never want the money; indeed I don’t. Take it, please take it; and if you will only let me ask Papa or Rock they will give you thousands and thousands of pounds, if that isn’t enough. Do let me!”
Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him. When he spoke his voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim with an emotion that he had not known in all his careless life; the child’s words and action touched him deeply, the caressing, generous innocence of the offered gift, beside the enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy of his career, smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange pleasure.
“Petite Reine,” he murmured gently, striving vainly for his old lightness, “Petite Reine, how some man will love you one day! Thank you from my heart, my little innocent friend.”
Her face flushed with gladness; she smiled with all a child’s unshadowed joy.
“Ah! then you will take it! and if you want more only let me ask them for it; papa and Philip never refuse me anything!”
His hand wandered gently over the shower of her hair, as he put back the Napoleons that he had gathered up into her azure bonbonniere.
“Petite Reine, you are a little angel; but I cannot take your money, my child, and you must ask for none for my sake from your father or from Rock. Do not look so grieved, little one; I love you none the less because I refuse it.”
Petite Reine’s face was very pale and grave; a delicate face, in its miniature feminine childhood almost absurdly like the Seraph’s; her eyes were full of plaintive wonder and of pathetic reproach.
“Ah!” she said, drooping her head with a sigh; “it is no good to you because it is such a little; do let me ask for more!”
He smiled, but the smile was very weary.
“No, dear, you must not ask for more; I have been very foolish, my little friend, and I must take the fruits of my folly; all men must. I can accept no one’s money, not even yours;