Under Two Flags (Romance Classic). Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé)
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.
It was only vague, for he was naturally very indolent, very gentle, very addicted to taking all things passively, and very strongly of persuasion that to rouse yourself for anything was a niaiserie of the strongest possible folly; but it was there. It always is there with men of Bertie’s order, and only comes to light when the match of danger is applied to the touchhole. Then, though “the Tenth don’t dance,” perhaps, with graceful, indolent, dandy insolence, they can fight as no others fight when Boot and Saddle rings through the morning air, and the slashing charge sweeps down with lightning speed and falcon swoop.
“In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more excited,” says Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little opportunity of putting that doctrine for amatory intrigues to the test in actual practice. Bertie, who had many opportunities, differed with him. He found love-making in his own polished, tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was more amused by Laura Lelas. However, he was sworn to the service of the Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down that day to another sort of Richmond dinner, of which the lady was the object instead of the Zu–Zu.
She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and inexorable lord, and arranged her flirtations to evade him with a degree of skill so great that it was lamentable it should be thrown away on an agricultural husband, who never dreamt that the “Fidelio-III-TstnegeR,” which met his eyes in the innocent face of his “Times” referred to an appointment at a Regent Street modiste’s, or that the advertisement —“White wins — Twelve,” meant that if she wore white camellias in her hair at the opera she would give “Beauty” a meeting after it.
Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate conventionalities. And yet she was a little fast — very fast, indeed, and was a queen of one of the fastest sets; but then — O sacred shield of a wife’s virtue — she could not have borne to lose her very admirable position, her very magnificent jointure, and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds!
So, for the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their rendezvous under the rose.
This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out at Hampton Court — really went, she was never so imprudent as to falsify her word; and with the Dowager, who was very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond, while the world thought her dining at Hampton Court. It was nothing to anyone, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there; that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the grapes and peaches — she had been a beauty herself, in her own day, and still had her sympathies — they went on the river, in the little toy that he kept there for his fair friends’ use; floating slowly along in the coolness of evening, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the sunset, and doing a graceful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a certain languid amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for they were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in the other.
When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you to feel it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was a low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its sedges. She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among her laces and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths of her eyes and on her delicate cheek. And Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady, really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at his heart, as he gazed on her in the half-light, and thought, almost wistfully, “If the Jews were down on me tomorrow, would she really care, I wonder?”
Really care? Bertie knew his world and its women too well to deceive himself in his heart about the answer. Nevertheless, he asked the question. “Would you care much, chere belle?”
“Care what?”
“If I came to grief — went to the bad, you know; dropped out of the world altogether?”
She raised her splendid eyes in amaze, with a delicate shudder through all her laces. “Bertie! You would break my heart! What can you dream of?”
“Oh, lots of us end so! How is a man to end?” answered Bertie philosophically, while his thoughts still ran off in a speculative skepticism. “Is there a heart to break?”
Her ladyship looked at him an laughed.
“A Werther in the Guards! I don’t think the role will suit either you or your corps, Bertie; but if you do it, pray do it artistically. I remember, last year, driving through Asnieres, when they had found a young man in the Seine; he was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and he held fast in his clinched hand a lock of gold hair. Now, there was a man who knew how to die gracefully,