by Ouida
The evening of the day which had brought the letter which announced him as gazetted to the — th P. W. O. Hussars: little Curly and I, having been sent with a message to a neighbouring rector from the Doctor, were riding by turns on Miss Arabella’s white pony, talking over the coming holidays, “vacation,” as old Joey called them, and of the long sunny future that stretched before us in dim golden haze, — so near, and yet so far from our young longing eyes — when De Vigne’s terrier rolled out of a hedge, and jumped upon us.
“Holloa!” cried Curly, “where’s your master, eh boy? There he is, by Jove! Arthur, talking to the Davis. What prime fun! I wish I dare chaff him!”
Curly, being on the pony’s back, could see over the hedge; I could not, so I swung myself upon an elm-bough, and saw at some little distance De Vigne and Lucy Davis in very earnest conversation, or rather, as it seemed to me, altercation; for De Vigne was switching the long meadow grass impatiently with his cane, looking pale and annoyed, while the girl Davis stood before him, seemingly in one of those violent furies which reputation attributed to her, by turns adjuring, abusing, and threatening him.
Curly and I stayed some minutes looking at them, for the scene piqued our interest, making us think of Eugène Sue, and Dumas, and all the love scenes we had devoured, when the Doctor supposed us plodding at the Pons Asinorum or the De Officiis: but we could make nothing out of it, except that De Vigne and the Davis were quarrelling; and an intuitive perception, that the senior pupil would not admire our playing the spy on him, made me leave my elm-branch, and Curly start off the pony homewards.
That night De Vigne was silent and gloomy in the drawing-room: gave us but a brief “Good night,” and shut his bedroom door with a bang; the next morning, however, he seemed all right again, as he breakfasted for the last time in the old Chancery.
“What a lucky fellow you are, De Vigne!” sighed Curly, enviously, as he stood in the hall, waiting for the fly to take him to the station.
He laughed:
“Oh, I don’t know! We shall see if we all say so this time twenty years! If I could foresee the future, I wouldn’t: I love the glorious uncertainty; it is the only sauce piquante one has, and I can’t say I fear fate very much!”
And well he might not at eighteen! Master, when he came of age, of a splendid fortune, his own guide, his own arbiter, able to see life in all its most deliciously attractive forms, truly it seemed that he, if any one, might trust to the sauce piquante of uncertain fate? Qui lira, verra.
Off he went by the express with his portmanteaus, lettered, as we enviously read, “Granville de Vigne, Esq., — th P. W. O. Hussars;” off with Punch and an Havannah to amuse him on the way, to much more than Exeter Barracks, — on the way to Manhood; with all its chances and its changes, its wild revels and its dark regrets, its sparkling champagne-cup, and its bitter aconite lying at the dregs! Off he went, and we, left behind in the dull solitude of academic Frestonhills, watched the smoke curling from the engine as it disappeared round the bend of a cutting, and wondered in vague schoolboy fashion what sort of thing De Vigne would make of Life.
CHAPTER II.
“A Southerly Wind and a Cloudy Sky proclaim it a Hunting Morning.”
“CONFOUND it, I can’t cram, and I won’t cram, so there’s an end of it!” sang out a Cantab one fine October morning, flinging Plato’s Republic to the far end of the room, where it knocked down a grind-cup, smashed a punch-bowl, and cracked the glass that glazed the charms of the last pet of the ballet The sun streamed through the oriel windows of my rooms in dear old Trinity. The roaring fire crackled, blazed, and chatted away to a slate-coloured Skye that lay full-length before it. The table was spread with coffee, audit, devils, omelets, hare-pies, and all the other articles of the buttery. The sunshine within, shone on pipes and pictures, tobacco-boxes and little bronzes, books, cards, cigar-cases, statuettes, portraits of Derby winners, and likenesses of fair Anonymas — all in confusion, tumbled pell-mell together among sofas and easy-chairs, rifles, cricket-bats, boxing-gloves, and skates. The sunshine without, shone on the backs, where outriggers and four-oars were pulling up and down the cold classic muddy waters of the Cam, more celebrated, but far less clear and lovely, I must say, than our old dancing, rapid, joyous Kennet. Everything looked essentially jolly, and jolly did I and my two companions feel, smoking before a huge fire, in the easiest of attitudes and couches, a very trifle seedy from a prolonged Wine the night previous.
One of them was a handsome young fellow of twenty, a great deal too handsome for the peace of the master’s daughters, and of the fair pâtissières and fleuristes of Petty Cury and King’s Parade; the self-same, save some additional feet of height and some ‘fondly-cherished whiskers, as our little Curly of Frestonhills. The other was a man of six-and-twenty, his figure superbly developed in strength and power, without losing one atom in symmetry, showing how his nerve and muscle would tell pulling up stream, or in a fast fifty minutes across country, or, if occasion turned up, in that “noble art of self-defence,” now growing as popular in England, as in days of yore at Elis.
“Cram?” he said, looking up as Curly spoke. “Why should you? What’s the good of it? Youth is made for something warmer than academic routine; and knowledge of the world will stand a man in better stead than the quarrels of commentators, and the dry demonstrations of mathematicians.”
“Of course. Not a doubt about it,” said Curly, stretching himself. “I find soda-water and brandy the best guano for the cultivation of my intellect, I can tell you, De Vigne.”
“Do you think it will get you a double first?”
“Heaven forfend!” cried Curly, with extreme piety. “I’ve no ambition for lawn sleeves, though they do bring with them as neat a little income as any Vessel of Grace, who lives on clover, and forswears the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, can possibly desire.”
“You’ll live in clover, my boy, trust you for that,” said De Vigne. “But you won’t pretend that you only take it because you’re ‘called’ to it, and that you would infinitely prefer, if left to yourself, a hovel and dry bread! Don’t cram, Curly; your great saps are like the geese they fatten for foie gras; they overfeed one part of the system till all the rest is weak, diseased, and worthless. But the geese have the best of it, for their livers do make something worth eating, while the reading-man’s brains are rarely productive of anything worth writing.”
“Ah!” re-echoed Curly, with an envious sigh of assent. “I wonder whose knowledge is worth the most; my old Coach’s, a living miracle of classic research, who couldn’t, to save his life, tell you who was Premier, translate ‘Comment vous portez-vous?’ or know a Creswick from a Rubens, or yours; who have everything at your fingers’ ends that one can want to hear about, from the last clause in the budget, to the best make in rifles?”
De Vigne laughed. “Well, a man can’t tumble about in the world, if he has any brains at all, without learning something; but, my dear fellow, that’s all ‘superficial,’ they’ll tell you; and it is atrociously bad taste to study leading articles instead of Greek unities! Chacun à son goût, you know. That young fellow above your head is a mild, spectacled youth, Arthur says, who gives scientific teas, where you give roistering wines, wins Craven scholarships where you get gated, and falls in love with the fair structure of the Oedipus Tyrannus, where you go mad about the unfortunately more perishable form of that pretty little girl at the cigar-shop over the way! You think him a muff, and he, I dare say, looks on you as an âme damnée, both in the French and English sense of the words. You both fill up niches in your own little world; you needn’t jostle one another. If all horses ran for one Cup only, the turf would soon come to grief. Why ain’t you like me? I go on my own way, and never trouble my head about other people!”
“Why am I not like you?” repeated Curly, with a prolonged whistle. “Why isn’t water as good as rum punch, or my bed-maker as pretty as little Rosalie? Don’t I wish I were you, instead of a beggarly younger son, tied
by the leg in Granta, bothered with chapel, and all sorts of horrors, and rusticated if I try to see the smallest atom of life. By George! De Vigne, what a jolly time you must have had of it since you left the Chancery!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said De Vigne, looking into the fire with a smile. “I’ve gone the pace, I dare say, as fast as most men, and there are few things I have not tried; but I am not blasé yet, thank Heaven! When other things begin to bore me, I turn back to sport — that never palls; there’s too much excitement in it. Wine one cannot drink too much of — I can’t, at the least — without getting tired of it; women — well, for all the poets write about the joys of constancy, there is no pleasure so great as change there; but with a good speat in the river, or clever dogs among the turnips, or a fine fox along a cramped country, a man need never be dull. The ping of a bullet, the shine of a trout’s back, never lose their pleasure. One can’t say as much for the brightest Rhenish that ever cooled one’s throat, nor the brightest glances that ever lured one into folly; though Heaven forbid that I should ever say a word against either!”
“You’d be a very ungrateful fellow if you did,” said I, “seeing that you generally monopolise the very best of both!”
He laughed again. “Well, I’ve seen life — I told you young fellows at Frestonhills, I trusted to my sauce piquante; and I must say it has used me very well hitherto, and I dare say always will as long as I keep away from the Jews. While a man has plenty of tin, all the world offers him the choicest dinner; though, when he has overdrawn at Coutts’s, his friends wouldn’t give him dry bread to keep him out of the union! Be able to dine en prince at home, and you’ll be invited out every night of your life; be hungry au troisième, and you must not lick the crumbs from under your sworn allies’ tables, those jolly good fellows, who have surfeited themselves at yours many a time! Oh yes, I enjoy life; a man always can as long as he can pay for it!”
With which axiom De Vigne rose from his rocking-chair, laid down his pipe, and stretched himself.
“It looks fine out yonder. Our club think of challenging your University Eight for love, good will, and — a gold cup. We never do anything for nothing in England; if we play, we must play for money or ornaments: I should like to do the thing for the sake of the fun, but that isn’t a general British feeling at all. Money is to us, all that glory was to the Romans, and is to the French. Genius is valued by the money it makes; artists are prized by the price of their pictures. If the nation is grateful, once in a hundred years, it votes — a pension; and if we want to have a good-humoured contest, we must wait till there are subscriptions enough to buy a reward to tempt us! Come along, Arthur, let’s have a pull to keep us in practice!”
We accordingly had a pull up that time-honoured stream, where Trinity has so often won challenge cups, and luckless King’s got bumped, thanks to its quasi-Etonians’ idleness. Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay. Where thousands of young fellows have dropped down under its trees, dreaming over Don Juan or the Lotus-eaters; or pulled along, straining muscle and nerve against the Head-Boat; or sauntered beside it in sweet midsummer eves, with some fair face upraised to theirs, long forgotten, out of mind now, but which then had power to make them oblivious of proctors and rustication! We pulled along with hearty good-will, aided by an oar with which, could we have had it to help us in the University race, we must have beaten Oxford out-and-out. For the Brocas, and Little Surley, could have told you tales of that long, lofty, slashing, stroke; and if, monsieur or madame, you are a “sentimental psychologist,” and sneer it down as “animal,” let me tell you it is the hand which is strong in sport, and in righteous strife, that will be warmer in help, and firmer in friendship, and more generous in deed, than the puny weakling’s who cannot hold his own.
“By George!” said De Vigne, resting at last upon his oar, “is there anything that gives one a greater zest in life than bodily exertion?”
A sentiment, however, in which indolent Curly declined to coincide. “Give me,” said he, “a lot of cushions, a hookah, and a novel; and your ‘bodily exertion’ may go to the deuce for me!”
De Vigne laughed; he was not over merciful on the present-day assumption in beardless boys of effeminacy, nil admirari-ism and blasé indifference. He was far too frank himself for affectation and too spirited for ennui; at the present, at least, his sauce piquante had not lost its flavour.
He had seen life; he had hunted with the Pytchley, stalked royals in the Highlands, flirted with maids of honour, supped in the Bréda Quartier, had dinners fit for princes at the Star and Garter, and pleasant hours in cabinets particuliers at Véfours and the Maison Dorée. He and his yacht, when he had got leave, had gone everywhere that a yacht could go; the Ionian Isles knew no figure-head better than his Aphrodite’s of the R.V.Y.S.; it had carried him up to salmon fishing in Norway, and across the Atlantic to hunt buffaloes and cariboos; to Granada, to look into soft Spanish faces by the dim moonlight in the Alhambra; and to Venice, to fling bouquets upwards to the balconies, and whisper to Venetian masks which showed him the glance of long almond eyes, in the riotous Carnival time. He had a brief campaign in Scinde, where he was wounded in the hip, and tenderly nursed by a charming Civil Service widow; where his daring drew down upon him the admiring rebuke of his commanding officer, but won him his troop, which promotion brought him back to England and enabled him to exchange into the — th Lancers, technically the Dashers, the nom de guerre of that daring and brilliant corps. And now, De Vigne, who had never lost sight of me since the Frestonhills days, but, on the contrary, had often asked me to go and shoot over Vigne, when he assembled a crowd of guests in that magnificent-mansion; having a couple of months’ leave, had run down to Newmarket, for the October Meeting; and had come at my entreaty to spend a week in Granta, where, I need not tell you, we feted him, and did him the honours of the place in style.
Crash! crash! went the relentless chapel-bell the next morning, waking us out of dreamless slumber that had endured not much more than an hour, owing to a late night of it with a man at John’s over punch and vingt-et-un; and we had to tumble out of bed and rush into chapel, twisting on our coats and swearing at our destinies, as we went. The Viewaway (the cleverest pack in the easterly counties, though not, I admit, up to the Burton, or Tedworth, or Melton mark) met that day, for. the first run of the season, at Euston Hollows, five miles from Cambridge; and Curly, who overcame his laziness on such occasions, staggered into his stall, the pink dexterously covered with his surplice, his bright hair for once in disorder, and his blue eyes most unmistakably sleepy. “Who’d be a hapless undergrad? That fellow De Vigne’s dreaming away in comfort, while we’re dragged out by the heels, for a lot of confounded humbug and form,” lamented Curly to me as we entered; while the readers hurried the prayers over, in that singsong recitative in favour with collegemen — a cross between the drone of a gnat, and the whine of a Suffolk peasant. We dozed comfortably, sitting down, and getting up, at the right times, by sheer force of habit; or read Dumas, or Balzac, under cover of our prayer-books. The freshmen alone, tried to look alive and attentive; those better seasoned knew it was but a ritual, much such an empty, but time-honoured, one, as the gathering of Fellows at the Signing of the Leases, at King’s; or any other moss-grown formula of Mater; and attempted no such thing; but rushed out of chapel again, the worse instead of the better for the ill-timed devotions, which forced us, in our thoughtless youth, into irreverence and hypocrisy: a formula as absurd, as soulless, and as sad to see, as the praying windmills of the Hindoos, at which those “heads of the Church,” who uphold morning-chapel as the sole safeguard of Granta, smile in pitying derision!
When I got back to my rooms I found breakfast waiting, and De Vi
gne standing on the hearth-rug. Audit and hare-pie had not much temptation for us that morning! we were soon in the saddle, and off to Euston Hollows. After a brisk gallop to cover, we found ourselves riding up the approach to the M.F.H.’s house, where the meet took place in an open sweep of grassland belted with trees, just facing the hall, where were gathered all the men of the Viewaway, mounted on powerful hunters, and looking all over like goers. There was every type of the genus sporting man; stout, square farmers, with honest bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very suspicious of brandy; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread; the courteous, cordial aristocratic M.F.H., with the men of his class, the county gentry; rough, ill-looking cads, awkward at all things save crossing country; no end of pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into everybody’s way; and last, but in our eyes not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds throw off.