by Ouida
He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer’s Field, to be long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived in the right set. “If it be very severe,” he would say, “it may give him a pang once a twelvemonth — say the morning after a whitebait dinner. Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may generally be traced to too many truffles or olives.”
Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; would not have thought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement and variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without even the trouble of pulling the strings. He had naturally considerable talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have been as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.
“If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I’d use such wits as I have: but why should I now?” he said on one occasion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia. “The best style is only just to say yes or no — and be bored even in saying that — and a very comfortable style it is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening your lips.”
“But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then? You would not get amused,” suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.
“Well — everybody is, pretty nearly,” said Bertie; “but there are always a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners — social rockets, you know — who will always fire themselves off to sparkle instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses. It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore to have to talk.”
He went that night, as he had said, to half a dozen good houses, midnight receptions, and after-midnight waltzes; making his bow in a Cabinet Minister’s vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at a Premier’s At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an ambassadress’ drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their own Clicquot.
When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five o’clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours’ time, without the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.
“Here — get me to perch as quick as you can, Rake,” he murmured, dropping into an armchair; astonished that Rake did not answer, he saw standing by him instead the boy Berkeley. Surprise was a weakness of raw inexperience that Cecil never felt; his gazette as Commander-in-Chief, or the presence of the Wandering Jew in his lodgings would never have excited it in him. In the first place, he would have merely lifted his eyebrows and said, “Be a fearful bore!” in the second he would have done the same, and murmured, “Queer old cad!”
Surprised, therefore, he was not, at the boy’s untimely apparition; but his eyes dwelt on him with a mild wonder, while his lips dropped but one word:
“Amber-Amulet?”
Amber-Amulet was a colt of the most marvelous promise at the Royallieu establishment, looked on to win the next Clearwell, Guineas, and Derby as a certainty. An accident to the young chestnut was the only thing that suggested itself as of possibly sufficient importance to make his brother wait for him at five o’clock on a June morning.
Berkeley looked up confusedly, impatiently:
“You are never thinking but of horses or women,” he said peevishly; “there may be others things in the world, surely.”
“Indisputably there are other things in the world, dear boy; but none so much to my taste,” said Cecil composedly, stretching himself with a yawn. “With every regard to hospitality and the charms of your society, might I hint that five o’clock in the morning is not precisely the most suitable hour for social visits and ethical questions?”
“For God’s sake, be serious, Bertie! I am the most miserable wretch in creation.”
Cecil opened his closed eyes, with the sleepy indifference vanished from them, and a look of genuine and affectionate concern on the serene insouciance of his face.
“Ah! you would stay and play that chicken hazard,” he thought, but he was not one who would have reminded the boy of his own advice and its rejection; he looked at him in silence a moment, then raised himself with a sigh.
“Dear boy, why didn’t you sleep upon it? I never think of disagreeable things till they wake me with my coffee; then I take them up with the cup and put them down with it. You don’t know how well it answers; it disposes of them wonderfully.”
The boy lifted his head with a quick, reproachful anger, and in the gaslight his cheeks were flushed, his eyes full of tears.
“How brutal you are, Bertie! I tell you I am ruined, and you care no more than if you were a stone. You only think of yourself; you only live for yourself!”
He had forgotten the money that had been tossed to him off that very table the day before the Grand Military; he had forgotten the debts that had been paid for him out of the winnings of that very race. There is a childish, wayward, wailing temper, which never counts benefits received save as title-deeds by which to demand others. Cecil looked at him with just a shadow of regret, not reproachful enough to be rebuke, in his glance, but did not defend himself in any way against the boyish, passionate accusation, nor recall his own past gifts into remembrance.
“‘Brutal’! What a word, little one. Nobody’s brutal now; you never see that form nowadays. Come, what is the worst this time?”
Berkeley looked sullenly down on the table where his elbows leaned; scattering the rose-notes, the French novels, the cigarettes, and the gold essence-bottles with which it was strewn; there was something dogged yet agitated, half-insolent yet half-timidly irresolute, upon him, that was new there.
“The worst is soon told,” he said huskily, and his teeth chattered together slightly, as though with cold, as he spoke. “I lost two hundred to-night; I must pay it, or be disgraced forever; I have not a farthing; I cannot get the money for my life; no Jews will lend to me, I am under age; and — and” — his voice sank lower and grew more defiant, for he knew that the sole thing forbidden him peremptorily by both his father and his brothers was the thing he had now to tell— “and — I borrowed three ponies of Granville Lee yesterday, as he came from the Corner with a lot of banknotes after settling-day. I told him I would pay them to-morrow; I made sure I should have won to-night.”
The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy’s confession.
Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother’s name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation — it was to borrow of a friend.
“You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley,” he said, with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his voice. “Have you no common knowledge of honor?”
The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.
“You are severe enough,” he said gloomily, and yet insolently. “Are you such a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, are about one-fifth of yours.”<
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For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil’s temper almost gave way. Be his debts what they would, there was not one among them to his friends, or one for which the law could not seize him. He was silent; he did not wish to have a scene of discussion with one who was but a child to him; moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to avert even a dispute, at any cost.
He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting his cheroot in his mouth.
“Tres cher, you are not courteous,” he said wearily; “but it may be that you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anything except the fit of my coats; I don’t think I ever told you I was. I am not altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a model for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor’s window in Bond Street to show the muffs how to dress. That isn’t the point, though; you say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow — to-day rather. I can suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal straight out; he never refuses you.”
Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly moved by fear.
“I would rather cut my throat,” he said, with a wild exaggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; “as I live I would! I have had so much from him lately — you don’t know how much — and now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on Royallieu—”
“What? Foreclose what?”
“The mortgage!” answered Berkeley impatiently; to his childish egotism it seemed cruel and intolerable that any extremities should be considered save his own. “You know the lands are mortgaged as deeply as Monti and the entail would allow them. They threatened to foreclose — I think that’s the word — and Royal has had God knows what work to stave them off. I no more dare face him, and ask him for a sovereign now than I dare ask him to give me the gold plate off the sideboard.”
Cecil listened gravely; it cut him more keenly than he showed to learn the evils and the ruin that so closely menaced his house; and to find how entirely his father’s morbid mania against him severed him from all the interests and all the confidence of his family, and left him ignorant of matters even so nearly touching him as these.
“Your intelligence is not cheerful, little one,” he said, with a languid stretch of his limbs; it was his nature to glide off painful subjects. “And — I really am sleepy! You think there is no hope Royal would help you?”
“I tell you I will shoot myself through the brain rather than ask him.”
Bertie moved restlessly in the soft depths of his lounging-chair; he shunned worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different, — less extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift, — he might have exercised a better influence, and his brother’s young life might have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary in which he lived, the utter inability he had to raise even the sum that the boy now needed; a sum so trifling, in his set, and with his habits, that he had betted it over and over again in a clubroom, on a single game of whist. It cut him with a bitter, impatient pain; he was as generous as the winds, and there is no trial keener to such a temper than the poverty that paralyzes its power to give.
“It is no use to give you false hopes, young one,” he said gently. “I can do nothing! You ought to know me by this time; and if you do, you know too that if the money was mine it would be yours at a word — if you don’t, no matter! Frankly, Berk, I am all down-hill; my bills may be called in any moment; when they are I must send in my papers to sell, and cut the country, if my duns don’t catch me before, which they probably will; in which event I shall be to all intents and purposes — dead. This is not lively conversation, but you will do me the justice to say that it was not I who introduced it. Only — one word for all, my boy; understand this: if I could help you I would, cost what it might, but as matters stand — I cannot.”
And with that Cecil puffed a great cloud of smoke to envelope him; the subject was painful, the denial wounded him by whom it had to be given full as much as it could wound him whom it refused. Berkeley heard it in silence; his head still hung down, his color changing, his hands nervously playing with the bouquet-bottles, shutting and opening their gold tops.
“No — yes — I know,” he said hurriedly; “I have no right to expect it, and have been behaving like a cur, and — and — all that, I know. But — there is one way you could save me, Bertie, if it isn’t too much for a fellow to ask.”
“I can’t say I see the way, little one,” said Cecil, with a sigh. “What is it?”
“Why — look here. You see I’m not of age; my signature is of no use; they won’t take it; else I could get money in no time on what must come to me when Royal dies; though ’tisn’t enough to make the Jews ‘melt’ at a risk. Now — now — look here. I can’t see that there could be any harm in it. You are such chums with Lord Rockingham, and he’s as rich as all the Jews put together. What could there be in it if you just asked him to lend you a monkey for me? He’d do it in a minute, because he’d give his head away to you — they all say so — and he’ll never miss it. Now, Bertie — will you?”
In his boyish incoherence and its disjointed inelegance the appeal was panted out rather than spoken; and while his head drooped and the hot color burned in his face, he darted a swift look at his brother, so full of dread and misery that it pierced Cecil to the quick as he rose from his chair and paced the room, flinging his cheroot aside; the look disarmed the reply that was on his lips, but his face grew dark.
“What you ask is impossible,” he said briefly. “If I did such a thing as that, I should deserve to be hounded out of the Guards to-morrow.”
The boy’s face grew more sullen, more haggard, more evil, as he still bent his eyes on the table, his glance not meeting his brother’s.
“You speak as if it would be a crime,” he muttered savagely, with a plaintive moan of pain in the tone; he thought himself cruelly dealt with and unjustly punished.
“It would be the trick of a swindler, and it would be the shame of a gentleman,” said Cecil, as briefly still. “That is answer enough.”
“Then you will not do it?”
“I have replied already.”
There was that in the tone, and in the look with which he paused before the table, that Berkeley had never heard or seen in him before; something that made the supple, childish, petulant, cowardly nature of the boy shrink and be silenced; something for a single instant of the haughty and untamable temper of the Royallieu blood that awoke in the too feminine softness and sweetness of Cecil’s disposition.
“You said that you would aid me at any cost, and now that I ask you so wretched a trifle, you treat me as if I were a scoundrel,” he moaned passionately. “The Seraph would give you the money at a word. It is your pride — nothing but pride. Much pride is worth to us who are penniless beggars!”
“If we are penniless beggars, by what right should we borrow of other men?”
“You are wonderfully scrupulous, all of a sudden!”
Cecil shrugged his shoulders slightly and began to smoke again. He did not attempt to push the argument. His character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of misconstruction.
“You are a brute to me!” went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman’s. “You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth. You’ll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don’t care if I should die in a debtor’s prison! You only brag about ‘honor’ when you want to
get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!”
“Melodramatic, and scarcely correct,” murmured Bertie.
The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself — partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.
There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never own a reality.
“Little one, you are heated, and don’t know what you say,” he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in the boy’s eyes. “Don’t be down about this; you will pull through, never fear. Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly. I know him better than you; he will be savage for a second, but he would sell every stick and stone on the land for your sake; he will see you safe through this. Only bear one thing in mind — tell him all. No half measures, no half confidences; tell him the worst, and ask his help. You will not come back without it.”