by Ouida
Now, that was just the sort of celebrity that made me mad to see the owner of it; there wasn’t a living being, except that year’s favorite out of the Whitewall establishment, that I was half so eager to look at, or so reverent when I thought of, as “the Killer.” I was very young then. I had gone through a classic course of yellow covers from Jeffs’ and Rolandi’s, and I had a vague impression that a man who had had a dozen barrière affairs abroad, and been “enfant” to every lovely lionne of his day, must of necessity be like the heroes of Delphine Demireps’ novels, who had each of them always a “je ne sais quoi de farouche et de fier dans ses grands yeux noirs, et toute la révélation d’une ame usée, mais dominée par des passions encore inépuisables, écrite sur son sombre et pale visage,” &c., &c., in the Demireps’ most telling style.
I don’t know quite what I expected to see in the Killer, but I think it was a sort of compound of Monte Christo, Mephistopheles, and Murat mixed in one; what I did see was a slight delicate man with a face as fair and soft as a girl’s, the gentlest possible manners, and a laugh like music. Deadly Dash had led a life as bad as he could lead, had lit his cigar without a tremor in the wrist, on many gray mornings, while his adversary lay dying hard among the red rank grasses, had gamed so deep twenty-four hours at a stretch that the most reckless galérie in Europe held their breath to watch his play; had had a tongue of silver for his intrigues and a nerve of steel for his vendetta; had lived in reckless rioting and drunk deep; but the Demirep would not have had him at any price in her romance; he looked so simply and quietly thorough-bred, he was so utterly guiltless of all her orthodox traits. The gentlest of mortals was Deadly Dash; when you first heard his sweet silvery voice, and his laughter as light and airy as a woman’s, you would never believe how often abroad there a dead man had been left to get stiff and cold among the clotted herbage, while the Killer went out of the town by the early express, smoking and reading the “Charivari,” and sipping some cold Curaçoa punch out of his flask.
“Of course!” growled a man to me once in the Guards’ smoking-room, an order of the Scots Fusilleers to Montreal having turned him misanthrope. “Did Mephistopheles ever come out in full harness, with horns and tail complete, eh? Not such a fool. He looked like a gentleman, and talked like a wit. Would the most dunder-headed Cain in Christendom, I should be glad to know, be such an ass as to go about town with the brand on his forehead, when he could turn down Bond Street any day and get a dash of the ladies’ pearl powder? Who ever shows anything now, my good fellow? Not that Dash ‘paints,’ to give the deuce his due — except himself a little blacker even than he is; he don’t cant; he couldn’t cant; not to save his life, I believe. But as to his bewitching you, almost as bad as he does the women, I know all about that. I used to swear by him till — —”
“Till what?”
“Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn’t speak after that, you see. Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Curaçoa punch in Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed Charlie,—” and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn’t humbug, and an uncalled-for sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Curaçoa brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail; — on the whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? “Keep clear of the Killer, though, young one,” he added, as he sauntered out. “He’s like that cheetah cub of Berkeley’s; soft as silk, you know, patte de velours, and what d’ye call ’em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to deal with.”
I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon — Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer’s arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.
At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched little chorus-singer of the Café Alcazar, who took their fancies both at once. The mondes thought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know, but the audacity of a cavalry man’s having potted a Very Serene High Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet, would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to plenty of “floating little bills,” could not bid high enough to purchase his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of virtue, “Oblivion cannot be hired, — unless,” adds Society, dropping to mellowest murmur her whisper, “unless you can give us a premium!” So Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from the Horse Guards — sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally, irretrievably, struck out.
Certainly the fellow was a bad fellow, and deserved his crash so far; he had no scruples, and no conscience; he spared neither woman nor man; of remorse he had never felt a twinge, and if you were in his path he would pick you off some way or other as indifferently as if you were one of the pigeons at Hornsey. And yet, he had been kind to me, though I was a young one; with his own variable Free Lance sort of liberality, the man would give his last sou to get you out of any difficulty, and would carry off your mistress, or beggar you at chicken-hazard, with the self-same pleasant air the next day: and I could not help being sorry that things had come to this pass with him. He shot so superbly! Put him where you would, in a warm corner while the bouquets of pheasants were told off; in a punt, while a square half-mile of wild-ducks whirred up from the marshes; in a dark forest alley in Transylvania, while the great boar rushed down through the twilight, foaming blood and roaring fury; in a still Indian night with the only target here and there a dusky head diving amidst the jhow jungle three hundred yards away: put him where you would, he was such a magnificent shot! The sins of a Frankenstein should not have lost such a marksman as Deadly Dash to the Service.
But the authorities thought otherwise; they were not open to the fact, that the man who had been out in more barrière affairs, and had won more Grand Military stakes than any other, should, by all laws of war-policy, have had his blackest transgressions forgiven him, till he could have been turned to account against Ghoorkas, Maories, or Caffres. The authorities instead, made him send in his papers, not knowing the grand knack of turning a scamp into a hero — a process that requires some genius and some clairvoyance in the manipulator, — and Deadly Dash, with his lightest and airiest laugh, steamed down channel one late autumn night, marked, disgraced, and outlawed, for creditors by the score were after him, knowing very well that he and his old gay lawless life, and his own wild pleasant world, and his old lands yonder in the green heart of the grass countries that had gone rood by rood to the Hebrews, were all divorced for ever with a great gulf between them that could never close.
So he dropped out of the Service, out of the country, out of remembrance, out of regret; nobody said a De Profundis over him, and some men breathed the freer. W
e can rarely be sure of any who will be sorry to miss us; but we can always be certain of some to be glad we are gone. And in the Killer’s case these last were legion. Here and there were one or two who owed him a wayward, inconstant bizarre fit of generosity; but there were on the other hand hundreds who owed him nothing less than entire ruin.
So Deadly Dash went with nobody to regret him and nobody to think of him for a second, after the nine hours’ wonder in the clubs and the mess-rooms that his levanting “under a cloud” occasioned; and so the old sobriquet, that had used to have so signal a notoriety, dropped out of men’s mouths and was forgotten. Where he was gone no one knew; and to be sure no one asked. Metaphorically, he was gone to the devil; and when a man takes that little tour, if he furnish talk for a day he has had very distinguished and lengthened obsequies as friendship goes in this world. Now and then in the course of half-a-dozen years I remembered him, when I looked up at the head of a Royal over my mantelpiece, with thirteen points, that he had stalked once in Ayrshire and given to me; but nobody else gave a thought to the Killer. Time passed, and whether he had been killed fighting in Chili or Bolivia, shot himself at Homburg, become Mussulman and entered the Sultan’s army, gone to fight with the Kabyles and Bedouins, turned brigand for the Neapolitan Bourbons, or sunk downward by the old well-worn stage, so sadly and so often travelled, into an adventurer living by the skill of his écarté and the dread surety of his shot, we did not know; we did not care. When society has given a man the sack, it matters uncommonly little whether he has given himself a shroud.
Seven or eight years after the name of Deadly Dash had ceased to be heard among cavalry men, and quoted on all things “horsey,” whether of the flat or of the ridge and furrow, I was in the Confederate States, on leave for a six months’ tour there. It was after Lee’s raid across the border and the days of Gettysburgh. I had run the blockade in a fast-built clipper, and pushed on at once into the heart of Virginia, to be in the full heat of whatever should come on the cards; cutting the cities rather, and keeping as much as I could to the camps and the woods, for I wanted to see the real thing in the rough. In my relish for adventure, however, I was a trifle, as it proved, too foolhardy.
Starting alone one day to cross the thirty miles or so that parted me from the encampment of some Virginian Horse, with no other companions than a very weedy-looking steel gray, and a brace of revolvers, I fairly “lost tracks,” and had not a notion of my way out of a wilderness of morass and forest, all glowing with the scarlet and the green of the Indian summer. Here and there were beautiful wild pools and lakes shut in by dense vegetation, so dense, that at noon it was dark as twilight, and great tablelands of rock jutted out black and rugged in places; but chiefly as far as was to be seen stretched the deep entangled woodland, with nothing else to break it, brooding quietly over square leagues of swamp. The orioles were singing their sweetest, wildest music overhead; sign of war there was none, save to be sure, now and then when I came on a black, arid circle, where a few charred timbers showed where a hut had been burnt down and deserted, or my horse shied and snorted uneasily, and half stumbled over some shapeless log on the ground — a log that when you looked closer was the swollen shattered body of a man who had died hard, with the grasses wrenched up in his fingers that the ants had eaten bare, and the hollows of his eyes staring open where the carrion birds had plucked the eyeballs out. And near him there were sure to be, half sunk in swamp, or cleaned to skeletons by the eagles and hawks, five, or ten, or twenty more, lying nameless and unburied there, where they had fallen in some scuffle with pickets, or some stray cavalry skirmish, to be told off as “missing,” and to be thought of no more. These groups I came upon more than once rotting among the rich Virginian soil, while the scarlet and purple weight of blossoming boughs swayed above, and the bright insect life fluttered humming around them; they were the only highway marks through the wooded wilderness.
So lonely was it mile after mile, and so little notion had I of either the way in or the way out, that the hallali! of a boar-hunt, or the sweet mellow tongues of the hounds when they have found in the coverts at home, were never brighter music to me than the sharp crack of rifles and the long sullen roll of musketry as they suddenly broke the silence, while I rode along, firing from the west that lay on my left. The gray, used to powder, pointed his ears and quickened his pace. Though a weedy, fiddle-headed beast, his speed was not bad, and I rattled him over the ground, crashing through undergrowth and wading through pools, with all my blood up at the tune of those ringing cheery shots; the roar growing louder and louder with every moment, and the sulphur scent of the smoke borne stronger and stronger down on the wind, till the horse broke pêle-mêle through a network of parasites; dashed downward along a slope of dank herbage, slipping at every step, and with his hind legs tucked under him; and shot, like a run-in for a race, on to a green plateau, where the skirmish was going on in hot earnest.
A glance told me how the land lay. A handful of Southern troopers held their own with tremendous difficulty against three divisions of Federal infantry, whom they had unexpectedly encountered, as the latter were marching across the plateau with some batteries of foot artillery, — the odds were probably scarcely less than five to one. The Southerners were fighting magnificently, as firm in their close square of four hundred as the Consular Guard at Marengo, but so surrounded by the Northern host, that they looked like a little island circled round by raging breakers. Glancing down on the plain as my horse scoured and slid along the incline, the nucleus of Southerners looked hopelessly lost amidst the belching fire and pressing columns of the enemy. The whole was surrounded and hidden by the whirling clouds of dust and smoke that swirled above in a white heavy mist; but through this the sabres flashed, the horses’ heads reared, maddened and foam-covered, like so many bas-reliefs of Bucephalus, the lean rifle-barrels glittered, and for a moment I saw the Southern leader, steady as a rock in the centre, hewing like a trooper right and left, and with a gray heron’s feather floating from his sombrero, a signal that seemed as well known and as closely followed as the snowy plume of Murat.
To have looked on at this and not have taken a share in it, one would have been a stone, not a man, and much less a cavalry-man; I need not tell you that I smashed the gray across the plateau, hurled him into the thick of the mêlée, dashed somehow through the Federal ranks, and was near the gray plume and fighting for the Old Dominion before you could have shouted a stave of “Dixie.” I was a “non-combatant,” I was a “neutral” — delicate Anglo-euphemism for coward, friend to neither and traitor to both! — I was on a tour of observation, and had no business to fire a shot for one or the other perhaps, but I forgot all that, and with the bridle in my teeth and a pistol in each hand, I rode down to give one blow the more for the weak side.
How superbly that Gray Feather fought! — keeping his men well up round him, though saddle after saddle was emptied, and horse after horse tore riderless out of the ranks, or reeled over on their heads, spurting blood, he sat like a statue, he fought like a Titan, his sabre seemed flashing unceasingly in the air, so often was it raised to come down again like lightning through a sword-arm, or lay open a skull to the brains; the shots ploughed up the earth round him, and rattled like hail through the air, a score of balls were aimed at him alone, a score of sabres crossed his own; but he was cool as St. Lawrence ice, and laid the men dead in struggling heaps under his charger’s hoofs; only to fight near the man was a glorious intoxication; you seemed to “breathe blood” till you got drunk with it.
The four hundred had been mowed down to two; I did as good work as I could, having wrenched a sword out of some dead trooper’s hand; but I was only one, and the Northerners counted by thousands. Come out of it alive I never expected to do; but I vow it was the happiest day of my life — the pace was so splendidly fast! The Gray Feather at last glanced anxiously around; his men stuck like death to him, ready to be hewed down one by one, and die game; his teeth were set tight, and his eyes had a fl
ash in them like steel. “Charge! and cut through!” he shouted, his voice rolling out like a clarion, giving an order that it seemed could be followed by nothing short of supernatural aid. The Southrons thought otherwise; they only heard to obey; they closed up as steadily as though they were a squadron on parade, despite the great gaps between them of dying chargers, and of heaped-up killed and wounded, that broke their ranks like so much piled stones and timber; they halted a moment, the murderous fire raking them right and left, front and rear; then, with that dense mass of troops round them, they charged; shivered the first line that wedged them in; pierced by sheer force of impetus the columns that opened fire in their path; wrenched themselves through as through the steel jaws of a trap, and swept out on to the green level of the open plateau, with a wild rallying Virginian shout that rings in my ears now!