Ouida - Under Two Flags стр 3.

I couldnt help it, pleaded the lad, with coaxing and almost piteous apology. I backed Grosvenors play, and you know hes always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldnt tell hed go a crowner and have such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, Bertie? I darent ask the governor; and besides I told Poulteney he should have it this morning. What do you think if I sold the mare? But then I couldnt sell her in a minute

Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lads young, fair, womanish face, were very gentle under the long shade of their lashes.

Sell the mare! Nonsense! How should anybody live without a hack? I can pull you through, I dare say. Ah! by George, theres the quarters chiming. I shall be too late, as I live.

Not hurried still, however; even by that near prospect, he sauntered to his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet and gold-filigreed absurdities, and shook out all the banknotes there were in it. There were fives and tens enough to count up 45 pounds. He reached over and caught up a five from a little heap lying loose on a novel of Du Terrails, and tossed the whole across the room to the boy.

There you are, young one! But dont borrow of any but your own people again, Berk. We dont do that. No, no!no thanks! Shut up all that. If ever you get in a hole, Ill take you out if I can. Good-bywill you go to the Lords? Better notnothing to see, and still less to hear. All stale. Thats the only comfort for uswe are outside! he said, with something that almost approached hurry in the utterance; so great was his terror of anything approaching a scene, and so eager was he to escape his brothers gratitude. The boy had taken the notes with delighted thanks indeed, but with that tranquil and unprotesting readiness with which spoiled childishness or unhesitating selfishness accepts gifts and sacrifices from anothers generosity, which have been so general that they have ceased to have magnitude. As his brother passed him, however, he caught his hand a second, and looked up with a mist before his eyes, and a flush half of shame, half of gratitude, on his face.

What a trump you are!how good you are, Bertie!

Cecil laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

First time I ever heard it, my dear boy, he answered, as he lounged down the staircase, his chains clashing and jingling; while, pressing his helmet on to his forehead and pulling the chin scale over his mustaches, he sauntered out into the street where his charger was waiting.

The deuce! he thought, as he settled himself in his stirrups, while the raw morning wind tossed his white plume hither and thither. I never remembered!I dont believe Ive left myself money enough to take Willon and Rake and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I shouldnt have kept enough to take my own ticket with!that would be no end of a sell. On my word I dont know how much theres left on the dressing-table. Well! I cant help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I cant have Berks name show in anything that looks shady.

The 50 pounds had been the last remnant of a bill, done under great difficulties with a sagacious Jew, and Cecil had no more certainty of possessing any more money until next pay-day should come round than he had of possessing the moon; lack of ready money, moreover, is a serious inconvenience when you belong to clubs where pounds and fives are the lowest points, and live with men who take the odds on most events in thousands; but the thing was done; he would not have undone it at the boys loss, if he could; and Cecil, who never was worried by the loss of the most stupendous crusher, and who made it a rule never to think of disagreeable inevitabilities two minutes together, shook his chargers bridle and cantered down Piccadilly toward the barracks, while Black Douglas reared, curveted, made as if he would kick, and finally ended by passaging down half the length of the road, to the imminent peril of all passers-by, and looking eminently glossy, handsome, stalwart, and foam-flecked, while he thus expressed his disapprobation of forming part of the escort from Palace to Parliament.

Home Secretary should see about it; its abominable! If we must come among them, they ought to be made a little odoriferous first. A couple of fire-engines now, playing on them continuously with rose-water and bouquet dEss for an hour before we come up, might do a little good. Ill get some men to speak about it in the house; call it Bill for the Purifying of the Unwashed, and Prevention of their Suffocating Her Majestys Brigades, murmured Cecil to the Earl of Broceliande, next him, as they sat down in their saddles with the rest of the First Life, in front of St. Stephens, with a hazy fog steaming round them, and a London mob crushing against their chargers flanks, while Black Douglas stood like a rock, though a butchers tray was pressed against his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of Cecils prophetic horror, was wildly plunging between his legs, as the hydra-headed rushed down in insane, headlong haste to stare at, and crush on to, that superb body of Guards.

I would give a kingdom for a soda and brandy. Bah! ye gods! What a smell of fish and fustian, signed Bertie, with a yawn of utter famine for want of something to drink and something to smoke, were it only a glass of brown sherry and a little papelito, while he glanced down at the snow-white and jet-black masterpieces of Rakes genius, all smirched, and splashed, and smeared.

He had given fifty pounds away, and scarcely knew whether he should have enough to take his ticket next day into the Shires, and he owed fifty hundred without having the slightest grounds for supposing he should ever be able to pay it, and he cared no more about either of these things than he cared about the Zu-Zus throwing the half-guinea peaches into the river after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit dragon-flies with them; but to be half a day without a cigarette, and to have a disagreeable odor of apples and corduroys wafted up to him, was a calamity that made him insupportably depressed and unhappy.

Well, why not? It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all. Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunters spine broken over the double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just when you wanted to rally the pack; its the whip who carries you off to a division just when youve sat down to your turbot; its the ten seconds by which you miss the train; its the dust that gets in your eyes as you go down to Epsom; its the pretty little rose note that went by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from madame; its the dog that always will run wild into the birds; its the cook who always will season the white soup wrongit is these that are the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.

An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having lost heavy sums through a swindler, with as placid an indifference as if he had lost a toothpick; but he swore like a trooper because a thief had stolen the steel-mounted hoof of a dead pet hunter.

Insufferable! murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn behind his gauntlet; the Lines nothing half so bad as this; one day in a London mob beats a years campaigning; whats charging a pah to charging an oyster-stall, or a parapet of fascines to a bristling row of umbrellas?

Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms was a question of military interest never answered, as Cecil scattered the umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the Houses of Parliament full trot with the rest of the escort on the return to the Palace; the afternoon sun breaking out with a brightened gleam from the clouds, and flashing off the drawn swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering breastplates, the gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers.