Ouida - Under Two Flags стр 6.

Nothing meant anything under 60,000 pounds a year with Cecil, as the minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look of genuine annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was on his face, the picture of carelessness and gentle indifference habitually, though shadowed now as he crossed the courtyard after his after-midnight visit to his steeple-chaser. He had backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or lose a cracker on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough lying on his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to pay his grooms book, or a notion where to get more, if the King should find his match over the ridge and furrow in the morning!

It was not pleasant: a cynical, savage, world-disgusted Timon derives on the whole a good amount of satisfaction from his break-down in the fine philippics against his contemporaries that it is certain to afford, and the magnificent grievances with which it furnishes him; but when life is very pleasant to a man, and the world very fond of him; when existence is perfectly smooth,bar that single pressure of money,and is an incessantly changing kaleidoscope of London seasons, Paris winters, ducal houses in the hunting months, dinners at the Pall Mall Clubs, dinners at the Star and Garter, dinners irreproachable everywhere; cottage for Ascot week, yachting with the R. V. Y. Club, Derby handicaps at Hornsey, pretty chorus-singers set up in Bijou villas, dashing rosieres taken over to Baden, warm corners in Belvoir, Savernake, and Longeat battues, and all the rest of the general programme, with no drawback to it, except the duties at the Palace, the heat of a review, or the extravagance of a pampered lionnethen to be pulled up in that easy, swinging gallop for sheer want of a golden shoe, as one may say, is abominably bitter, and requires far more philosophy to endure than Timon would ever manage to master. It is a bore, an unmitigated bore; a harsh, hateful, unrelieved martyrdom that the world does not see, and that the world would not pity if it did.

Never mind! Things will come right. Forest King never failed me yet; he is as full of running as a Derby winner, and hell go over the yawners like a bird, thought Cecil, who never confronted his troubles with more than sixty seconds thought, and who was of that light, impassible, half-levity, half-languor of temperament that both throws off worry easily and shirks it persistently. Sufficient for the day, etc., was the essence of his creed; and if he had enough to lay a fiver at night on the rubber, he was quite able to forget for the time that he wanted five hundred for settling-day in the morning, and had not an idea how to get it. There was not a trace of anxiety on him when he opened a low arched door, passed down a corridor, and entered the warm, full light of that chamber of liberty, that sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple of refuge, thrice blessed in all its forms throughout the land, that consecrated Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the meerschaum, and the paradise of the nargilethe smoking-room.

A spacious, easy chamber, too; lined with the laziest of divans, seen just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly a score of men in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and with faces as well known in the Park at six oclock in May, and on the Heath in October; in Paris in January, and on the Solent in August; in Pratts of a summers night, and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features that came round as regularly as the July or the Waterloo Cup. Some were puffing away in calm, meditative comfort, in silence that they would not have broken for any earthly consideration; others were talking hard and fast, and through the air heavily weighted with the varieties of tobacco, from tiny cigarettes to giant cheroots, from rough bowls full of cavendish to sybaritic rose-water hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose together: Gave him too much riding, the idiot. Take the field, bar one. Nothing so good for the mare as a little niter and antimony in her mash. Not at all! The Regent and Rake cross in the old strain, always was black-tan with a white frill. The Earls as good a fellow as Lady Flora; always give you a mount. Nothing like a Kate Terry though, on a bright day, for salmon. Faster thing I never knew; found at twenty minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown Water at ten to twelve. All these various phrases were rushing in among each other, and tossed across the eddies of smoke in the conflicting tongues loosened in the tabagie and made eloquent, though slightly inarticulate, by pipe-stems; while a tall, fair man, with the limbs of a Hercules, the chest of a prize-fighter, and the face of a Raphael Angel, known in the Household as Seraph, was in the full blood of a story of whist played under difficulties in the Doncaster express.

I wanted a monkey; I wanted monkeys awfully, he was stating as Forest Kings owner came into the smoking-room.

Did you, Seraph? The Zoo or the Clubs could supply you with apes fully developed to any amount, said Bertie, as he threw himself down.

You be hanged! laughed the Seraph, known to the rest of the world as the Marquis of Rockingham, son of the Duke of Lyonnesse. I wished monkeys, but the others wished ponies and hundreds, so I gave in; Vandebur and I won two rubbers, and wed just begun the third when the train stopped with a crash; none of us dropped the cards though, but the tricks and the scores all went down with the shaking. Cant play in that row, said Charlie, for the women were shrieking like mad, and the engine was roaring like my mare PhilippaIm afraid shell never be cured, poor thing!so I put my head out and asked what was up? Wed run into a cattle train. Anybody hurt? No, nobody hurt; but we were to get out. Ill be shot if I get out, I told em, till Ive finished the rubber. But you must get out, said the guard; carriages must be moved. Nobody says must to him, said Van (hed drank more Perles du Rhin than was good for him in Doncaster); dont you know the Seraph? Man stared. Yes, sir; know the Seraph, sir; leastways, did, sir, afore he died; see him once at Moulsey Mill, sir; his one two was amazin. Waters soon threw up the sponge. We were all dying with laughter, and I tossed him a tenner. There, my good fellow, said I, shunt the carriage and let us finish the game. If another train comes up, give it Lord Rockinghams compliments and say hell thank it to stop, because collisions shake his trumps together. Man thought us mad; took tenner though, shunted us to one side out of the noise, and we played two rubbers more before theyd repaired the damage and sent us on to town.

And the Seraph took a long-drawn whiff from his silver meerschaum, and then a deep draught of soda and brandy to refresh himself after the narrativebiggest, best-tempered, and wildest of men in or out of the Service, despite the angelic character of his fair-haired head, and blue eyes that looked as clear and as innocent as those of a six-year-old child.

Not the first time by a good many that youve shunted off the straight, Seraph? laughed Cecil, substituting an amber mouth-piece for his half-finished cheroot. Ive been having a good-night look at the King. Hell stay.

Of course he will, chorused half a dozen voices.

With all our pots on him, added the Seraph. Hes too much of a gentleman to put us all up a tree; he knows he carries the honor of the Household.

There are some good mounts, theres no denying that, said Chesterfield of the Blues (who was called Tom for no other reason than that it was entirely unlike his real name of Adolphus), where he was curled up almost invisible, except for the movement of the jasmine stick of his chibouque. That brute, Day Star, is a splendid fencer, and for a brook jumper, it would be heard to best Wild Geranium, though her shoulders are not quite what they ought to be. Montacute, too, can ride a good thing, and hes got one in Pas de Charge.