He knew that a season, a month, a day, might be the only respite left him, the only pause for him, 'twixt his glittering luxurious world and the fiat of outlawry and exile. He knew that the Jews might be down on him any night that he sat at the Guards' mess, flirted with foreign princesses, or laughed at the gossamer gossip of the town over iced drinks in the clubs. His liabilities were tremendous, his resources totally exhausted; but such was the latent recklessness of the careless Royallieu blood, and such the languid devil-may-care of his training and his temper, that the knowledge scarcely ever seriously disturbed his enjoyment of the moment. Somehow, he never realized it.
If any weatherwise had told the Lisbon people of the coming of the great earthquake, do you think they could have brought themselves to realize that midnight darkness, that yawning desolation which were nigh, while the sun was still so bright and the sea so tranquil, and the bloom so sweet on purple pomegranate and amber grape, and the scarlet of odorous flowers, and the blush of a girl's kiss-warmed cheek?
A sentimental metaphor with which to compare the difficulties of a dandy of the Household, because his “stiff” was floating about in too many directions at too many high figures, and he had hardly enough till next pay-day came round to purchase the bouquets he sent and meet the club-fees that were due! But, after all, may it not well be doubted if a sharp shock and a second's blindness, and a sudden sweep down under the walls of the Cathedral or the waters of the Tagus, were not, on the whole, a quicker and pleasanter mode of extinction than that social earthquake—“gone to the bad with a crash”? And the Lisbonites did not more disbelieve in, and dream less of their coming ruin than Cecil did his, while he was doing the season, with engagements enough in a night to spread over a month, the best known horses in the town, a dozen rose-notes sent to his clubs or his lodgings in a day, and the newest thing in soups, colts, beauties, neckties, perfumes, tobaccos, or square dances waiting his dictum to become the fashion.
“How you do go on with those women, Beauty,” growled the Seraph, one day after a morning of fearful hard work consequent on having played the Foot Guards at Lord's, and, in an unwary moment, having allowed himself to be decoyed afterward to a private concert, and very nearly proposed to in consequence, during a Symphony in A; an impending terror from which he could hardly restore himself of his jeopardized safety. “You're horribly imprudent!”
“Not a bit of it,” rejoined Beauty serenely. “That is the superior wisdom and beautiful simplicity of making love to your neighbor's wife—she can't marry you!”
“But she may get you into the D. C.,” mused the Seraph, who had gloomy personal recollection of having been twice through that phase of law and life, and of having been enormously mulcted in damages because he was a Duke in future, and because, as he piteously observed on the occasion, “You couldn't make that fellow Cresswell see that it was they ran away with me each time!”
“Oh, everybody goes through the D. C. somehow or other,” answered Cecil, with philosophy. “It's like the Church, the Commons, and the Gallows, you know—one of the popular Institutions.”
“And it's the only Law Court where the robber cuts a better figure than the robbed,” laughed the Seraph; consoling himself that he had escaped the future chance of showing in the latter class of marital defrauded, by shying that proposal during the Symphony in A, on which his thoughts ran, as the thoughts of one who has just escaped from an Alpine crevasse run on the past abyss in which he had been so nearly lost forever. “I say, Beauty, were you ever near doing anything serious—asking anybody to marry you, eh? I suppose you have been—they do make such awful hard running on one” and the poor hunted Seraph stretched his magnificent limbs with the sigh of a martyred innocent.
“I was once—only once!”
“Ah, by Jove! And what saved you?”
The Seraph lifted himself a little, with a sort of pitying, sympathizing curiosity toward a fellow-sufferer.
“Well, I'll tell you,” said Bertie, with a sigh as of a man who hated long sentences, and who was about to plunge into a painful past. “It's ages ago; day I was at a Drawing room; year Blue Ruin won the Clearwell for Royal, I think. Wedged up there, in that poking place, I saw such a face—the deuce, it almost makes me feel enthusiastic now. She was just out—an angel with a train! She had delicious eyes—like a spaniel's you know—a cheek like this peach, and lips like that strawberry there, on the top of your ice. She looked at me, and I was in love! I knew who she was—Irish lord's daughter—girl I could have had for the asking; and I vow that I thought I would ask her—I actually was as far gone as that; I actually said to myself, I'd hang about her a week or two, and then propose. You'll hardly believe it, but I did. Watched her presented; such grace, such a smile, such a divine lift of the lashes. I was really in love, and with a girl who would marry me! I was never so near a fatal thing in my life——”
“Well?” asked the Seraph, pausing to listen till he let the ice in his sherry-cobbler melt away. When you have been so near breaking your neck down the Matrimonial Matterhorn, it is painfully interesting to hear how your friend escaped the same risks of descent.
“Well,” resumed Bertie, “I was very near it. I did nothing but watch her; she saw me, and I felt she was as flattered and as touched as she ought to be. She blushed most enchantingly; just enough, you know; she was conscious I followed her; I contrived to get close to her as she passed out, so close that I could see those exquisite eyes lighten and gleam, those exquisite lips part with a sigh, that beautiful face beam with the sunshine of a radiant smile. It was the dawn of love I had taught her! I pressed nearer and nearer, and I caught her soft whisper as she leaned to her mother: 'Mamma, I'm so hungry! I could eat a whole chicken!' The sigh, the smile, the blush, the light, were for her dinner—not for me! The spell was broken forever. A girl whom I had looked at could think of wings and merry-thoughts and white sauce! I have never been near a proposal again.”
The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung a hautboy at him.
“Hang you, Beauty! If I didn't think you were going to tell one how you really got out of a serious thing; it is so awfully difficult to keep clear of them nowadays. Those before-dinner teas are only just so many new traps! What became of her—eh?”
“She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, somewhere among the Hebrides. Served her right,” murmured Cecil sententiously. “Only think what she lost just through hungering for a chicken; if I hadn't proposed for her,—for one hardly keeps the screw up to such self-sacrifice as that when one is cool the next morning,—I would have made her the fashion!”
With which masterly description in one phrase of all he could have done for the ill-starred debutante who had been hungry in the wrong place, Cecil lounged out of the club to drive with half a dozen of his set to a water-party—a Bacchanalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters for the Naiads and the Household for their Tritons.
A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in driving down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours over the courses, contributing seven guineas apiece for the repast, listening to the songs of the Café Alcazar, reproduced with matchless elan by a pretty French actress, being pelted with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their best cigars thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving back again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythms ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretching gallop down the Kew Road. It certainly had no other more aquatic feature in it save a little drifting about for twenty minutes before dining, in toy boats and punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the brunette actress, sang a barcarolle.
“Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop.”
“Where be all those
Dear dead women, with such hair too; what's become of all the gold