It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion, because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'd you if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.
As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil's box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in the dining room. A cashmere is a Parisian's soul, idol, and fetich; servants could not find it; Cecil, who, to do him this justice, was always as courteous to a comedienne as to a countess, went himself. Passing the open window of another room, he recognized the face of his little brother among a set of young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They had no women with them; but they had brought what was perhaps worse—dice for hazard—and were turning the unconscious Star and Garter unto an impromptu Crockford's over their wine.
Little Berk's pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set tight, his eyes were glittering; the boy had the gambler's passion of the Royallieu blood in its hottest intensity. He was playing with a terrible eagerness that went to Bertie's heart with the same sort of pang of remorse with which he had looked on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bed at home.
Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window.
“Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; will you come?” he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the young fellows.
Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance.
“No, I can't,” he said irritably; “don't you see we are playing, Bertie?”
“I see,” answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of sadness in him, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in his teeth.
“Come away,” he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, who chanced to be close to the casement. “Hazard is the very deuce for anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's a capital set here, and I'm going to half a dozen good houses to-night, when we get back. I'll take you with me. Come! you like waltzing, and all that sort of thing, you know.”
The lad shook himself peevishly; a sullen cloud over his fair, picturesque, boyish face.
“Let me alone before the fellows,” he muttered impatiently. “I won't come, I tell you.”
“Soit!”
Cecil shrugged his shoulders, left the window, found the Lelas' cashmere, and sauntered back to the drags without any more expostulation. The sweetness of his temper could never be annoyed, but also he never troubled himself to utter useless words. Moreover, he had never been in is life much in earnest about anything; it was not worth while.
“A pretty fellow I am to turn preacher, when I have sins enough on my own shoulders for twenty,” he thought; as he shook the ribbons and started the leaders off to the gay music of Laura Lelas' champagne-tuned laughter.
The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, with all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk, though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and unstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant, and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. And Cecil—the last man in the world to turn mentor—would light a cheroot, as he did to-night, and forget all about it. The boy would be right enough when he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy was the essence of laissez-faire.
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,