Under Two Flags | Page 7

is everybody. The normal state of man is to want money. Two ponies. What's it for?"
"I lost it at chicken-hazard last night. Poulteney lent it me, and I told him I would send it him in the morning. The ponies were gone before I thought of it, Bertie, and I haven't a notion where to get them to pay him again."
"Heavy stakes, young one, for you," murmured Cecil, while his hand dropped from the boy's shoulder, and a shadow of gravity passed over his face; money was very scarce with himself. Berkeley gave him a hurried, appealing glance. He was used to shift all his anxieties on to his elder brother, and to be helped by him under any difficulty. Cecil never allotted two seconds' thought to his own embarrassments, but he would multiply them tenfold by taking other people's on him as well, with an unremitting and thoughtless good nature.
"I couldn't help it," pleaded the lad, with coaxing and almost piteous apology. "I backed Grosvenor's play, and you know he's always the most wonderful luck in the world. I couldn't tell he'd go a crowner and have such cards as he had. How shall I get the money, Bertie? I daren't 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 couldn't sell her in a minute----"
Cecil laughed a little, but his eyes, as they rested on the lad's 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, there's 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 Terrail's, and tossed the whole across the room to the boy.
"There you are, young one! But don't borrow of any but your own people again, Berk. We don't do that. No, no!--no thanks! Shut up all that. If ever you get in a hole, I'll take you out if I can. Good-by--will you go to the Lords? Better not--nothing to see, and still less to hear. All stale. That's the only comfort for us--we 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 brother's 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 another's 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 don't believe I've left myself money enough to take Willon and Rake and the cattle down to the Shires to-morrow. If I shouldn't have kept enough to take my own ticket with!--that would be no end of a sell. On my word I don't know how much there's left on the dressing-table. Well! I can't help it; Poulteney had to be paid; I can't have Berk's 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 boy's loss, if he could; and Cecil, who never was worried