Under Two Flags | Page 8

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 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 charger's 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; it's 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 d'Ess for an hour before we come up, might do a little good.
I'll 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
Majesty's 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. Stephen's, 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 butcher's tray was pressed against
his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable
apple-woman, of Cecil's 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 Rake's 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-Zu's 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 hunter's 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; it's the whip who carries you off to
a division just when you've sat down to your turbot; it's the ten seconds
by which you miss the train; it's the dust that gets in your eyes as you
go down to Epsom; it's the pretty little rose note that went by accident
to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from madame;
it's the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it's the cook who
always will season the white soup wrong--it 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