Under Two Flags by Ouida (page 4)

surprise upon his face, no flush of anger, no expression of amaze or indignation; only the look which had paralyzed Rock on his entrance; he stood still and mute.

The Seraph looked at him, a great dread seizing him lest he should have seemed himself to cast this foul thing on his brother-in-arms; and in that dread all the fierce fire of his freshly-loosened passion broke its bounds.

“Damnation! Cecil, can’t you hear me! A hound has brought against you the vilest charge that ever swindlers framed: an infamy that he deserves to be shot for, as if he were a dog. He makes me stand before you as if I were your accuser; as if I doubted you; as if I lent an ear one second to this loathsome lie. I sent for you to confront him, and to give him up to the law. Stand out, you scoundrel, and let us see how you dare look at us now!”

He swung round at the last words, and signed to Baroni to rise from the couch were he sat. The Jew advanced slowly, softly.

“If your lordship will pardon me, you have scarcely made it apparent what the matter is for which the gentleman is wanted. You have scarcely explained to him that it is on a charge of forgery.”

The Seraph’s eyes flashed on him with a light like a lion’s, and his right hand clinched hard.

“By my life! If you say that word again you shall be flung in the street like the cur you are, let me pay what I will for it! Cecil, why don’t you speak?”

Bertie had not moved; not a breath escaped his lips. He stood like a statue, deadly pale in the gaslight; when the figure of Baroni rose up and came before him, a great darkness stole on his face–it was a terrible bitterness, a great horror, a loathing disgust; but it was scarcely criminality, and it was not fear. Still he stood perfectly silent–a guilty man, any other than his loyal friend would have said: guilty, and confronted with a just accuser. The Seraph saw that look, and a deadly chill passed over him, as it had done at the Jew’s first charge–not doubt; such heresy to his creeds, such shame to his comrade and his corps could not be in him; but a vague dread hushed his impetuous vehemence. The dignity of the old Lyonnesse blood asserted its ascendency.

“M. Baroni, make your statement. Later on Mr. Cecil can avenge it.”

Cecil never moved; once his eyes went to Rockingham with a look of yearning, grateful, unendurable pain; but it was repressed instantly; a perfect passiveness was on him. The Jew smiled.

“My statement is easily made, and will not be so new to this gentleman as it was to your lordship. I simply charge the Honorable Bertie Cecil with having negotiated a bill with my firm for 750 pounds on the 15th of last month, drawn in his own favor, and accepted at two months’ date by your lordship. Your signature you, my Lord Marquis, admit to be a forgery–with that forgery I charge your friend!”

“The 15th!”

The echo of those words alone escaped the dry, white lips of Cecil; he showed no amaze, no indignation; once only, as the charge was made, he gave in sudden gesture, with a sudden gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in his eyes, that his comrade thought and hoped that with one moment more the Jew would be dashed down at his feet with the lie branded on his mouth by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged honor. The action was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, more hopeless because more resigned than any sign of pain or of passion, returned either by force of self-control or by the stupor of despair.

The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he could not believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. His dearest friend stood mute beneath the charge of lowest villainy–stood powerless before the falsehoods of a Jew extortioner!

“Bertie! Great Heaven!” he cried, well-nigh beside himself, “how can you stand silent there? Do you hear–do you hear aright? Do you know the accursed thing this conspiracy has tried to charge you with? Say something, for the love of God! I will have vengeance on your slanderer, if you take none.”

He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang in his own imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted gentleman, the instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous denial, the fire of scorn, the lightning flash of fury–all that he gave himself, all that must be so naturally given by a slandered man under the libel that brands him with disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting of one sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on the course of his friend’s conduct as he would upon his own, and a ghastly terror sent a pang to his heart.

Still–Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed anguish on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an unnatural calm upon him; yet he lifted his head with a gesture haughty for the moment as any action that his defender could have wished.

“I am not guilty,” he said simply.

The Seraph’s hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp almost ere the words were spoken.

“Beauty, Beauty! Never say that to me. Do you think I can ever doubt you?”

For a moment Cecil’s head sank; the dignity with which he had spoken remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and his denial faded.

“No; you cannot; you never will.”

The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in a dream. Ezra Baroni, standing calmly there with the tranquility that an assured power alone confers, smiled slightly once more.

“You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we can find it so. Your proofs?”

“Proof? I give you my word.”

Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued.

“We men of business, sir, are–perhaps inconveniently for gentlemen– given to a preference in favor of something more substantial. Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your acquaintance; it is a pity for you that your friend’s name should have been added to the bond you placed with us. Business men’s pertinacity is a little wearisome, no doubt, to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all the same I must persist–how can you disprove this charge?”

The Seraph turned on him with a fierceness of a bloodhound.

“You dog! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will double- throng you till you cannot breathe!”

Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not resist the pleasure of braving and of torturing the “aristocrats.”

“I don’t doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but neither do I doubt the force of the law to make you account for any brutality of the prize-ring your lordship may please to exert on me.”

The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet.

“We waste words on that wretch,” he said abruptly to Cecil. “Prove his insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him later on.”

“Precisely what I said, my lord,” murmured Baroni. “Let Mr. Cecil prove his innocence.”

Into Bertie’s eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He turned them on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the heart; yet the abhorrent thought crossed him–was it thus that men guiltless looked?

“Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7:50 on the evening of the 15th. It was long over business hours, but my partner to oblige him stretched a point,” pursued the soft, bland, malicious voice of the German Jew. “If he was not at our office–where was he? That is simple enough.”

“Answered in a moment!” said the Seraph, with impetuous certainty. “Cecil!–to prove this man what he is, not for an instant to satisfy me–where were you at that time on the 15th?”

“The 15th!”

“Where were you?” pursued his friend. “Were you at mess? At the clubs? Dressing for dinner?–where–where? There must be thousands of ways of remembering–thousands of people who’ll prove it for you?”

Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. He could not speak–a woman’s reputation lay in his silence.

“Can’t you remember?” implored the Seraph. “You will think–you must think!”

There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp.

Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes–both his accuser and his friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue were paralyzed; he was bound by his word of honor; he was weighted with a woman’s secret.

“Don’t look at me so, Bertie, for mercy’s sake! Speak! Where were you?”

“I cannot tell you; but I was not there.”

The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the butterfly pleasure of a summer-day love.

“Cannot tell me!–cannot? You mean you have forgotten!”

“I cannot tell you; it is enough.”

There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman’s reputation–a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler’s word, a Lovelace’s smile!–that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of honor.

Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy.

“I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil ‘cannot tell.’ As it happens, my partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the honor of showing you–“

“Let me see it.”

The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.

Baroni smiled.

“It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science of fist-attack.”

He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy.

“You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?” thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. “Do you judge the world by your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or, as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand.”

The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him.

“I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis,” he said, as he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.

Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight, in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or–to hold in all utterance that might be on his lips.

“Well?” asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew not what to believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph’s fearless expectance, when he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false accuser.

“Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that bill, Mr. Cecil?” asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra Baroni.

“I do. I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that document until to-night.”

The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was haggard as by a night’s deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his forehead–it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.

“And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th? Unfortunate!”

“I do; but in your account of them you lie!”

There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. Under it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; and a fear of the man he accused smote him, more deep, more keen than that with which the sweeping might of the Seraph’s fury had moved him. He knew now why Ben Davis had hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that slept under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of “the d—-d Guards’ swell.”

What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest sign.

“As a matter of course you deny it!” he said, with a polite wave of his hand. “Quite right; you are not required to criminate yourself. I wish sincerely we were not compelled to criminate you.”

The Seraph’s grand, rolling voice broke in; he had stood chafing, chained, panting in agonies of passion and of misery.

“M. Baroni!” he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his anger and his bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of either law or fact, “you have heard his signature and your statements alike denied once for all by Mr. Cecil. Your document is a libel and a conspiracy, like your charge; it is false, and you are swindling; it is an outrage, and you are a scoundrel; you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion; not a sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accusation you dare to make true, I am the only one whom it can concern, since it is my name which is involved. Were it true–could it possibly be true–I should forbid any steps to be taken in it; I should desire it ended once and forever. It shall be so now, by God!”

He scarcely knew what he was saying; yet what he did say, utterly as it defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so gallant a ring, had so kingly a wrath, that it awed and impressed even Baroni in the instant of its utterance.

“They say that those fine gentlemen fight like a thousand lions when they are once roused,” he thought. “I can believe it.”

“My lord,” he said softly, “you have called me by many epithets, and menaced me with many threats since I have entered this chamber; it is not a wise thing to do with a man who knows the law. However, I can allow for the heat of your excitement. As regards the rest of your speech, you will permit me to say that its wildness of language is only equaled by the utter irrationality of your deductions and your absolute ignorance of all legalities. Were you alone concerned and alone the discoverer of this fraud, you could prosecute or not as you please; but we are subjects of its imposition, ours is the money that he has obtained by that forgery, and we shall in consequence open the prosecution.”

“Prosecution?” The echo rang in an absolute agony from his hearer; he had thought of it as, at its worst, only a question between himself and Cecil.

The accused gave no sigh, the rigidity and composure he had sustained throughout did not change; but at the Seraph’s accent the hunted and pathetic misery which had once before gleamed in his eyes came there again; he held his comrade in a loyal and exceeding love. He would have let all the world stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend should cast even a look of contempt.

“Prosecution!” replied Baroni. “It is a matter of course, my lord, that Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very wise; the law specially cautions the accused to say nothing to criminate themselves. But we waste time in words; and, pardon me, if you have your friend’s interest at heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly useless opposition to an inevitable line of action. I must attest Mr. Cecil; but I am willing–for I know to high families these misfortunes are terribly distressing–to conduct everything with the strictest privacy and delicacy. In a word, if you and he consult his interests, he will accompany me unresistingly; otherwise I must summon legal force. Any opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his relatives and position, to spare him.”

A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows on an insult that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too hideously shameful for the thoughts to grasp it as reality.

In the first moment of Baroni’s words Cecil’s eyes had gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been worse to face even than his comrade’s wrath; it died, however, well- nigh instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its motive. He was simply, as he had been throughout, passive–so passive that even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, looked at him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that singular, unbroken calm. It perplexed him–the first thing which had ever done so in his own peculiar paths of finesse and of intrigue.

The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were the judge and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and blind under this unutterable shame, which seemed to net them both in such close and hopeless meshes. He, heir to one of the greatest coronets in the world, must see his friend branded as a common felon, and could do no more to aid or to avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in the pine woods! His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke:

“Cecil, tell me–what is to be done? This infamous outrage cannot pass! cannot go on! I will send for the Duke, for–“

“Send for no one.”

Bertie’s voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man exhausted by a long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. Its composure fell on Rockingham’s tempestuous grief and rage with a sickly, silencing awe, with a terrible sense of some evil here beyond his knowledge and ministering, and of an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend and to avenge–the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known.

“Pardon me, my lord,” interposed Baroni, “I can waste time no more. You must be now convinced yourself of your friend’s implication in this very distressing affair.”

“I!” The Seraph’s majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn blazed from his azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing to him. “I! If you dare hint such a damnable shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with as little remorse as I would a kite’s. I believe in his guilt? Forgive me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word! I believe in it? I would as soon believe in my own disgrace–in my father’s dishonor!”

“How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil’s total inability to tell us know he spent the hours between six and nine on the 15th?”

“Unable? He is not unable; he declines! Bertie, tell me what you did that one cursed evening. Whatever it was, wherever it was, say it for my sake, and shame this devil.”

Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle-tubes aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the man he loved best on earth. He staggered slightly, as if he were about to fall, and a faint white foam came on his lips; but he recovered himself almost instantly. It was so natural to him to repress every emotion that it was simply old habit to do so now.

“I have answered,” he said very low, each word a pang–“I cannot.”

Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite, significant gesture.

“In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you follow me quietly, sir, or must force be employed?”

“I will go with you.”

The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own as it was given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that of any fear was its spring; that some cause beyond the mere abhorrence of “a scene” was at the root of the quiescence.

“It must be so,” said Cecil huskily to his friend. “This man is right, so far as he knows. He is only acting on his own convictions. We cannot blame him. The whole is–a mystery, an error. But, as it stands, there is no resistance.”

“Resistance! By God! I would resist if I shot him dead, or shot myself. Stay–wait–one moment! If it be an error in the sense you mean, it must be a forgery of your name as of mine. You think that?”

“I did not say so.”

The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once the suspicion crept in on him–was this guilt? Yet even now the doubt would not be harbored by him.

“Say so–you must mean so! You deny them as yours; what can they be but forgeries? There is no other explanation. I think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong–let that pass. If it be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment. Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the matter further, unless they find out the delinquent. See here”–he went to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, swept out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from the book, threw it down before Baroni–“here! fill it up as you like, and I will sign it in exchange for the forged sheet.”

Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adoration that excluded every other passion; that blank check, that limitless carte blanche, that vast exchequer from which to draw!–it was a sore temptation. He thought wistfully of the welsher’s peremptory forbiddance of all compromise–of the welsher’s inexorable command to “wring the fine- feathered bird,” lose whatever might be lost by it.

Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leaned forward, took the check and tore it in two.

“God bless you, Rock,” he said, so low that it only reached the Seraph’s ear, “but you must not do that.”

“Beauty, you are mad!” cried the Marquis passionately. “If this villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as much as I– tenfold more than I. If this Jew chooses to sell the paper to me, naming his own compensation, whose affair is it except his and mine? They have been losers, we indemnify them. It rests with us to find out the criminal. M. Baroni, there are a hundred more checks in that book; name your price, and you shall have it; or, if you prefer my father’s, I will send to him for it. His Grace will sign one without a question of its errand, if I ask him. Come! your price?”

Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was strong in the austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of social duty.

“You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, my lord,” he said politely. “I am glad such friendship exists on earth. But you really ask me what is not in my power. In the first place, I am but one of the firm, and have no authority to act alone; in the second, I most certainly, were I alone, should decline totally any pecuniary compromise. A great criminal action is not to be hushed up by any monetary arrangement. You, my Lord Marquis, may be ignorant in the Guards of a very coarse term used in law, called ‘compounding a felony.’ That is what you tempt me to now.”

The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew’s blood run cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to speak; Cecil arrested him with that singular impassiveness, that apathy of resignation which had characterized his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief moments.

“Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own justification. I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully’s brawl; they have the law with them. Let it take its course.”

The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind–the room seemed to reel with him.

“Oh, God! that you—-“

He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his friend, one of his own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like the blackest thief in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple!

Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning– infinitely gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs. He hesitated a moment, then he stretched out his hand.

“Will you take it–still?”

Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in both of the Seraph’s.

“Take it? Before all the world–always, come what will.”

His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear as the ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion in it. He had forgotten the Hebrew’s presence; he had forgotten all save his friend and his friend’s extremity. Cecil did not answer; if he had done so, all the courage, all the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike sustained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand closed fast in his companion’s, his eyes met his once in a look of gratitude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity.

“M. Baroni, I am ready.”

“Wait!” cried Rockingham. “Where you go I come.”

The Hebrew interposed demurely.

“Forgive me, my lord–not now. You can take what steps you will as regards your friend later on; and you may rest assured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot accompany him now. I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount Royallieu–not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards–not the friend of one so distinguished as yourself–but as simply an arrested forger.”

Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life. He put his hand above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards off a blow.

“Gentlemen,” and his teeth chattered as he spoke, “one sign of violence, and I shall summon legal force.”

Cecil caught the Seraph’s lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance. His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.

“We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go–they must do what they will. My reckoning must wait, and my justification. One word only. Take the King and keep him for my sake.”

Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out to his fate, and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his arms where he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in all his life, felt the hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the passion of a woman mastered and unmanned him–he would sooner a thousand times have laid his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for this.

Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright eyes of the Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single sign of any effort to evade him would have been arrested by him in an instant with preconcerted skill. He looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in his prisoner’s mind. Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went to his doom; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance. The Hebrew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rockingham, who beheld this thing but on its surface. Baroni was to him only the agent of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate that closed him in, netting him tight with the web of his own past actions; no more than the irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew’s sight and knowledge a just sentence. He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than the conscience of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the instruments of his chastisement.

Was he guilty?

Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so as he passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance with that dead resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid look set on his features, and gazing almost in stupefaction out from the dark hazel depths of eyes that women had loved for their luster, their languor, and the softness of their smile.

They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had given his consent to follow the bill-discounter without resistance, and he had no thought to break his word; he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel, waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an archduke’s dinner, to a princess’ entertainment; he looked at them with a vague, strange sense of unreality–these things of the life from which he was now barred forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, branded, and outlawed, and dishonored from all place in the world that he had led, and been caressed by and beguiled with for so long.

To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all that was highest and gayest and fairest in Europe at the banquet of a Prince–and he went by his captor’s side, a convicted criminal.

Once out in the air, the Hebrew laid his hand on his arm. He started– it was the first sign that his liberty was gone! He restrained himself from all resistance still, and passed onward, down where Baroni motioned him out of the noise of the carriages, out of the glare of the light, into the narrow, darkened turning of a side street. He went passively; for this man trusted to his honor.

In the gloom stood three figures, looming indistinctly in the shadow of the houses. One was a Huissier of the Staats-Procurator, beside whom stood the Commissary of Police of the district; the third was an English detective. Ere he saw them their hands were on his shoulders, and the cold chill of steel touched his wrists. The Hebrew had betrayed him, and arrested him in the open street. In an instant, as the ring of the rifle rouses the slumbering tiger, all the life and the soul that were in him rose in revolt as the icy glide of the handcuffs sought their hold on his arms. In an instant, all the wild blood of his race, all the pride of his breeding, all the honor of his service, flashed into fire and leaped into action. Trusted, he would have been true to his accuser; deceived, the chains of his promise were loosened, and all he thought, all he felt, all he knew were the lion impulses, the knightly instincts, the resolute choice to lose life rather than to lose freedom, of a soldier and a gentleman. All he remembered was that he would fight to the death rather than be taken alive; that they should kill him where he stood, in the starlight, rather than lead him in the sight of men as a felon.

With the strength that lay beneath all the gentle languor of his habits and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields of his boyhood, he wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had closed, and with the single straightening of his left arm felled the detective to earth like a bullock, with a crashing blow that sounded through the stillness like some heavy timber stove in; flinging himself like lightning on the Huissier, he twisted out of his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs, and wrestling with him was woven for a second in that close-knit struggle which is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle for life and death. The German was a powerful and firmly built man; but Cecil’s science was the finer and the most masterly. His long, slender delicate limbs seemed to twine and writhe around the massive form of his antagonist like the coils of a cobra; they rocked and swayed to and fro on the stones, while the shrill, shrieking voice of Baroni filled the night with its clamor. The viselike pressure of the stalwart arms of his opponent crushed him in till his ribs seemed to bend and break under the breathless oppression, the iron force; but desperation nerved him, the Royallieu blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for the first time in his careless life; his skill and his nerve were unrivaled, and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off him, and lifting him up–he never knew how–as he would have lifted a log of wood, hurled him down in the white streak of moonlight that alone slanted through the peaked roofs of the crooked by-street.

The cries of Baroni had already been heard; a crowd, drawn by their shrieking appeals, were bearing toward the place in tumult. The Jew had the quick wit to give them, as call-word, that is was a croupier who had been found cheating and fled; it sufficed to inflame the whole mob against the fugitive. Cecil looked round him once–such a glance as a Royal gives when the gaze-hounds are panting about him and the fangs are in his throat; then, with the swiftness of the deer itself, he dashed downward into the gloom of the winding passage at the speed which had carried him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old green Eton meadows. There was scarce a man in the Queen’s Service who could rival him for lightness of limb, for power of endurance in every sport of field and fell, of the moor and the gymnasium; and the athletic pleasures of many a happy hour stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his terrible extremity.

Flight!–for the instant the word thrilled through him with a loathing sense. Flight!–the craven’s refuge, the criminal’s resource. He wished in the moment’s agony that they would send a bullet through his brain as he ran, rather than drive him out to this. Flight!–he felt a coward and a felon as he fled; fled from every fairer thing, from every peaceful hour, from the friendship and good will of men, from the fame of his ancient race, from the smile of the women that loved him, from all that makes life rich and fair, from all that men call honor; fled, to leave his name disgraced in the service he adored; fled, to leave the world to think him a guilty dastard who dared not face his trial; fled, to bid his closest friend believe him low sunk in the depths of foulest felony, branded forever with a criminal’s shame–by his own act, by his own hand. Flight!–it has bitter pangs that make brave men feel cowards when they fly from tyranny and danger and death to a land of peace and promise; but in his flight he left behind him all that made life worth the living, and went out to meet eternal misery; renouncing every hope, yielding up all his future.

“It is for her sake–and his,” he thought; and without a moment’s pause, without a backward look he ran, as the stag runs with the bay of the pack behind it, down into the shadows of the night.

The hue and cry was after him; the tumult of a crowd’s excitement, raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on his steps, joined with the steadier and keener pursuit of men organized for the hunter’s work, and trained to follow the faintest track, the slightest clew. The moon was out, and they saw him clearly, though the marvelous fleetness of his stride had borne him far ahead in the few moments’ start he had gained. He heard the beat of their many feet on the stones, the dull thud of their running, the loud clamor of the mob, the shrill cries of the Hebrew offering gold with frantic lavishness to whoever should stop his prey. All the breathless excitation, all the keen and desperate straining, all the tension of the neck-and-neck struggle that he had known so often over the brown autumn country of the Shires at home, he knew now, intensified to horror, made deadly with despair, changed into a race for life and death.

Yet, with it the wild blood in him woke; the recklessness of peril, the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his levity and languor heated his veins and spurred his strength; he was ready to die if they chose to slaughter him; but for his freedom he strove as men will strive for life; to distance them, to escape them, he would have breathed his last at the goal; they might fire him down, if they would, but he swore in his teeth to die free.

Some Germans in his path, hearing the shouts that thundered after him in the night, drew their mule-cart across the pent-up passage-way down which he turned, and blocked the narrow road. He saw it in time; a second later, and it would have been instant death to him at the pace he went; he saw it, and gathered all the force and nervous impetus in his frame to the trial, as he came rushing downward along the slope of the lane, with his elbows back, and his body straight, as prize- runners run. The wagon, sideways, stretched across–a solid barrier, heaped up with fir boughs brought for firing from the forests; the mules stood abreast, yoked together. The mob following saw too, and gave a hoot and yell of brutal triumph; their prey was in their clutches; the cart barred his progress, and he must double like a fox faced with a stone wall.

Scarcely!–they did not know the man with whom they had to deal–the daring and the coolness that the languid surface of indolent fashion had covered. Even in the imminence of supreme peril, of breathless jeopardy, he measured with unerring eye the distance and the need; rose as lightly in the air as Forest King had risen with him over fence and hedge; and with a single, running leap cleared the width of the mules’ backs, and landing safely on the farther side, dashed on; scarcely pausing for breath. The yell that hissed in his wake, as the throng saw him escape, by what to their slow Teutonic instincts seemed a devil’s miracle, was on his ear like the bay of the slot-hounds to the deer. They might kill him, if they could; but they should never take him captive.

And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear; shining down in the summer light, as though in love with the beauty of earth! He looked up once; the stars seemed reeling round him in disordered riot; the chill face of the moon looked unpitying as death. All this loveliness was round him; this glory of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil planet, and there was no help for him.

A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the distance; he had left the brilliance of the town behind him, and was now in its by- streets and outskirts. The sound seemed to thrill him to the bone; it was like the echo of the lost life he was leaving forever.

He saw, he felt, he heard, he thought; feeling and sense were quickened in him as they had never been before, yet he never slackened his pace save once or twice, when he paused for breath; he ran as swiftly, he ran as keenly, as ever stag or fox had run before him; doubling with their skill, taking the shadow as they took the covert; noting with their rapid eye the safest track; outracing with their rapid speed the pursuit that thundered in his wake.

The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well-nigh out of the town, with the open country and forest lying before him. The people whom he met rushed out of his path; happily for him they were few, and were terrified, because they thought him a madman broken loose from his keepers. He never looked back; but he could tell that the pursuit was falling farther and farther behind him, that the speed at which he went was breaking the powers of his hunters; fresh throngs added indeed to the first pursuers as they tore down through the starlight night, but none had the science with which he went, the trained, matchless skill of the university foot-race. He left them more and more behind him each second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it seemed, had lasted bare three minutes. If the night were but dark! He felt that pitiless luminance glistening bright about him everywhere; shining over all the summer world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. The silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground; one hour of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black rain of an autumn storm, and he could have made for shelter as the stag makes for it across the broad, brown Highland water.

Before him stretched indeed the gloom of the masses of pine, the upward slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the Black Forest; but they were like the mirage to a man who dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace he went, he could not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his brain and pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath in with loud gasping spasms; he knew that in a little space his speed must slacken–he knew it by the roar, like the noise of water, that was rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like a hand’s hard grip, that seemed above his heart.

But he would go till he died; go till they fired on him; go, though the skies felt swirling round like a sea of fire, and the hard, hot earth beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his feet struck it flying.

The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and high-peaked gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across his road; a shadow black and rayless, darker for the white glisten of the moon around. Built more in the Swiss than the German style, a massive balcony of wood ran round it, upon and beneath which in its heavy shade was an impenetrable gloom, while the twisted wooden pillars ran upward to the gallery, loggia-like. With rapid perception and intuition he divined rather than saw these things, and, swinging himself up with noiseless lightness, he threw himself full-length down on the rough flooring of the balcony. If they passed he was safe, for a brief time more at least; if they found him–his teeth clinched like a mastiff’s where he lay–he had the strength in him still to sell his life dearly.

The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamors that floated up in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew that they had tracked him. He heard the tramp of their feet as they came under the loggia; he heard the click of the pistols–they were close upon him at last in the blackness of night.

CHAPTER XII.

THE KING’S LAST SERVICE.

“Is he up there?” asked a voice in the darkness.

“Not likely. A cat couldn’t scramble up that woodwork,” answered a second.

“Send a shot, and try,” suggested a third.

There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the veranda. He heard the words as the thronging mob surged, and trampled, and swore, and quarreled, beneath him, in the blackness of the gloom; balked of their prey, and savage for some amends. There was a moment’s pause–a hurried, eager consultation; then he heard the well-known sound of a charge being rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod; there was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second in his sight; a ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush, and bedded itself in the timber, a few inches above his uncovered hair. A dead silence followed; then the muttering of many voices broke out afresh.

“He’s not there, at any rate,” said one, who seemed the chief; “he couldn’t have kept as still as that with a shot so near him. He’s made for the open country and the forest, I’ll take my oath.”

Then the trending of many feet trampled their way out from beneath the loggia; their voices and their rapid steps grew fainter and fainter as they hurried away through the night. For a while, at least, he was safe.

For some moments he lay prostrated there; the rushing of the blood on his brain, the beating of his heart, the panting of his breath, the quivering of his limbs after the intense muscular effort he had gone through, mastered him and flung him down there, beaten and powerless. He felt the foam on his lips and he thought with every instant that the surcharged veins would burst; hands of steel seemed to crush in upon his chest, knotted cords to tighten in excruciating pain about his loins; he breathed in short, convulsive gasps; his eyes were blind, and his head swam. A dreaming fancy that this was death vaguely came on him, and he was glad it should be so.

His eyelids closed unconsciously, weighed down as by the weight of lead; he saw the starry skies above him no more, and the distant noise of the pursuit waxed duller and duller on his ear; then he lost all sense and memory–he ceased even to feel the night air on his face. How long he lay there he never knew; when consciousness returned to him all was still; the moon was shining down clear as the day, the west wind was blowing softly among his hair. He staggered to his feet and leaned against the timber of the upper wall; the shelving, impenetrable darkness sloped below; above were the glories of a summer sky at midnight, around him the hills and woods were bathed in the silver light; he looked, and he remembered all.

He had escaped his captors; but for how long? While yet there were some hours of the night left, he must find some surer refuge, or fall into their hands again. Yet it was strange that in this moment his own misery and his own peril were less upon him than a longing to see once more–and for the last time–the woman for whose sake he suffered this. Their love had had the lightness and the languor of their world, and had had but little depth in it; yet, in that hour of his supreme sacrifice to her, he loved her as he had not loved in his life.

Recklessness had always been latent in him, with all his serenity and impassiveness; a reckless resolve entered him now–reckless to madness. Lightly and cautiously, though his sinews still ached, and his nerves still throbbed with the past strain, he let himself fall, hand over hand, as men go down a rope, along the woodwork to the ground. Once touching earth, off he glided, swiftly and noiselessly, keeping in the shadow of the walls all the length of the streets he took, and shunning every place where any sort of tumult could suggest the neighborhood of those who were out and hunting him down. As it chanced, they had taken to the open country; he passed on unquestioned, and wound his way to the Kursaal. He remembered that to-night there was a masked ball, at which all the princely and titled world of Baden were present; to which he would himself have gone after the Russian dinner; by the look of the stars he saw that it must be midnight or past; the ball would be now at its height.

The dare-devil wildness and the cool quietude that were so intimately and intricately mingled in his natare could alone have prompted and projected such a thought and such an action as suggested themselves to him now; in the moment of his direst extremity, of his utter hopelessness, of his most imminent peril, he went–to take a last look at his mistress! Baden, for aught he knew, might be but one vast network to mesh in and to capture him; yet he ran the risk with the dauntless temerity that had ever lain underneath the indifferentism and the indolence of his habits.

Keeping always in the shadow, and moving slowly, so as to attract no notice from those he passed, he made his way deliberately, straight toward the blaze of light where all the gayety of the town was centered; he reckoned, and rightly, as it proved, that the rumor of his story, the noise of his pursuit, would not have penetrated here as yet; his own world would be still in ignorance. A moment, that was all he wanted, just to look upon a woman’s beauty; he went forward daringly and tranquilly to the venture. If any had told him that a vein of romance was in him, he would have stared and thought them madmen; yet something almost as wild was in his instinct now. He had lost so much to keep her honor from attainder; he wished to meet the gaze of her fair eyes once more before he went out to exile.

In one of the string of waiting carriages he saw a loose domino lying on the seat; he knew the liveries and the footmen, and he signed them to open the door. “Tell Count Carl I have borrowed these,” he said to the servant, as he sprang into the vehicle, slipped the scarlet-and- black domino on, took the mask, and left the carriage. The man touched his hat and said nothing; he knew Cecil well, as an intimate friend of his young Austrian master. In that masquerade guise he was safe; for the few minutes, at least, which were all he dared take.

He went on, mingled among the glittering throng, and pierced his way to the ballroom, the Venetian mask covering his features; many spoke to him, by the scarlet-and-black colors they took him for the Austrian; he answered none, and treaded his way among the blaze of hues, the joyous echoes of the music, the flutter of the silk and satin dominoes, the mischievous challenge of whispers. His eyes sought only one; he soon saw her, in the white and silver mask-dress, with the spray of carmine-hued eastern flowers, by which he had been told, days ago, to recognize her. A crowd of dominoes were about her, some masked, some not. Her eyes glanced through the envious disguise, and her lips were laughing. He approached her with all his old tact in the art d’arborer le cotillon; not hurriedly, so as to attract notice, but carefully, so as to glide into a place near her.

“You promised me this waltz,” he said very gently in her ear. “I have come in time for it.”

She recognized him by his voice, and turned from a French prince to rebuke him for his truancy, with gay raillery and much anger.

“Forgive me, and let me have this one waltz–please do!” She glanced at him a moment, and let him lead her out.

“No one has my step as you have it, Bertie,” she murmured, as they glided into the measure of the dance.

She thought his glance fell sadly on her as he smiled.

“No?–but others will soon learn it.”

Yet he had never treaded more deftly the maze of the waltzers, never trodden more softly, more swiftly, or with more science, the polished floor. The waltz was perfect; she did not know it was also a farewell. The delicate perfume of her floating dress, the gleam of the scarlet flower-spray, the flash of the diamonds studding her domino, the fragrance of her lips as they breathed so near his own; they haunted him many a long year afterward.

His voice was very calm, his smile was very gentle, his step, as he swung easily through the intricacies of the circle, was none the less smooth and sure for the race that had so late strained his sinews to bursting; the woman he loved saw no change in him; but as the waltz drew to its end, she felt his heart beat louder and quicker on her own; she felt his hand hold her own more closely, she felt his head drooped over her till his lips almost touched her brow;–it was his last embrace; no other could be given here, in the multitude of these courtly crowds. Then, with a few low-murmured words that thrilled her in their utterance, and echoed in her memory for years to come, he resigned her to the Austrian Grand Duke who was her next claimant, and left her silently–forever.

Less heroism has often proclaimed itself, with blatant trumpet to the world–a martyrdom.

He looked back once as he passed from the ballroom–back to the sea of colors, to the glitter of light, to the moving hues, amid which the sound of the laughing, intoxicating music seemed to float; to the glisten of the jewels and the gold and the silver–to the scene, in a word, of the life that would be his no more. He looked back in a long, lingering look, such as a man may give the gladness of the earth before the gates of a prison close on him; then he went out once more into the night, threw the domino and the mask back again into the carriage, and took his way, alone.

He passed along till he had gained the shadow of a by-street, by a sheer unconscious instinct; then he paused, and looked round him–what could he do? He wondered vaguely if he were not dreaming; the air seemed to reel about him, and the earth to rock; the very force of control he had sustained made the reaction stronger; he began to feel blind and stupefied. How could he escape? The railway station would be guarded by those on the watch for him; he had but a few pounds in his pocket, hastily slipped in as he had won them, “money-down,” at ecarte that day; all avenues of escape were closed to him, and he knew that his limbs would refuse to carry him with any kind of speed farther. He had only the short, precious hours remaining of the night in which to make good his flight–and flight he must take to save those for whom he had elected to sacrifice his life. Yet how? and where?

A hurried, noiseless footfall came after him; Rake’s voice came breathless on his ear, while the man’s hand went up in the unforgotten soldier’s salute–

“Sir! no words. Follow me, and I’ll save you.”

The one well-known voice was to him like water in a desert land; he would have trusted the speaker’s fidelity with his life. He asked nothing, said nothing, but followed rapidly and in silence; turning and doubling down a score of crooked passages, and burrowing at the last like a mole in a still, deserted place on the outskirts of the town, where some close-set trees grew at the back of stables and out- buildings.

In a streak of the white moonlight stood two hunters, saddled; one was Forest King. With a cry, Cecil threw his arms round the animal’s neck; he had no thought then except that he and the horse must part.

“Into saddle, sir! quick as your life!” whispered Rake. “We’ll be far away from this d—-d den by morning.”

Cecil looked at him like a man in stupor–his arm still over the gray’s neck.

“He can have no stay in him! He was dead-beat on the course.”

“I know he was, sir; but he ain’t now; he was pisined; but I’ve a trick with a ‘oss that’ll set that sort o’ thing–if it ain’t gone too far, that is to say–right in a brace of shakes. I doctored him; he’s hisself agen; he’ll take you till he drops.”

The King thrust his noble head closer in his master’s bosom, and made a little murmuring noise, as though he said, “Try me!”

“God bless you, Rake!” Cecil said huskily. “But I cannot take him, he will starve with me. And–how did you know of this?”

“Begging your pardon, your honor, he’ll eat chopped furze with you better than he’ll eat oats and hay along of a new master,” retorted Rake rapidly, tightening the girths. “I don’t know nothing, sir, save that I heard you was in a strait; I don’t want to know nothing; but I sees them cursed cads a-runnin’ of you to earth, and thinks I to myself, ‘Come what will, the King will be the ticket for him.’ So I ran to your room unbeknown, packed a little valise, and got out the passports; then back again to the stables, and saddled him like lightning, and got ’em off–nobody knowing but Bill there. I seed you go by into the Kursaal, and laid in wait for you, sir. I made bold to bring Mother o’ Pearl for myself.”

And Rake stopped, breathless and hoarse with passion and grief that he would not utter. He had heard more than he said.

“For yourself?” echoed Cecil. “What do you mean? My good fellow, I am ruined. I shall be beggared from to-night–utterly. I cannot even help you or keep you; but Lord Rockingham will do both for my sake.”

The ci-devant soldier struck his heel into the earth with a fiery oath.

“Sir, there ain’t time for no words. Where you goes I go. I’ll follow you while there’s a drop o’ blood in me. You was good to me when I was a poor devil that everyone scouted; you shall have me with you to the last, if I die for it. There!”

Cecil’s voice shook as he answered. The fidelity touched him as adversity could not do.

“Rake, you are a noble fellow. I would take you, were it possible; but–in an hour I may be in a felon’s prison. If I escape that, I shall lead a life of such wretchedness as–“

“That’s not nothing to me, sir.”

“But it is much to me,” answered Cecil. “As things have turned–life is over with me, Rake. What my own fate may be I have not the faintest notion–but let it be what it will, it must be a bitter one. I will not drag another into it.”

“If you send me away, I’ll shoot myself through the head, sir; that’s all.”

“You will do nothing of the kind. Go to Lord Rockingham, and ask him from me to take you into his service. You cannot have a kinder master.”

“I don’t say nothing agen the Marquis, sir,” said Rake doggedly; “he’s a right-on generous gentleman, but he aren’t you. Let me go with you, if it’s just to rub the King down. Lord, sir! you don’t know what straits I’ve lived in–what a lot of things I can turn my hand to– what a one I am to fit myself into any rat-hole, and make it spicy. Why, sir, I’m that born scamp, I am–I’m a deal happier on the cross and getting my bread just anyhow, than I am when I’m in clover like you’ve kept me.”

Rake’s eyes looked up wistfully and eager as a dog’s when he prays to be let out of kennel to follow the gun; his voice was husky and agitated with a strong excitement. Cecil stood a moment, irresolute, touched and pained at the man’s spaniel-like affection–yet not yielding to it.

“I thank you from my heart, Rake,” he said at length, “but it must not be. I tell you my future life will be beggary–“

“You’ll want me anyways, sir,” retorted Rake, ashamed of the choking in his throat. “I ask your pardon for interrupting, but every second’s that precious like. Besides, sir, I’ve got to cut and run for my own sake. I’ve laid Willon’s head open, down there in the loose box; and when he’s come to himself a pretty hue and cry he’ll raise after me. He painted the King, that’s what he did; and I told him so, and I give it to him–one–two–amazing! Get into saddle, sir, for the Lord’s sake! And here, Bill–you run back, shut the door, and don’t let nobody know the ‘osses are out till the morning. Then look like a muff as you are, and say nothing!”

The stable-boy stared, nodded assent, and sloped off. Rake threw himself across the brown mare.

“Now, sir! a steeple-chase for our lives! We’ll be leagues away by the day-dawn, and I’ve got their feed in the saddle-bags, so that they’ll bait in the forests. Off, sir, for God’s sake, or the blackguards will be down on you again!”

As he spoke the clamor and tread of men of the town racing to the chase were wafted to them on the night wind, drawing nearer and nearer; Rake drew the reins tight in his hand in fury.

“There they come–the d—-d beaks! For the love of mercy, sir, don’t check now. Ten seconds more and they’ll be on you; off, off!–or by the Lord Harry, sir, you’ll make a murderer of me, and I’ll kill the first man that lays his hand on you!”

The blaze of bitter blood was in the ex-Dragoon’s fiery face as the moon shone on it, and he drew out one of his holster pistols, and swung round in his saddle, facing the narrow entrance of the lane; ready to shoot down the first of the pursuit whose shadow should darken the broad stream of white light that fell through the archway.

Cecil looked at him, and paused no more; but vaulted into the old familiar seat, and Forest King bore him away through the starry night, with the brown mare racing her best by his side. Away–through the sleeping shadows, through the broad beams of the moon, through the odorous scent of the crowded pines, through the soft breaking gray of the dawn; away–to mountain solitudes and forest silence, and the shelter of lonely untracked ravines, and the woodland lairs they must share with wolf and boar; away–to flee with the flight of the hunted fox, to race with the wakeful dread of the deer; away–to what fate, who could tell?

Far and fast they rode through the night, never drawing rein. The horses laid well to their work; their youth and their mettle were roused, and they needed no touch of spur, but neck-and-neck dashed down through the sullen gray of the dawn and the breaking flush of the first sunrise. On the hard, parched earth, on the dew-laden moss, on the stretches of wayside sward, on the dry white dust of the ducal roads, their hoofs thundered, unfollowed, unechoed; the challenge of no pursuit stayed them, and they obeyed the call that was made on their strength with good and gallant willingness. Far and fast they rode, happily knowing the country well; now through the darkness of night, now through the glimmering daybreak. Tall walls of fir-crowned rocks passed by their eyes, all fused and dim; gray piles of monastic buildings, with the dull chimes tolling the hour, flashed on their sight to be lost in a moment; corn-lands yellowing for the sickle, fields with the sheaves set-up, orchards ruddy with fruit, and black barn-roofs lost in leafy nests; villages lying among their hills like German toys caught in the hollow of a guarding hand; masses of forests stretching wide, somber and silent and dark as a tomb; the shine of water’s silvery line where it flowed in a rocky channel–they passed them all in the soft gray of the waning night, in the white veil of the fragrant mists, in the stillness of sleep and of peace. Passed them, racing for more than life, flying with the speed of the wind.

“I failed him to-day through my foes and his,” Forest King thought, as he laid his length out in his mighty stride. “But I love him well; I will save him to-night.” And save him the brave brute did. The grass was so sweet and so short, he longed to stop for a mouthful; the brooks looked so clear, he longed to pause for a drink; renewed force and reviving youth filled his loyal veins with their fire; he could have thrown himself down on that mossy turf, and had a roll in its thyme and its lichens for sheer joy that his strength had come back. But he would yield to none of these longings; he held on for his master’s sake, and tried to think, as he ran, that this was only a piece of play–only a steeple-chase, for a silver vase and a lady’s smile, such as he and his rider had so often run for, and so often won, in those glad hours of the crisp winter noons of English Shires far away. He turned his eyes on the brown mare’s, and she turned hers on his; they were good friends in the stables at home, and they understood one another now. “If I were what I was yesterday, she wouldn’t run even with me,” thought the King; but they were doing good work together, and he was too true a knight and too true a gentleman to be jealous of Mother o’ Pearl, so they raced neck-and-neck through the dawn; with the noisy clatter of water-mill wheels, or the distant sound of a woodman’s ax, or the tolling bell of a convent clock, the only sound on the air save the beat of the flying hoofs.

Away they went, mile on mile, league on league, till the stars faded out in the blaze of the sun, and the tall pines rose out of the gloom. Either his pursuers were baffled and distanced, or no hue and cry was yet after him; nothing arrested them as they swept on, and the silent land lay in the stillness of morning ere toil and activity awakened. It was strangely still, strangely lonely, and the echo of the gallop seemed to beat on the stirless, breathless solitude. As the light broke and grew clearer and clearer, Cecil’s face in it was white as death as he galloped through the mists, a hunted man, on whose head a price was set; but it was quite calm still, and very resolute–there was no “harking back” in it.

They had raced nigh twenty English miles by the time the chimes of a village were striking six o’clock; it was the only group of dwellings they had ventured near in their flight; the leaded lattices were thrust open with a hasty clang, and women’s heads looked out as the iron tramp of the hunters’ feet struck fire from the stones. A few cries were raised; one burgher called them to know their errand; they answered nothing, but traversed the street with lightning speed, gone from sight almost ere they were seen. A league farther on was a wooded bottom, all dark and silent, with a brook murmuring through it under the leafy shade of lilies and the tangle of water-plants; there Cecil checked the King and threw himself out of saddle.

“He is not quite himself yet,” he murmured, as he loosened the girths and held back the delicate head from the perilous cold of the water to which the horse stretched so eagerly; he thought more of Forest King than he thought, even in that hour, of himself. He did all that was needed with his own hands; fed him with the corn from the saddle-bags, cooled him gently, led him to drink a cautious draught from the bubbling little stream, then let him graze and rest under the shade of the aromatic pines and the deep bronze leaves of the copper beeches; it was almost dark, so heavy and thickly laced were the branches, and exquisitely tranquil in the heart of the hilly country, in the peace of the early day, with the rushing of the forest brook the sole sound that was heard, and the everlasting sighing of the pine-boughs overhead.

Cecil leaned a while silently against one of the great gnarled trunks, and Rake affected to busy himself with the mare; in his heart was a tumult of rage, a volcano of curiosity, a pent-up storm of anxious amaze, but he would have let Mother o’ Pearl brain him with a kick of her iron plates rather than press a single look that should seem like doubt, or seem like insult in adversity to his fallen master.

Cecil’s eyes, drooped and brooding, gazed a long half-hour down in silence into the brook bubbling at his feet; then he lifted his head and spoke–with a certain formality and command in his voice, as though he gave an order on parade.

“Rake, listen, and do precisely what I bid you; neither more nor less. The horses cannot accompany me, nor you either; I must go henceforth where they would starve, and you would do worse. I do not take the King into suffering, nor you into temptation.”

Rake, who at the tone had fallen unconsciously in to the attitude of “attention,” giving the salute with his old military instinct, opened his lips to speak in eager protestation; Cecil put up his hand.

“I have decided; nothing you can say will alter me. We are near a by- station now; if I find none there to prevent me, I shall get away by the first train; to hide in these woods is out of the question. You will return by easy stages to Baden, and take the horses at once to Lord Rockingham. They are his now. Tell him my last wish was that he should take you into his service; and he will be a better master to you than I have ever been. As for the King”–his lips quivered, and his voice shook a little, despite himself–“he will be safe with him. I shall go into some foreign service–Austrian, Russian, Mexican, whichever be open to me. I would not risk such a horse as mine to be sold, ill-treated, tossed from owner to owner, sent in his old age to a knacker’s yard, or killed in a skirmish by a cannon-shot. Take both him and the mare back, and go back yourself. Believe me, I thank you from my heart for your noble offer of fidelity, but accept it I never shall.”

A dead pause came after his words; Rake stood mute; a curious look– half-dogged, half-wounded, but very resolute–had come on his face. Cecil thought him pained, and spoke with an infinite gentleness:

“My good fellow, do not regret it, or fancy I have no gratitude to you. I feel your loyalty deeply, and I know all you would willingly suffer for me; but it must not be. The mere offer of what you would do had been quite testimony enough of your truth and your worth. It is impossible for me to tell you what has so suddenly changed my fortunes; it is sufficient that for the future I shall be, if I live, what you were–a private soldier in an army that needs a sword. But let my fate be what it will, I go to it alone. Spare me more speech, and simply obey my last command.”

Quiet as the words were, there was a resolve in them not to be disputed; an authority not to be rebelled against. Rake stared, and looked at him blankly; in this man who spoke to him with so subdued but so irresistible a power of command, he could scarcely recognize the gay, indolent, indulgent, pococurante Guardsman, whose most serious anxiety had been the set of a lace tie, the fashion of his hunting dress, or the choice of the gold arabesques for his smoking- slippers.

Rake was silent a moment; then his hand touched his cap again.

“Very well, sir,” and without opposition or entreaty, he turned to resaddle the mare.

Our natures are oddly inconsistent. Cecil would not have taken the man in to exile, and danger, and temptation, and away from comfort and an honest life, for any consideration; yet it gave him something of a pang that Rake was so soon dissuaded from following him, and so easily convinced of the folly of his fidelity. But he had dealt himself a far deadlier one when he had resolved to part forever from the King. He loved the horse better than he loved anything–fed from his hand in foalhood, reared, broken, and trained under his own eye and his own care, he had had a truer welcome from those loving, lustrous eyes than all his mistresses ever gave him. He had had so many victories, so many hunting-runs, so many pleasant days of winter and of autumn, with Forest King for his comrade and companion! He could better bear to sever from all other things than from the stable-monarch, whose brave heart never failed him, and whose honest love was always his.

He stretched his hand out with his accustomed signal; the King lifted his head where he grazed, and came to him with the murmuring noise of pleasure he always gave at his master’s caress, and pressed his forehead against Cecil’s breast, and took such tender heed, such earnest solicitude, not to harm him with a touch of the mighty fore hoofs, as those only who care for and know horses well will understand in its relation.

Cecil threw his arm over his neck, and leaned his own head down on it, so that his face was hidden. He stood motionless so many moments, and the King never stirred, but only pressed closer and closer against his bosom as though he knew that this was his eternal farewell to his master. But little light came there, the boughs grew so thickly; and it was still and solitary as a desert in the gloom of the meeting trees.

There have been many idols–idols of gold, idols of clay–less pure, less true than the brave and loyal-hearted beast from whom he parted now.

He stood motionless a while longer, and where his face was hidden, the gray silken mane of the horse was wet with great, slow tears that forced themselves through his closed eyes; then he laid his lips on the King’s forehead, as he might have touched the brow of the woman he loved; and with a backward gesture of his hand to his servant, plunged down into the deep slope of netted boughs and scarce penetrable leafage, that swung back into their places, and shrouded him from sight with their thick, unbroken screen.

“He’s forgot me right and away in the King,” murmured Rake, as he led Forest King away slowly and sorrowfully, while the hunter pulled and fretted to force his way to his master. “Well, it’s only natural like. I’ve cause to care for him, and plenty on it; but he ain’t no sort of reason to think about me.”

That was the way the philosopher took his wound.

Alone, Cecil flung himself full-length down on the turf beneath the beech woods; his arms thrown forward, his face buried in the grass, all gay with late summer forest blossoms; for the first time the whole might of the rain that had fallen on his was understood by him; for the first time it beat him down beneath it, as the overstrained tension of nerve and of self-restraint had their inevitable reaction. He knew what this thing was which he had done–he had given up his whole future.

Though he had spoken lightly to his servant of his intention to enter a foreign army, he knew himself how few the chances were that he could ever do so. It was possible that Rockingham might so exert his influence that he would be left unpursued, but unless this chanced so (and Baroni had seemed resolute to forego no part of his demands), the search for him would be in the hands of the law, and the wiles of secret police and of detectives’ resources spread too far and finely over the world for him to have a hope of ultimate escape.

If he sought France, the Extradition Treaty would deliver him up; Russia–Austria–Prussia were of equal danger; he would be identified, and given up to trial. Into the Italian service he knew many a scoundrel was received unquestioned; and he might try the Western world; though he had no means to pay the passage, he might work it; he was a good sailor. Yachts had been twice sunk under him, by steamers, in the Solent and the Spezzia, and his own schooner had once been fired at by mistake for a blockade runner, when he had brought to, and given them a broadside from his two shotted guns before he would signal them their error.

As these things swept, disordered and aimless, through his mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the Guards’ champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to be taken before the mast, or could stand before the tambour-major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the same flag!

For a while he lay like a drunken man, heavy and motionless, his brow resting on his arm, his face buried in the grass; he had parted more easily with the woman he loved than he had parted with Forest King. The chimes of some far-off monastery, or castle-campanile, swung lazily in the morning stillness; the sound revived him, and recalled to him how little time there was if he would seek the flight that had begun on impulse and was continued in a firm, unshrinking resolve; he must go on, and on, and on; he must burrow like a fox, hide like a beaten cur; he must put leagues between him and all who had ever known him; he must sink his very name, and identity, and existence, under some impenetrable obscurity, or the burden he had taken up for others’ sake would be uselessly borne. There must be action of some sort or other, instant and unerring.

“It don’t matter,” he thought, with the old idle indifference, oddly becoming in that extreme moment the very height of stoic philosophy, without any thought or effort to be such; “I was going to the bad of my own accord; I must have cut and run for the debts, if not for this; it would have been the same thing, anyway, so it’s just as well to do it for them. Life’s over, and I’m a fool that I don’t shoot myself.”

But there was too imperious a spirit in the Royallieu blood to let him give in to disaster and do this. He rose slowly, staggering a little, and feeling blinded and dazzled with the blaze of the morning sun as he went out of the beech wood. There were the marks of the hoofs on the damp, dewy turf; his lips trembled a little as he saw them–he would never rid the horse again!

Some two miles, more or less, lay between him and the railway. He was not certain of his way, and he felt a sickening exhaustion on him; he had been without food since his breakfast before the race. A gamekeeper’s hut stood near the entrance of the wood; he had much recklessness in him, and no caution. He entered through the half-open door, and asked the keeper, who was eating his sausage and drinking his lager, for a meal.

“I’ll give you one if you’ll bring me down that hen-harrier,” growled the man in south German; pointing to the bird that was sailing far off, a mere speck in the sunny sky.

Cecil took the rifle held out to him, and without seeming even to pause to take aim, fired. The bird dropped like a stone through the air into the distant woods. There was no tremor in his wrist, no uncertainty in his measure. The keeper stared; the shot was one he had thought beyond any man’s range, and he set food and drink before his guest with a crestfallen surprise, oddly mingled with veneration.

“You might have let me buy my breakfast, without making me do murder,” said Bertie quietly, as he tried to eat. The meal was coarse–he could scarcely touch it; but he drank the beer down thirstily, and took a crust of bread. He slipped his ring, a great sapphire graven with his crest, off his finger, and held it out to the man.

“That is worth fifty double-Fredericks. Will you take it in exchange for your rifle and some powder and ball?”

The German stared again, open-mouthed, and clinched the bargain eagerly. He did not know anything about gems, but the splendor of this dazzled his eye, while he had guns more than enough, and could get many others at his lord’s cost. Cecil fastened a shot-belt round him, took a powder-flask and cartridge-case, and with a few words of thanks, went on his way.

Now that he held the rifle in his hand, he felt ready for the work that was before him; if hunted to bay, at any rate he could now have a struggle for his liberty. The keeper stood bewildered, gazing blankly after him down the vista of pines.

“Hein! Hein!” he growled, as he looked at the sapphire sparkling in his broad, brown palm; “I never saw such a with-lavishness-wasteful- and-with-courteous-speech-laconic gentleman! I wish I had not let him have the gun; he will take his own life, belikes; ach, Gott! He will take his own life!”

But Cecil had not bought it for that end–though he had called himself a fool for not sending a bullet through his brain, to quench in eternal darkness this ruined and wretched life that alone remained to him. He walked on through the still summer dawn, with the width of the country stretching sun-steeped around him. The sleeplessness, the excitement, the misery, the wild running of the past night had left him strengthless and racked with pain, but he knew that he must press onward or be caught, sooner or later, like netted game in the poacher’s silken mesh. Where to go, what to do, he knew no more than if he were a child; everything had always been ready to his hand; the only thought required of him had been how to amuse himself and avoid being bored; now thrown alone on a mighty calamity, and brought face to face with the severity and emergency of exertion, he was like a pleasure-boat beaten under high billows, and driven far out to sea by the madness of a raging nor’wester. He had no conception what to do; he had but one resolve–to keep his secret; if, to do it, he killed himself with the rifle his sapphire ring had bought.

Carelessly daring always, he sauntered now into the station for which he had made, without a sign on him that could attract observation; he wore still the violet velvet Spanish-like dress, the hessians, and the broad-leafed felt hat with an eagle’s feather fastened in it, that he had worn at the races; and with the gun in his hand there was nothing to distinguish him from any tourist “milor,” except that in one hand he carried his own valise. He cast a rapid glance around; no warrant for his apprehension, no announcement of his personal appearance had preceded him here; he was safe–safe in that; safer still in the fact that the train rushed in so immediately on his arrival there, that the few people about had no time to notice or speculate upon him. The coupe was empty, by a happy chance; he took it, throwing his money down with no heed that when the little he had left was once expended he would be penniless, and the train whirled on with him, plunging into the heart of forest and mountain, and the black gloom of tunnels, and the golden seas of corn-harvest. He was alone; and he leaned his head on his hands, and thought, and thought, and thought, till the rocking, and the rushing, and the whirl, and the noise of the steam on his ear and the giddy gyrations of his brain in the exhaustion of overstrung exertion, conquered thought. With the beating of the engine seeming to throb like the great swinging of a pendulum through his mind, and the whirling of the country passing by him like a confused phantasmagoria, his eyes closed, his aching limbs stretched themselves out to rest, a heavy dreamless sleep fell on him, the sleep of intense bodily fatigue, and he knew no more.

Gendarmes awoke him to see his visa. He showed it them by sheer mechanical instinct, and slept again in that dead weight of slumber the moment he was alone. When he had taken his ticket, and they had asked him to where it should be, he had answered to their amaze, “to the farthest place it goes,” and he was borne on now unwitting where it went; through the rich champaign and the barren plains; through the reddening vintage and over the dreary plateaux; through antique cities, and across broad, flowing rivers; through the cave of riven rocks, and above nestling, leafy valleys; on and on, on and on, while he knew nothing, as the opium-like sleep of intense weariness held him in it stupor.

He awoke at last with a start; it was evening; the stilly twilight was settling over all the land, and the train was still rushing onward, fleet as the wind. His eyes, as they opened dreamily, fell on a face half obscured in the gleaming; he leaned forward, bewildered and doubting his senses.

“Rake!”

Rake gave the salute hurriedly and in embarrassment.

“It’s I, sir!–yes, sir.”

Cecil thought himself dreaming still.

“You! You had my orders?”

“Yes, sir, I had your orders,” murmured the ex-soldier, more confused than he had ever been in the whole course of his audacious life, “and they was the first I ever disobeyed–they was. You see, sir, they was just what I couldn’t swallow nohow–that’s the real, right-down fact! Send me to the devil, Mr. Cecil, for you, and I’ll go at the first bidding, but leave you just when things are on the cross for you, damn me if I will!–beggin’ your pardon, sir!”

And Rake, growing fiery and eloquent, dashed his cap down on the floor of the coupe with an emphatic declaration of resistance. Cecil looked at him in silence; he was not certain still whether this were not a fantastic folly he was dreaming.

“Damn me if I will, Mr. Cecil! You won’t keep me–very well; but you can’t prevent me follerin’ of you, and foller you I will; and so there’s no more to be said about it, sir; but just to let me have my own lark, as one may say. You said you’d go to the station, I went there; you took your ticket, I took my ticket. I’ve been travelling behind you till about two hours ago, then I looked at you; you was asleep sir. ‘I don’t think my master’s quite well,’ says I to Guard; ‘I’d like to get in there along of him.’ ‘Get in with you, then,’ says he (only we was jabbering that willainous tongue o’ theirs), for he sees the name on my traps is the same as that on your traps–and in I get. Now, Mr. Cecil, let me say one word for all, and don’t think I’m a insolent, ne’er-do-well for having been and gone and disobeyed you; but you was good to me when I was sore in want of it; you was even good to my dog–rest his soul, the poor beast! There never were a braver!–and stick to you I will till you kick me away like a cur. The truth is, it’s only being near of you, sir, that keeps me straight; if I was to leave you I should become a bad ‘un again, right and away. Don’t send me from you, sir, as you took mercy on me once!”

Rake’s voice shook a little toward the close of his harangue, and in the shadows of evening light, as the train plunged through the gathering gloom, his ruddy, bright, bronzed face looked very pale and wistful.

Cecil stretched out his hand to him in silence that spoke better than words.

Rank hung his head.

“No, sir; you’re a gentleman, and I’ve been an awful scamp! It’s enough honor for me that you would do it. When I’m more worth it, perhaps–but that won’t never be.”

“You are worth it now, my gallant fellow.” His voice was very low; the man’s loyalty touched him keenly. “It was only for yourself, Rake, that I ever wished you to leave me.”

“God bless you, sir!” said Rake passionately; “them words are better nor ten tosses of brandy! You see, sir, I’m so spry and happy in a wild life, I am, and if so be as you go to them American parts as you spoke on, why I know ’em just as well as I know Newmarket Heath, every bit! They’re terrible rips in them parts; kill you as soon as look at you; it makes things uncommon larky out there, uncommon spicy. You aren’t never sure but what there’s a bowie knife a-waiting for you.”

With which view of the delights of Western life, Rake, “feeling like a fool,” as he thought himself, for which reason he had diverged into Argentine memories, applied himself to the touching and examining of the rifle with that tenderness which only gunnery love and lore produce.

Cecil sat silent a while, his head drooped down on his hands, while the evening deepened to night. At last he looked up.

“The King? Where is he?”

Rake flushed shamefacedly under his tanned skin.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir; behind you.”

“Behind me?”

“Yes, sir; him and the brown mare. I couldn’t do nothing else with ’em you see, sir, so I shipped him along with us; they don’t care for the train a bit, bless their hearts! And I’ve got a sharp boy a-minding of ’em. You can easily send ’em on to England from Paris if you’re determined to part with ’em; but you know the King always was fond of drums and trumpets and that like. You remember, sir, when he as a colt we broke him into it and taught him a bit of maneuvering; ’cause, till you find what pace he had in him, you’d thought of making a charger of him. He loves the noise of soldiering–he do; and if he thought you was going away without him, he’d break his heart, Mr. Cecil, sir. It was all I could do to keep him from follerin’ of you this morning; he sawed my arms off almost.”

With which, Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of unpardonable disobedience and outrageous interference, hung his head over the gun; a little anxious and a good deal ashamed.

Cecil smiled a little, despite himself.

“Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid; you are terribly insubordinate!”

He had not the heart to say more; the man’s fidelity was too true to be returned with rebuke; and stronger than all surprise and annoyance was a strange mingling of pain and pleasure in him to think that the horse he loved so well was still so near him, the comrade of his adversity as he had been the companion of his happiest hours.

“These things will keep him a few days,” he thought, as he looked at his hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in each of his wristband- studs. HE would have pawned every atom he had about him to have had the King with him a week longer.

The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a coming tempest drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward through the thickening darkness, through the spectral country–it was like his life, rushing headlong down into impenetrable gloom. The best, the uttermost, that he could look for was a soldier’s grave, far away under some foreign soil.

A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in her own boudoir in her Baden suite; she was going to dine with an Archduchess of Russia, and the splendid jewels of her House glittered through the black shower of her laces, and crowned her beautiful glossy hair, her delicate imperial head. In her hands was a letter–oddly written in pencil on a leaf torn out of a betting book, but without a tremor or a change in the writing itself. And as she stood a shiver shook her frame; in the solitude of her lighted and luxurious chamber her cheek grew pale, her eyes grew dim.

“To refute the charge,” ran the last words of what was at best but a fragment, “I must have broken my promise to you, and have compromised your name. Keeping silence myself, but letting the trial take place, law-inquiries so execrable and so minute, would soon have traced through others that I was with you that evening. To clear myself I must have attainted your name with public slander, and drawn the horrible ordeal on you before the world. Let me be thought guilty. It matters little. Henceforth I shall be dead to all who know me, and my ruin would have exiled me without this. Do not let an hour of grief for me mar your peace, my dearest; think of me with no pain, Beatrice; only with some memory of our past love. I have not strength yet to say –forget me; and yet,–if it be for your happiness,–blot out from your remembrance all thought of what we have been to one another; all thought of me and of my life, save to remember now and then that I was dear to you.”

The words grew indistinct before her sight, they touched the heart of the world-worn coquette, of the victorious sovereign, to the core; she trembled greatly as she read them. For–in her hands was his fate. Though no hint of this was breathed in his farewell letter, she knew that with a word she could clear him, free him, and call him back from exile and shame, give him once more honor and guiltlessness in the sight of the world. With a word she could do this; his life was in the balance that she held as utterly as though it were now hers to sign, or to destroy, his death-warrant. It rested with her to speak and to say he had no guilt.

But to do this she must sacrifice herself. She stood mute, irresolute, a shudder running through her till her diamonds shook in the light; the heavy tears stole slowly down, one by one, and fell upon the blurred and blackened paper; her heart ached with an exceeding bitterness. Then shudderingly still, and as though there were a coward crime in the action, her hand unclosed and let the letter fall into the spirit flame of a silver lamp, burning by; the words that were upon it merited a better fate, a fonder cherishing, but–they would have compromised her. She let them fall, and burn, and wither. With them she gave up his life to its burden of shame, to its fate of exile.

She would hear his crime condemned, and her lips would not open; she would hear his name aspersed, and her voice would not be raised; she would know that he dwelt in misery, or died under foreign suns unhonored and unmourned, while tongues around her would babble of his disgrace–and she would keep her peace.

She loved him–yes; but she loved better the dignity in which the world held her, and the diamonds from which the law would divorce her if their love were known.

She sacrificed him for her reputation and her jewels; the choice was thoroughly a woman’s.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN THE CAFE OF THE CHASSEURS.

The red-hot light of the after-glow still burned on the waters of the bay, and shed its Egyptian-like luster on the city that lies in the circle of the Sahel, with the Mediterranean so softly lashing with its violet waves the feet of the white, sloping town. The sun had sunk down in fire–the sun that once looked over those waters on the legions of Scipio and the iron brood of Hamilcar, and that now gave its luster on the folds of the French flags as they floated above the shipping of the harbor, and on the glitter of the French arms, as a squadron of the army of Algeria swept back over the hills to their barracks. Pell-mell in its fantastic confusion, its incongruous blending, its forced mixture of two races–that will touch, but never mingle; that will be chained together, but will never assimilate–the Gallic-Moorish life of the city poured out; all the coloring of Haroun al Raschid scattered broadcast among Parisian fashion and French routine. Away yonder, on the spurs and tops of the hills, the green sea-pines seemed to pierce the transparent air; in the Cabash old, dreamy Arabian legends, poetic as Hafiz, seem still to linger here and there under the foliage of hanging gardens or the picturesque curves of broken terraces; in the distance the brown, rugged Kabyl mountains lay like a couched camel, and far off against the golden haze a single palm rose, at a few rare intervals, with its drooped, curled leaves, as though to recall, amid the shame of foreign domination, that this was once the home of Hannibal; the Africa that had made Rome tremble.

In the straight, white boulevards, as in the winding ancient streets; under the huge barn-like walls of barracks, as beneath the marvelous mosaics of mosques; the strange bizarre conflict of European and Oriental life spread its panorama. Staff officers, all aglitter with crosses, galloped past; mules, laden with green maize and driven by lean, brown Bedouins, swept past the plate-glass windows of bonbon shops; grave, white-bearded sheiks drank petits verres in the guinguettes; sapeurs, Chasseurs, Zouaves, cantinieres–all the varieties of French military life–mingled with jet-black Soudans, desert kings wrathful and silent, Eastern women shrouded in haick and serroual, eagle-eyed Arabs flinging back snow-white burnous, and handling ominously the jeweled halts of their cangiars. Alcazar chansons rang out from the cafes, while in their midst stood the mosque, that had used to resound with the Muezzin. Bijou-blondine and Bebee La-la and all the sister-heroines of demi-monde dragged their voluminous Paris-made dresses side by side with Moorish beauties, who only dared show the gleam of their bright black eyes through the yashmak; the reverberes were lit in the Place du Gouvernement, and a group fit for the days of Solyman the Magnificent sat under the white marble beauty of the Mohammedan church. “Rein n’est sacre pour un sapeur!” was being sung to a circle of sous-officiers, close in the ear of a patriarch serenely majestic as Abraham; gaslights were flashing, cigar shops were filling, newspapers were being read, the Rigolboche was being danced, commis-voyageurs were chattering with grisettes, drums were beating, trumpets were sounding, bands were playing, and, amid it all, grave men were dropping on their square of carpet to pray, brass trays of sweetmeats were passing, ostrich eggs were dangling, henna-tipped fingers were drawing the envious veil close, and noble Oriental shadows were gliding to and fro through the open doors of the mosques, like a picture of the “Arabian Nights,” like a poem of dead Islamism–in a word, it was Algiers at evening.

In one of the cafes there, a mingling of all the nations under the sun was drinking demi-tasses, absinthe, vermouth, or old wines, in the comparative silence that had succeeded to a song, sung by a certain favorite of the Spahis, known as Loo-Loo-j’n-m’en soucie guere, from Mlle. Loo-Loo’s well-known habits of independence and bravado, which last had gone once so far as shooting a man through the chest in the Rue Bab-al-Oued, and setting all the gendarmes and sergents-de-ville at defiance afterward. Half a dozen of that famous regiment the Chasseurs d’Afrique were gathered together, some with their feet resting on the little marble-topped tables, some reading the French papers, all smoking their inseparable companions–the brules-gueles; fine, stalwart, sun-burned fellows, with faces and figures that the glowing colors of their uniform set off to the best advantage.

“Loo-Loo was in fine voice to-night,” said one.

“Yes; she took plenty of cognac before she sang; that always clears her voice,” said a second.

“And I think that did her spirits good, shooting that Kabyl,” said a third. “By the way, did he die?”

“N’sais pas, Loo-Loo’s a good aim.”

“Sac a papier, yes! Rire-pour-tout taught her.”

“Ah! There never was a shot like Rire-pour-tout. When he went out, he always asked his adversary, ‘Where will you like it? your lungs, your heart, your brain? It is quite a matter of choice;’–and whichever they chose, he shot there. Le pauvre Rire-pour-tout! He was always good-natured.”

“And did he never meet his match?” asked a sous-officier of the line.

The speaker looked down on the piou-piou with superb contempt, and twisted his mustaches. “Monsieur! how could he? He was a Chasseur.”

“But if he never met his match, how did he die?” pursued the irreverent piou-piou–a little wiry man, black as a berry, agile as a monkey, tough and short as a pipe-stopper.

The magnificent Chasseur laughed in his splendid disdain. “A piou-piou never killed him, that I promise you. He spitted half a dozen of you before breakfast, to give him a relish. How did Rire-pour-tout die? I will tell you.”

He dipped his long mustaches into a beaker of still champagne. Claude, Viscomte de Chanrellon, though in the ranks, could afford those luxuries.

“He died this way, did Rire-pour-tout! Dieu de Dieu! a very good way too. Send us all the like when our time comes! We were out yonder” (and he nodded his handsome head outward to where the brown, seared plateaux and the Kabyl mountains lay). “We were hunting Arabs, of course–pot-shooting, rather, as we never got nigh enough to their main body to have a clear charge at them. Rire-pour-tout grew sick of it. ‘This won’t do,’ he said; ‘here’s two weeks gone by, and I haven’t shot anything but kites and jackals. I shall get my hand out.’ For Rire-pour-tout, as the army knows, somehow or other, generally potted his man every day, and he missed it terribly. Well, what did he do? He rode off one morning and found out the Arab camp, and he waved a white flag for a parley. He didn’t dismount, but he just faced the Arabs and spoke to their Sheik. ‘Things are slow,’ he said to them. ‘I have come for a little amusement. Set aside six of your best warriors, and I’ll fight them one after another for the honor of France and a drink of brandy to the conqueror.’ They demurred; they thought it unfair to him to have six to one. ‘Ah!’ he laughs, ‘you have heard of Rire-pour- tout, and you are afraid!’ That put their blood up: they said they would fight him before all his Chasseurs. ‘Come, and welcome,’ said Rire-pour-tout; ‘and not a hair of your beards shall be touched except by me.’ So the bargain was made for an hour before sunset that night. Mort de Dieu! that was a grand duel!”

He dipped his long mustaches again into another beaker of still. Talking was thirsty work; the story was well known in all the African army, but the piou-piou, having served in China, was new to the soil.

“The General was ill-pleased when he heard it, and half for arresting Rire-pour-tout; but–sacre!–the thing was done; our honor was involved; he had engaged to fight these men, and engaged for us to let them go in peace afterward; there was no more to be said, unless we had looked like cowards, or traitors, or both. There was a wide, level plateau in front of our camp, and the hills were at our backs–a fine field for the duello; and, true to time, the Arabs filed on to the plain, and fronted us in a long line, with their standards, and their crescents, and their cymbals and reed-pipes, and kettle-drums, all glittering and sounding. Sac a papier! There was a show, and we could not fight one of them! We were drawn up in line–Horse, Foot, and Artillery–Rire-pour-tout all alone, some way in advance; mounted, of course. The General and the Sheik had a conference; then the play began. There were six Arabs picked out–the flower of the army–all white and scarlet, and in their handsomest bravery, as if they came to an aouda. They were fine men–diable!–they were fine men. Now the duel was to be with swords; these had been selected; and each Arab was to come against Rire-pour-tout singly, in succession. Our drums rolled the pas de charge, and their cymbals clashed; they shouted ‘Fantasia!’ and the first Arab rode at him. Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went his steel through the Bedouin’s lung, before you could cry hola!–a death-stroke, of course; Rire-pour-tout always killed: that was his perfect science. Another and another and another came, just as fast as the blood flowed. You know what the Arabs are–vous autres? How they wheel and swerve and fight flying, and pick up their saber from the ground, while their horse is galloping ventre a terre, and pierce you here and pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks? You know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after another, more like devils than men. Mort de Dieu! it was a magnificent sight! He was gashed here and gashed there; but they could never unseat him, try how they would; and one after another he caught them sooner or later, and sent them reeling out of their saddles, till there was a great red lake of blood all round him, and five of them lay dead or dying down in the sand. He had mounted afresh twice, three horses had been killed underneath him, and his jacket all hung in strips where the steel had slashed it. It was grand to see, and did one’s heart good; but–ventre bleu!–how one longed to go in too.

“There was only one left now–a young Arab, the Sheik’s son, and down he came like the wind. He thought with the shock to unhorse Rire-pour- tout, and finish him then at his leisure. You could hear the crash as they met, like two huge cymbals smashing together. Their chargers hit and tore at each other’s manes; they were twined in together there as if they were but one man and one beast; they shook and they swayed and they rocked; the sabers played about their heads so quick that it was like lightning, as they flashed and twirled in the sun; the hoofs trampled up the sand till a yellow cloud hid their struggle, and out of it all you could see was the head of a horse tossing up and spouting with foam, or a sword-blade lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled down a little, the sand mist cleared away, the Arab’s saddle was empty–but Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock. The old Chief bowed his head. ‘It is over! Allah is great!’ And he knew his son lay there dead. Then we broke from the ranks, and we rushed to the place where the chargers and men were piled like so many slaughtered sheep. Rire-pour-tout laughed such a gay, ringing laugh as the desert never had heard. ‘Vive la France!’ he cried. ‘And now bring me my toss of brandy.’ Then down headlong out of his stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse; and when we lifted him up there were two broken sword-blades buried in him, and the blood was pouring fast as water out of thirty wounds and more. That was how Rire-pour-tout died, piou- piou; laughing to the last. Sacre bleu! It was a splendid end; I wish I were sure of the like.”

And Claude de Chanrellon drank down his third beaker, for overmuch speech made him thirsty.

The men around him emptied their glasses in honor of the dead hero.

“Rire-pour-tout was a croc-mitaine,” they said solemnly, with almost a sigh; so tendering by their words the highest funeral oration.

“You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose?” asked a voice in very pure French. The speaker was leaning against the open door of the cafe; a tall, lightly built man, dressed in a velvet shooting tunic, much the worse for wind and weather, a loose shirt, and jack- boots splashed and worn out.

“When we are at it, monsieur,” returned the Chasseur. “I only wish we had more.”

“Of course. Are you in need of recruits?”

“They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves,” smiled Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. “Still, a good sword brings its welcome. Do you ask seriously, monsieur?”

The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little piou-piou drowning his mortification in some curacoa, the idlers reading the “Akbah” or the “Presse,” the Chasseurs lounging over their drink, the ecarte players lost in their game, all looked up at the newcomer. They thought he looked a likely wearer of the dead honors of Rire-pour- tout.

He did not answer the question literally, but came over from the doorway and seated himself at the little marble table opposite Claude, leaning his elbows on it.

“I have a doubt,” he said. “I am more inclined to your foes.”

“Dieu de Dieu!” exclaimed Chanrellon, pulling at his tawny mustaches. “A bold thing to say before five Chasseurs.”

He smiled, a little contemptuously, a little amusedly.

“I am not a croc-mitaine, perhaps; but I say what I think, with little heed of my auditors, usually.”

Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. “He is a croc- mitaine,” he thought. “He is not to be lost.”

“I prefer your foes,” went on the other, quite quietly, quite listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of French soldiers. “In the first place, they are on the losing side; in the second, they are the lords of the soil; in the third, they live as free as air; and in the fourth, they have undoubtedly the right of the quarrel!”

“Monsieur!” cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on their swords, fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily up from under the long lashes of his lids, and went on, as though they had not spoken.

“I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours, Rire- pour-tout, did, but I don’t think it’s worth while,” he said carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. “Brawling’s bad style; we don’t do it. I was saying, I like your foes best; mere matter of taste; no need to quarrel over it–that I see. I shall go into their service or into yours, monsieur–will you play a game of dice to decide?”

“Decide?–but how?”

“Why–this way,” said the other, with the weary listlessness of one who cares not two straws how things turn. “If I win, I go to the Arabs; if you win, I come to your ranks.”

“Mort de Dieu! it is a droll gambling,” murmured Chanrellon. “But–if