"Hush--be at rest! There is no injury but what I can repair, nor is
there a creature in sight to have witnessed the accident. Trust in me;
no one shall ever know of this. You shall reach town safely and alone."

And, while he promised, he forgot that he thus pledged his honor to
leave four hours of his life so buried that, however much he needed, he
neither should nor could account for them.

CHAPTER IX.

THE PAINTED BIT.

Baden was at its brightest. The Victoria, the Badischer Hof, the
Stephanie Bauer were crowded. The Kurliste had a dazzling string of
names. Imperial grandeur sauntered in slippers; chiefs, used to be
saluted with "Ave Caesar Imperator," smoked a papelito in peace over
"Galignani." Emperors gave a good-day to ministers who made their
thrones beds of thorns, and little kings elbowed great capitalists who
could have bought them all up in a morning's work in the money market.
Statecraft was in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown.
Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the hazard of
European politics laughed good-humoredly as they laid their gold down on
the color. Rivals who had lately been quarreling over the knotty points
of national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the
bouquetiere. Knights of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece,
who had hated each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the
Continent between them, got friends over a mutually good book on the
Rastadt or Foret Noir. Brains that were the powder depot of one-half of
the universe let themselves be lulled to tranquil amusement by a fair
idiot's coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could loosen the
coursing slips of the wild hell-dogs of war, murmured love to a
princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morning, or smiled
over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or Cham.

Baden was full. The supreme empires of demi-monde sent their sovereigns,
diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all other principalities and
powers, while in breadth of marvelous skirts, in costliness of cobweb
laces, in unapproachability of Indian shawls and gold embroideries,
and mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a
Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced by none.

Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered under the
pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there was not one in his way
greater than the steeple-chaser, Forest King--certes, there was not one
half so honest.

The Guards' Crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the sole
representative of England. There were two or three good things out of
French stables,--specially a killing little boy, L'Etoile,--and there
was an Irish sorrel, the property of an Austrian of rank, of which fair
things were whispered; but it was scarcely possible that anything
could stand against the King and that wonderful stride of his which
spread-eagled his field like magic, and his countrymen were well
content to leave their honor and their old renown to "Beauty" and his
six-year-old.

Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort of
conviction that the German race would set everything square. He stood
either to make a very good thing on it or to be very heavily bit. There
could be no medium. He never hedged in his life; and as it was almost
a practical impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get
together would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of
the King. Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably too
careless to take the chance of adverse accident into account, had come
to Baden, and was amusing himself there dropping a Friedrich d'Or on the
rouge, flirting in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady
Guenevere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness,
supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that a Russian
Prince had had before him, with all the serenity of a millionaire, as
far as memory of money went; with much more than the serenity in other
matters of most millionaires, who, finding themselves uncommonly ill
at ease in the pot-pourri of monarchs and ministers, of beau-monde and
demi-monde, would have given half their newly turned thousands to get
rid of the odor of Capel Court and the Bourse, and to attain the calm,
negligent assurance, the easy, tranquil insolence, the nonchalance with
Princes, and the supremacy among the Free Lances, which they saw and
coveted in the indolent Guardsman.

Bertie amused himself. He might be within a day of his ruin, but that
was no reason why he should not sip his iced sherbet and laugh with a
pretty French actress to-night. His epicurean formulary was the same as
old Herrick's, and he would have paraphrased this poet's famous quatrain
into

     Drink a pure claret while you may,
     Your "stiff" is still a-flying;
     And he who dines so well to-day
     To-morrow may be lying,
     Pounced down upon by Jews _tout net_,
     Or outlawed in a French _guinguette!_

Bertie was a great believer--if the words are not too sonorous and
too earnest to be applied to his very inconsequent views upon any and
everything--in the philosophy of happy accident. Far as it was in him to
have a conviction at all,--which was a thorough-going, serious sort
of thing not by any means his "form,"--he had a conviction that
the doctrine of "Eat, drink, and enjoy, for to-morrow we die" was
a universal panacea. He was reckless to the uttermost stretch of
recklessness, all serene and quiet though his pococurantism and his
daily manner were; and while subdued to the undeviating monotone and
languor of his peculiar set in all his temper and habits, the natural
dare-devil in him took out its inborn instincts in a wildly careless and
gamester-like imprudence with that most touchy tempered and inconsistent
of all coquettes--Fortune.

Things, he thought, could not well be worse with him than they were now.
So he piled all on one coup, and stood to be sunk or saved by the
Prix de Dames. Meanwhile, all the same, he murmured Mussetism to the
Guenevere under the ruins of the Alte Schloss, lost or won a rouleau at
the roulette-wheel, gave a banknote to the famous Isabel for a tea-rose,
drove the Zu-Zu four in hand to see the Flat races, took his guinea
tickets for the Concerts, dined with Princes, lounged arm-in-arm with
Grand Dukes, gave an Emperor a hint as to the best cigars, and charmed a
Monarch by unfolding the secret of the aroma of a Guards' Punch, sacred
to the Household.

Bertie who believed in bivalves but not in heroics, thought it best to
take the oysters first and eschew the despair entirely.

He had one unchangeable quality--insouciance; and he had, moreover, one
unchangeable faith--the King. Lady Guenevere had reached home unnoticed
after the accident of their moonlight stag-hunt. His brother, meeting
him a day or two after their interview, had nodded affirmatively, though
sulkily, in answer to his inquiries, and had murmured that it was "all
square now." The Jews and the tradesmen had let him leave for Baden
without more serious measures than a menace, more or less insolently
worded. In the same fashion he trusted that the King's running at the
Bad, with the moneys he had on it, would set all things right for a
little while; when, if his family interest, which was great, would get
him his step in the First Life, he thought, desperate as things were,
they might come round again smoothly, without a notorious crash.

"You are sure the King will 'stay,' Bertie?" asked Lady Guenevere, who
had some hundreds in gloves (and even under the rose "sported a pony" or
so more seriously) on the event.

"Certain! But if he don't I promise you as pretty a tableau as your
Asnieres one; for your sake, I'll make the finish as picturesque as
possible. Wouldn't it be well to give me a lock of hair in readiness?"

Her ladyship laughed and shook her head; if a man killed himself, she
did not desire that her gracious name should be entangled with the
folly.

"No; I don't do those things," she said, with captivating waywardness.
"Besides, though the Oos looks cool and pleasant, I greatly doubt that
under any pressure you would trouble it; suicides are too pronounced for
your style, Bertie."

"At all events, a little morphia in one's own rooms would be quieter,
and better taste," said Cecil, while he caught himself listlessly
wondering, as he had wondered at Richmond, if this badinage were to turn
into serious fact--how much would she care.

"May your sins be forgiven you!" cried Chesterfield, the apostle of
training, as he and the Seraph came up to the table where Cecil and
Cos Wentworth were breakfasting in the garden of the Stephanien on the
race-day itself. "Liqueurs, truffles, and every devilment under the
sun?--cold beef, and nothing to drink, Beauty, if you've any conscience
left!"

"Never had a grain, dear boy, since I can remember," murmured Bertie
apologetically. "You took all the rawness off me at Eton."

"And you've been taking coffee in bed, I'll swear!" pursued the
cross-examiner.

"What if he have? Beauty's condition can't be upset by a little mocha,
nor mine either," said his universal defender; and the Seraph shook his
splendid limbs with a very pardonable vanity.

"Ruteroth trains; Ruteroth trains awfully," put in Cos Wentworth,
looking up out of a great silver flagon of Badminton, with which he was
ending his breakfast; and referring to that Austrian who was to ride the
Paris favorite. "Remember him at La Marche last year, and the racing at
Vincennes--didn't take a thing that could make flesh--muscles like iron,
you know--never touched a soda even----"

"I've trained, too," said Bertie submissively; "look how I've been
waltzing! There isn't harder work than that for any fellow. A deuxtemps
with the Duchess takes it out of you like any spin over the flat."

His censurers laughed, but did not give in their point.

"You've run shocking risks, Beauty," said Chesterfield; "the King's in
fine running-form; don't say he isn't; but you've said scores of times
what a deal of riding he takes. Now, can you tell us yourself that
you're in as hard condition as you were when you won the Military, eh?"

Cecil shook his head with a sigh.

"I don't think I am; I've had things to try me, you see. There was that
Verschoyle's proposal. I did absolutely think at one time she'd marry
me before I could protest against it! Then there was that shock to one's
whole nervous system, when that indigo man, who took Lady Laura's house,
asked us to dinner, and actually thought we should go!--and there was a
scene, you know, of all earthly horrors, when Mrs. Gervase was so near
eloping with me, and Gervase cut up rough, instead of pitying me; and
then the field-days were so many, and so late into the season; and I
exhausted myself so at the Belvoir theatricals at Easter; and I toiled
so atrociously playing 'Almaviva' at your place, Seraph--a private
opera's galley slave's work!--and, altogether, I've had a good many
things to pull me down since the winter," concluded Bertie, with a
plaintive self-condolence over his truffles.

The rest of his condemning judges laughed, and passed the plea of
sympathy; the Coldstreamer alone remained censorious and untouched.

"Pull you down! You'll never pull off the race if you sit drinking
liqueurs all the morning!" growled that censor. "Look at that!"

Bertie glanced at the London telegram tossed across to him, sent from a
private and confidential agent.

"Betting here--two to one on L'Etoile; Irish Roan offered and taken
freely. Slight decline in closing prices for the King; getting on French
bay rather heavily at midnight. Fancy there's a commission out against
the King. Looks suspicious." Cecil shrugged his shoulders and raised his
eyebrows a little.

"All the better for us. Take all they'll lay against me. It's as good
as our having a 'Commission out'; and if any cads get one against us it
can't mean mischief, as it would with professional jocks."

"Are you so sure of yourself, Beauty?"

Beauty shook his head repudiatingly.

"Never am sure of anything, much less of myself. I'm a chameleon, a
perfect chameleon!"

"Are you so sure of the King, then?"

"My dear fellow, no! I ask you in reason, how can I be sure of what
isn't proved? I'm like that country fellow the old story tells of; he
believed in fifteen shillings because he'd once had it in his hand;
others, he'd heard, believed in a pound; but, for his part, he didn't,
because he'd never seen it. Now that was a man who'd never commit
himself; he might had had the Exchequer! I'm the same; I believe the
King can win at a good many things because I've seen him do 'em; but I
can't possibly tell whether he can get this, because I've never ridden
him for it. I shall be able to tell you at three o'clock--but that you
don't care for----"

And Bertie, exhausted with making such a lengthened exposition--the
speeches he preferred were monosyllabic--completed his sins against
training with a long draught of claret-cup.

"Then what the devil do you mean by telling us to pile our pots on you?"
asked the outraged Coldstreamer, with natural wrath.

"Faith is a beautiful sight!" said Bertie, with solemnity.

"Offered on the altar of the Jews!" laughed the Seraph, as he turned him
away from the breakfast table by the shoulders. "Thanks, Beauty; I've
'four figures' on you, and you'll be good enough to win them for me.
Let's have a look at the King. They are just going to walk him over."

Cecil complied; while he lounged away with the others to the stables,
with a face of the most calm, gentle, weary indifference in the world,
the thought crossed him for a second of how very near he was to the
wind. The figures in his betting-book were to the tune of several
thousands, one way or another. If he won this morning it would be all
right, of course; if he lost--even Beauty, odd mixture of devil-may-care
and languor though he was, felt his lips grow, for the moment, hot and
cold by turns as he thought of that possible contingency.

The King looked in splendid condition; he knew well enough what was up
again, knew what was meant by that extra sedulous dressing-down, that
setting muzzle that had been buckled on him some nights previous, the
limitation put to his drink, the careful trial spins in the gray of the
mornings, the conclusive examination of his plates by a skillful hand;
he knew what was required of him, and a horse in nobler condition never
stepped out in body clothing, as he was ridden slowly down on to the
plains of Iffesheim. The Austrian Dragoon, a Count and a Chamberlain
likewise, who was to ride his only possible rival, the French horse
L'Etoile, pulled his tawny silken mustaches as he saw the great English
hero come up the course, and muttered to himself, "L'affaire est finie."
L'Etoile was a brilliant enough bay in his fashion, but Count Ruteroth
knew the measure of his pace and powers too thoroughly to expect him to
live against the strides of the Guards' gray.

"My beauty, won't you cut those German fellows down!" muttered Rake, the
enthusiast, in the saddling inclosure. "As for those fools what go agin
you, you'll put them in a hole, and no mistake. French horse, indeed!
Why, you'll spread-eagle all them Mossoos' and Meinherrs' cattle in a
brace of seconds--"

Rake's foe, the head groom, caught him up savagely.

"Won't you never learn decent breeding? When we wins we wins on the
quiet, and when we loses we loses as if we liked it; all that braying,
and flaunting, and boasting is only fit for cads. The 'oss is in tip-top
condition; let him show what he can do over furren ground."

"Lucky for him, then, that he hasn't got you across the pigskin; you'd
rope him, I believe, as soon as look at him, if it was made worth your
while," retorted Rake, in caustic wrath; his science of repartee chiefly
lay in a successful "plant," and he was here uncomfortably conscious
that his opponent was in the right of the argument, as he started
through the throng to put his master into the "shell" of the
Shire-famous scarlet and white.

"Tip-top condition, my boy--tip-top, and no mistake," murmured Mr.
Willon for the edification of those around them as the saddle-girths
were buckled on, and the Guards' Crack stood the cynosure of every eye
at Iffesheim.

Then, in his capacity as head attendant on the hero, he directed the
exercise bridle to be taken off, and with his own hands adjusted a new
and handsome one, slung across his arm.

"'Tis a'most a pity. 'Tis a'most a pity," thought the worthy, as he put
the curb on the King; "but I shouldn't have been haggravated with that
hinsolent soldiering chap. There, my boy! if you'll win with a painted
quid, I'm a Dutchman."

Forest King champed his bit between his teeth a little; it tasted
bitter; he tossed his head and licked it with his tongue impatiently;
the taste had got down his throat and he did not like its flavor; he
turned his deep, lustrous eyes with a gentle patience on the crowd about
him, as though asking them what was the matter with him. No one moved
his bit; the only person who could have had such authority was busily
giving the last polish to his coat with a fine handkerchief--that
glossy neck which had been so dusted many a time with the cobweb
coronet-broidered handkerchiefs of great ladies--and his instincts,
glorious as they were, were not wise enough to tell him to kick his head
groom down, then and there, with one mortal blow, as his poisoner and
betrayer.

The King chafed under the taste of that "painted quid"; he felt a
nausea as he swallowed, and he turned his handsome head with a strange,
pathetic astonishment in his glance. At that moment a familiar hand
stroked his mane, a familiar foot was put into his stirrup, Bertie threw
himself into saddle; the lightest weight that ever gentleman-rider rode,
despite his six-foot length of limb. The King, at the well-known touch,
the well-loved voice, pricked his delicate ears, quivered in all his
frame with eager excitation, snuffed the air restlessly through his
distended nostrils, and felt every vein under his satin skin thrill
and swell with pleasure; he was all impatience, all power, all longing,
vivid intensity of life. If only that nausea would go! He felt a
restless sickliness stealing on him that his young and gallant strength
had never known since he was foaled. But it was not in the King to yield
to a little; he flung his head up, champing angrily at the bit, then
walked down to the starting-post with his old calm, collected grace; and
Cecil, looking at the glossy bow of the neck, and feeling the width of
the magnificent ribs beneath him, stooped from his saddle a second as he
rode out of the inclosure and bent to the Seraph.

"Look at him, Rock! The thing's as good as won."

The day was very warm and brilliant; all Baden had come down to the
race-course; continuous strings of carriages, with their four or six
horses and postilions, held the line far down over the plains; mob there
was none, save of women in matchless toilets, and men with the highest
names in the "Almanac de Gotha"; the sun shone cloudlessly on the broad,
green plateau of Iffesheim, on the white amphitheater of chalk hills,
and on the glittering, silken folds of the flags of England, France,
Prussia, and of the Grand Duchy itself, that floated from the summits of
the Grand Stand, Pavilion, and Jockey Club.

The ladies, descending from the carriages, swept up and down on the
green course that was so free from "cads" and "legs"; their magnificent
skirts trailing along without the risk of a grain of dust; their costly
laces side by side with the Austrian uniforms of the military men from
Rastadt. The betting was but slight, in odd contrast with the hubbub and
striking clamor of English betting rings; the only approach to anything
like "real business" being transacted between the members of the
Household and those of the Jockey Clubs. Iffesheim was pure pleasure,
like every other item of Baden existence, and all aristocratic,
sparkling, rich, amusement-seeking Europe seemed gathered there under
the sunny skies, and on everyone's lips in the titled throng was but one
name--Forest King's. Even the coquettish bouquet-sellers, who remembered
the dresses of his own colors which Cecil had given them last year when
he had won the Rastadt, would sell nothing except little twin scarlet
and white moss rosebuds; of which thousands were gathered and died that
morning in honor of the English Guards' champion.

A slender event usually, the presence of the renowned crack of the
Household Cavalry made the Prix de Dames the most eagerly watched-for
entry on the card; and the rest of the field were scarcely noticed as
the well-known gold-embroidered jacket came up at the starting-post.

The King saw that blaze of light and color over course and stands that
he knew so well by this time; he felt the pressure round him of his
foreign rivals as they reared and pulled and fretted and passaged; the
old longing quivered in all his eager limbs, the old fire wakened in all
his dauntless blood; like the charger at sound of the trumpet-call, he
lived in his past victories, and was athirst for more. But yet--between
him and the sunny morning there seemed a dim, hazy screen; on his
delicate ear the familiar clangor smote with something dulled and
strange; there seemed a numbness stealing down his frame; he shook his
head in an unusual and irritated impatience; he did not know what ailed
him. The hand he loved so loyally told him the work that was wanted of
him; but he felt its guidance dully too, and the dry, hard, hot earth,
as he struck it with his hoof, seemed to sway and heave beneath him; the
opiate had stolen into his veins and was creeping stealthily and surely
to the sagacious brain, and over the clear, bright senses.

The signal for the start was given; the first mad headlong rush broke
away with the force of a pent-up torrent suddenly loosened; every
instinct of race and custom, and of that obedience which rendered him
flexible as silk to his rider's will, sent him forward with that stride
which made the Guards' Crack a household word in all the Shires. For a
moment he shook himself clear of all the horses, and led off in the old
grand sweeping canter before the French bay, three lengths in the one
single effort.

Then into his eyes a terrible look of anguish came; the numb and sickly
nausea was upon him, his legs trembled, before his sight was a blurred,
whirling mist; all the strength and force and mighty life within him
felt ebbing out, yet he struggled bravely. He strained, he panted, he
heard the thundering thud of the first flight gaining nearer and nearer
upon him; he felt his rivals closing hotter and harder in on him; he
felt the steam of his opponent's smoking, foam-dashed withers burn
on his own flanks and shoulders; he felt the maddening pressure of a
neck-to-neck struggle; he felt what in all his victorious life he had
never known--the paralysis of defeat.

The glittering throngs spreading over the plains gazed at him in the
sheer stupor of amazement; they saw that the famous English hero was
dead-beat as any used-up knacker.

One second more he strove to wrench himself through the throng of the
horses, through the headlong crushing press, through--worst foe of
all!--the misty darkness curtaining his sight! One second more he
tried to wrestle back the old life into his limbs, the unworn power
and freshness into nerve and sinew. Then the darkness fell utterly; the
mighty heart failed; he could do no more--and his rider's hand slackened
and turned him gently backward; his rider's voice sounded very low and
quiet to those who, seeing that every effort was hopeless, surged and
clustered round his saddle.

"Something ails the King," said Cecil calmly; "he is fairly knocked
off his legs. Some Vet must look to him; ridden a yard farther he will
fall."

Words so gently spoken!--yet in the single minute that alone had passed
since they had left the Starter's Chair, a lifetime seemed to have been
centered, alike to Forest King and to his owner.

The field swept on with a rush, without the favorite; and the Prix de
Dames was won by the French bay L'Etoile.

CHAPTER X.

"PETITE REINE."

When a young Prussian had shot himself the night before for roulette
losses, the event had not thrilled, startled, and impressed the gay
Baden gathering one tithe so gravely and so enduringly as did now the
unaccountable failure of the great Guards' Crack.

Men could make nothing of it save the fact that there was "something
dark" somewhere. The "painted quid" had done its work more thoroughly
than Willon and the welsher had intended; they had meant that the opiate
should be just sufficient to make the favorite off his speed, but not to
make effects so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly prepared
that under examination no trace could be found of it, and the result of
veterinary investigation, while it left unremoved the conviction that
the horse had been doctored, could not explain when or how, or by what
medicines. Forest King had simply "broken down"; favorites do this on
the flat and over the furrow from an overstrain, from a railway journey,
from a touch of cold, from a sudden decay of power, from spasm, or from
vertigo; those who lose by them may think what they will of "roping," or
"painting," or "nobbling," but what can they prove?

Even in the great scandals that come before the autocrats of the Jockey
Club, where the tampering is clearly known, can the matter ever be
really proved and sifted? Very rarely. The trainer affects stolid
unconsciousness or unimpeachable respectability; the hapless stable-boy
is cross-examined, to protest innocence and ignorance, and most likely
protest them rightly; he is accused, dismissed, and ruined; or some
young jock has a "caution" out everywhere against him, and never again
can get a mount even for the commonest handicap; but, as a rule, the
real criminals are never unearthed, and by consequence are never reached
and punished.

The Household, present and absent, were heavily hit. They cared little
for the "crushers" they incurred, but their champion's failure, when
he was in the face of Europe, cut them more terribly. The fame of the
English riding-men had been trusted to Forest King and his owner, and
they, who had never before betrayed the trust placed in them, had broken
down like any screw out of a livery stable; like any jockey bribed to
"pull" at a suburban selling-race. It was fearfully bitter work; and,
unanimous to a voice, the indignant murmur of "doctored" ran through
the titled, fashionable crowds on the Baden course in deep and ominous
anger.

The Seraph's grand wrath poured out fulminations against the wicked-doer
whosoever he was, or wheresoever he lurked; and threatened, with a
vengeance that would be no empty words, the direst chastisement of the
"Club," of which both his father and himself were stewards, upon the
unknown criminal. The Austrian and French nobles, while winners by the
event, were scarce in less angered excitement. It seemed to cast the
foulest slur upon their honor that, upon foreign ground, the renowned
English steeple-chaser should have been tampered with thus; and the fair
ladies of either world added the influence of their silver tongues, and
were eloquent in the vivacity of their sympathy and resentment with a
unanimity women rarely show in savoring defeat, but usually reserve for
the fairer opportunity of swaying the censer before success.

Cecil alone, amid it all, was very quiet; he said scarcely a word,
nor could the sharpest watcher have detected an alteration in
his countenance. Only once, when they talked around him of the
investigations of the Club, and of the institution of inquiries to
discover the guilty traitor, he looked up with a sudden, dangerous
lighting of his soft, dark, hazel eyes, under the womanish length of
their lashes: "When you find him, leave him to me."

The light was gone again in an instant; but those who knew the wild
strain that ran in the Royallieu blood knew by it that, despite his
gentle temper, a terrible reckoning for the evil done his horse might
come some day from the Quietist.

He said little or nothing else, and to the sympathy and indignation
expressed for him on all sides he answered with his old, listless calm.
But, in truth, he barely knew what was saying or doing about him; he
felt like a man stunned and crushed with the violence of some tremendous
fall; the excitation, the agitation, the angry amazement around
him (growing as near clamor as was possible in those fashionable
betting-circles, so free from roughs and almost free from bookmakers),
the conflicting opinions clashing here and there--even, indeed, the
graceful condolence of the brilliant women--were insupportable to him.
He longed to be out of this world which had so well amused him; he
longed passionately, for the first time in his life, to be alone.

For he knew that with the failure of Forest King had gone the last plank
that saved him from ruin; perhaps the last chance that stood between him
and dishonor. He had never looked on it as within the possibilities of
hazard that the horse could be defeated; now, little as those about him
knew it, an absolute and irremediable disgrace fronted him. For, secure
in the issue of the Prix de Dames, and compelled to weight his chances
in it very heavily that his winnings might be wide enough to relieve
some of the debt-pressure upon him, his losses now were great; and he
knew no more how to raise the moneys to meet them than he would have
known how to raise the dead.

The blow fell with crushing force; the fiercer because his indolence had
persisted in ignoring his danger, and because his whole character was so
naturally careless and so habituated to ease and to enjoyment.

A bitter, heartsick misery fell on him; the tone of honor was high with
him; he might be reckless of everything else, but he could never be
reckless in what infringed, or went nigh to infringe, a very stringent
code. Bertie never reasoned in that way; he simply followed the
instincts of his breeding without analyzing them; but these led him
safely and surely right in all his dealings with his fellow-men, however
open to censure his life might be in other matters. Careless as he was,
and indifferent, to levity, in many things, his ideas of honor were
really very pure and elevated; he suffered proportionately now that,
through the follies of his own imprudence, and the baseness of some
treachery he could neither sift nor avenge, he saw himself driven down
into as close a jeopardy of disgrace as ever befell a man who did not
willfully, and out of guilty coveting of its fruits, seek it.

For the first time in his life the society of his troops of acquaintance
became intolerably oppressive; for the first time in his life he sought
refuge from thought in the stimulus of drink, and dashed down neat
Cognac as though it were iced Badminton, as he drove with his set off
the disastrous plains of Iffesheim. He shook himself free of them as
soon as he could; he felt the chatter round him insupportable; the men
were thoroughly good-hearted, and though they were sharply hit by the
day's issue, never even by implication hinted at owing the disaster to
their faith in him, but the very cordiality and sympathy they showed cut
him the keenest--the very knowledge of their forbearance made his own
thoughts darkest.

Far worse to Cecil than the personal destruction the day's calamity
brought him was the knowledge of the entire faith these men had placed
in him, and the losses which his own mistaken security had caused them.
Granted he could neither guess nor avert the trickery which had brought
about his failure; but none the less did he feel that he had failed
them; none the less did the very generosity and magnanimity they showed
him sting him like a scourge.

He got away from them at last, and wandered out alone into the gardens
of the Stephanien, till the green trees of an alley shut him in in
solitude, and the only echo of the gay world of Baden was the strain of
a band, the light mirth of a laugh, or the roll of a carriage sounding
down the summer air.

It was eight o'clock; the sun was slanting in the west in a cloudless
splendor, bathing the bright scene in a rich golden glow, and tinging to
bronze the dark masses of the Black Forest. In another hour he was the
expected guest of a Russian Prince at a dinner party, where all that was
highest, fairest, greatest, most powerful, and most bewitching of every
nationality represented there would meet; and in the midst of this
radiant whirlpool of extravagance and pleasure, where every man worth
owning as such was his friend, and every woman whose smile he cared for
welcomed him, he knew himself as utterly alone, as utterly doomed, as
the lifeless Prussian lying in the dead-house. No aid could serve him,
for it would have been but to sink lower yet to ask or to take it; no
power could save him from the ruin which in a few days later at the
farthest would mark him out forever an exiled, beggared, perhaps
dishonored man--a debtor and an alien.

Where he had thrown himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash, trying
vainly to realize this thing which had come upon him--and to meet which
not training, nor habit, nor a moment's grave reflection had ever done
the slightest to prepare him; gazing, blankly and unconsciously, at the
dense pine woods and rugged glens of the Forest that sloped upward and
around above the green and leafy nest of Baden--he watched mechanically
the toiling passage of a charcoal-burner going up the hillside in
distance through the firs.

"Those poor devils envy us!" he thought. "Better be one of them ten
thousand times than be trained for the Great Race, and started with the
cracks, dead weighted with the penalty-shot of Poverty!"

A soft touch came on his arm as he sat there; he looked up, surprised.
Before him stood a dainty, delicate little form, all gay with white
lace, and broideries, and rose ribbons, and floating hair fastened
backward with a golden fillet; it was that of the little Lady
Venetia,--the only daughter of the House of Lyonnesse, by a late
marriage of his Grace,--the eight-year-old sister of the colossal
Seraph; the plaything of a young and lovely mother, who had flirted
in Belgravia with her future stepson before she fell sincerely and
veritably in love with the gallant and still handsome Duke.

Cecil roused himself and smiled at her; he had been by months together
at Lyonnesse most years of the child's life, and had been gentle to her
as he was to every living thing, though he had noticed her seldom.

"Well, Petite Reine," he said kindly, bitter as his thoughts were;
calling her by the name she generally bore. "All alone? Where are your
playmates?"

"Petite Reine," who, to justify her sobriquet, was a grand, imperial
little lady, bent her delicate head--a very delicate head, indeed,
carrying itself royally, young though it was.

"Ah! you know I never care for children!"

It was said so disdainfully, yet so sincerely, without a touch of
affectation, and so genuinely, as the expression of a matured and
contemptuous opinion, that even in that moment it amused him. She did
not wait an answer, but bent nearer, with an infinite pity and anxiety
in her pretty eyes.

"I want to know--you are so vexed; are you not? They say you have lost
all your money!"

"Do they? They are not far wrong then. Who are 'they,' Petite Reine?"

"Oh! Prince Alexis, and the Duc de Lorance, and mamma, and everybody. Is
it true?"

"Very true, my little lady."

"Ah!" She gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, with her head
on one side, and her lips parted; "I heard the Russian gentleman saying
that you were ruined. Is that true, too?"

"Yes, dear," he answered wearily, thinking little of the child in the
desperate pass to which his life had come.

Petite Reine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young ladyship had
a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she had understood what
had been said before her of him vaguely indeed, and with no sense of
its true meaning, yet still with the quick perception of a brilliant
and petted child. Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes
were filled with tears. He put out his hand and drew her to him.

"Why, little one, what do you know of these things? How did you find me
out here?"

She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its bright
gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting her face to
his--earnest, beseeching, and very eager.

"I came--I came--please don't be angry--because I heard them say you
had no money, and I want you to take mine. Do take it! Look, it is all
bright gold, and it is my own, my very own. Papa gives it to me to do
just what I like with. Do take it; pray do!"

Coloring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct of generous
natures,--a most sensitive delicacy for others,--but growing ardent in
her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, she shook on to Cecil's
knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat box, twenty bright Napoleons that
fell in a glittering shower on the grass.

He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook for offense.
She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, and with her large eyes
gleaming and melting with passionate entreaty.

"Don't be angry; pray take it; it is all my own, and you know I have
bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, and dogs till I am tired
of them; I never want the money; indeed I don't. Take it, please take
it; and if you will only let me ask Papa or Rock they will give you
thousands and thousands of pounds, if that isn't enough. Do let me!"

Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him. When he spoke his
voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim with an emotion
that he had not known in all his careless life; the child's words and
action touched him deeply, the caressing, generous innocence of the
offered gift, beside the enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy
of his career, smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange
pleasure.

"Petite Reine," he murmured gently, striving vainly for his old
lightness, "Petite Reine, how some man will love you one day! Thank you
from my heart, my little innocent friend."

Her face flushed with gladness; she smiled with all a child's unshadowed
joy.

"Ah! then you will take it! and if you want more only let me ask them
for it; papa and Philip never refuse me anything!"

His hand wandered gently over the shower of her hair, as he put back the
Napoleons that he had gathered up into her azure bonbonniere.

"Petite Reine, you are a little angel; but I cannot take your money, my
child, and you must ask for none for my sake from your father or from
Rock. Do not look so grieved, little one; I love you none the less
because I refuse it."

Petite Reine's face was very pale and grave; a delicate face, in its
miniature feminine childhood almost absurdly like the Seraph's; her eyes
were full of plaintive wonder and of pathetic reproach.

"Ah!" she said, drooping her head with a sigh; "it is no good to you
because it is such a little; do let me ask for more!"

He smiled, but the smile was very weary.

"No, dear, you must not ask for more; I have been very foolish, my
little friend, and I must take the fruits of my folly; all men must.
I can accept no one's money, not even yours; when you are older and
remember this, you will know why. But I do not thank you the less from
my heart."

She looked at him, pained and wistful.

"You will not take anything, Mr. Cecil?" she asked with a sigh, glancing
at her rejected Napoleons.

He drew the enamel bonbonniere away.

"I will take that if you will give it me, Petite Reine, and keep it in
memory of you."

As he spoke, he stooped and kissed her very gently; the act had
moved him more deeply than he thought he had it in him to be moved
by anything, and the child's face turned upward to him was of a very
perfect and aristocratic loveliness, far beyond her years. She colored
as his lips touched hers, and swayed slightly from him. She was an
extremely proud young sovereign, and never allowed caresses; yet she
lingered by him, troubled, grave, with something intensely tender and
pitiful in the musing look of her eyes. She had a perception that this
calamity which smote him was one far beyond the ministering of her
knowledge.

He took the pretty Palais Royal gold-rimmed sweetmeat box, and slipped
it into his waistcoat pocket. It was only a child's gift, a tiny Paris
toy; but it had been brought to him in a tender compassion, and he did
keep it; kept it through dark days and wild nights, through the scorch
of the desert and the shadows of death, till the young eyes that
questioned him now with such innocent wonder had gained the grander
luster of their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider than he knew
now.

At that moment, as the child stood beside him under the drooping acacia
boughs, with the green, sloping lower valley seen at glimpses through
the wall of leaves, one of the men of the Stephanien approached him
with an English letter, which, as it was marked "instant," they had laid
apart from the rest of the visitors' pile of correspondence. Cecil took
it wearily--nothing but fresh embarrassments could come to him from
England--and looked at the little Lady Venetia.

"Will you allow me?"

She bowed her graceful head; with all the naif unconsciousness of a
child, she had all the manner of the veille cour; together they made her
enchanting.

He broke the envelope and read--a blurred, scrawled, miserable letter;
the words erased with passionate strokes, and blotted with hot tears,
and scored out in impulsive misery. It was long, yet at a glance he
scanned its message and its meaning; at the first few words he knew its
whole as well as though he had studied every line.

A strong tremor shook him from head to foot, a tremor at once of
passionate rage and of as passionate pain; his face blanched to a deadly
whiteness; his teeth clinched as though he were restraining some bodily
suffering, and he tore the letter in two and stamped it down into the
turf under his heel with a gesture as unlike his common serenity of
manner as the fiery passion that darkened in his eyes was unlike the
habitual softness of his too pliant and too unresentful temper. He
crushed the senseless paper again and again down into the grass beneath
his heel; his lips shook under the silky abundance of his beard; the
natural habit of long usage kept him from all utterance, and even in the
violence of its shock he remembered the young Venetia's presence; but,
in that one fierce, unrestrained gesture the shame and suffering upon
him broke out, despite himself.

The child watched him, startled and awed. She touched his hand softly.

"What is it? Is it anything worse?"

He turned his eyes on her with a dry, hot, weary anguish in them; he was
scarcely conscious what he said or what he answered.

"Worse--worse?" he repeated mechanically, while his heel still ground
down in loathing the shattered paper into the grass. "There can be
nothing worse! It is the vilest, blackest shame."

He spoke to his thoughts, not to her; the words died in his throat; a
bitter agony was on him; all the golden summer evening, all the fair
green world about him, were indistinct and unreal to his senses; he felt
as if the whole earth were of a sudden changed; he could not realize
that this thing could come to him and his--that this foul dishonor could
creep up and stain them--that this infamy could ever be of them and upon
them. All the ruin that before had fallen on him to-day was dwarfed and
banished; it looked nothing beside the unendurable horror that reached
him now.

The gay laughter of children sounded down the air at that moment; they
were the children of a French Princess seeking their playmate Venetia,
who had escaped from them and from their games to find her way to Cecil.
He motioned her to them; he could not bear even the clear and pitying
eyes of the Petite Reine to be upon him now.

She lingered wistfully; she did not like to leave him.

"Let me stay with you," she pleaded caressingly. "You are vexed at
something; I cannot help you, but Rock will--the Duke will. Do let me
ask them?"

He laid his hand on her shoulder; his voice, as he answered, was hoarse
and unsteady.

"No; go, dear. You will please me best by leaving me. Ask none--tell
none; I can trust you to be silent, Petite Reine."

She gave him a long, earnest look.

"Yes," she answered simply and gravely, as one who accepts, and not
lightly, a trust.

Then she went slowly and lingeringly, with the sun on the gold fillet
binding her hair, but the tears heavy on the shadow of her silken
lashes. When next they met again the luster of a warmer sun, that once
burned on the white walls of the palace of Phoenicia and the leaping
flame of the Temple of the God of Healing, shone upon them; and through
the veil of those sweeping lashes there gazed the resistless sovereignty
of a proud and patrician womanhood.

Alone, his head sank down upon his hands; he gave reins to the fiery
scorn, the acute suffering which turn by turn seized him with every
moment that seared the words of the letter deeper and deeper down into
his brain. Until this he had never known what it was to suffer; until
this his languid creeds had held that no wise man feels strongly, and
that to glide through life untroubled and unmoved is as possible as it
is politic. Now he suffered, he suffered dumbly as a dog, passionately
as a barbarian; now he was met by that which, in the moment of its
dealing, pierced his panoplies of indifference, and escaped his light
philosophies.

"Oh, God!" he thought, "if it were anything--anything--except Disgrace!"

In a miserable den, an hour or so before--there are miserable dens even
in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads
are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be
content with a shakedown--two men sat in consultation. Though the
chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive
wines and liqueurs. Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected
this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity.
One of them was the "welsher," Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter
man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a
Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the
"welsher," heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a
gloating malignity. Excitement and the fire of very strong wines,
of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in
exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him
in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of
success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his
teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have
furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of
delighted tyranny.

"That precious Guards' swell!" he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth
time. "I've paid him out at last! He won't take a 'walk over' again in
a hurry. Cuss them swells! They allays die so game; it ain't half a go
after all, giving 'em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under
it all, and never show they are down, even when their backers throw up
the sponge. You can't make 'em give in, not even when they're mortal
hit; that's the crusher of it."

"Vell, vhat matter that ven you have hit 'em?" expostulated the more
philosophic Jew.

"Why, it is a fleecing of one," retorted the welsher savagely, even amid
his successes. "A clear fleecing of one. If one gets the better of a
dandy chap like that, and brings him down neat and clean, one ought
to have the spice of it. One ought to see him wince and--cuss 'em
all!--that's just what they'll never do. No! not if it was ever so. You
may pitch into 'em like Old Harry, and those d----d fine gentlemen will
just look as if they liked it. You might strike 'em dead at your feet,
and it's my belief, while they was cold as stone they'd manage to look
not beaten yet. It's a fleecing of one--a fleecing of one!" he growled
afresh; draining down a great draught of brandy-heated Roussillon to
drown the impatient conviction which possessed him that, let him triumph
as he would, there would ever remain, in that fine intangible sense
which his coarse nature could feel, though he could not have further
defined it, a superiority in his adversary he could not conquer; a
difference between him and his prey he could not bridge over.

The Jew laughed a little.

"Vot a child you are, you Big Ben! Vot matter how he look, so long as
you have de success and pocket de monish?"

Big Ben gave a long growl, like a mastiff tearing to reach a bone just
held above him.

"Hang the blunt! The yellows ain't a quarter worth to me what it 'ud be
to see him just look as if he knew he was knocked over. Besides, laying
again' him by that ere commission's piled up hatsful of the ready, to
be sure; I don't say it ain't; but there's two thou' knocked off for
Willon, and the fool don't deserve a tizzy of it. He went and put the
paint on so thick that, if the Club don't have a flare-up about the
whole thing----"

"Let dem!" said the Jew serenely. "Dey can do vot dey like; dey von't
get to de bottom of de vell. Dat Villon is sharp; he vill know how to
keep his tongue still; dey can prove nothing; dey may give de sack to a
stable-boy, or dey may think themselves mighty bright in seeing a mare's
nest, but dey vill never come to us."

The welsher gave a loud, hoarse guffaw of relish and enjoyment.

"No! We know the ins and outs of Turf Law a trifle too well to be caught
napping. A neater thing weren't ever done, if it hadn't been that the
paint was put a trifle too thick. The 'oss should have just run ill, and
not knocked over, clean out o' time like that. However, there ain't no
odds a-crying over spilt milk. If the Club do come a inquiry, we'll show
'em a few tricks that'll puzzle 'em. But it's my belief they'll let it
off on the quiet; there ain't a bit of evidence to show the 'oss was
doctored, and the way he went stood quite as well for having been
knocked off his feed and off his legs by the woyage and sich like. And
now you go and put that swell to the grindstone for Act 2 of the comedy;
will yer?"

Ezra Baroni smiled, where he leaned against the table, looking over some
papers.

"Dis is a delicate matter; don't you come putting your big paw in
it--you'll spoil it all."

Ben Davis growled afresh:

"No, I ain't a-going. You know as well as me I can't show in the thing.
Hanged if I wouldn't almost lief risk a lifer out at Botany Bay for the
sake o' wringing my fine-feathered bird myself, but I daren't. If he
was to see me in it, all 'ud be up. You must do it. Get along; you look
uncommon respectable. If your coat-tails was a little longer, you might
right and away be took for a parson."

The Jew laughed softly, the welsher grimly, at the compliment they paid
the Church; Baroni put up his papers into a neat Russia letter book.
Excellently dressed, without a touch of flashiness, he did look
eminently respectable--and lingered a moment.

"I say, dear child; vat if de Marquis vant to buy off and hush up? Ten
to von he vill; he care no more for monish than for dem macaroons, and
he love his friend, dey say."

Ben Davis took his legs off the table with a crash, and stood
up, flushed, thirstily eager, almost aggressive in his peremptory
excitement.

"Without wringing my dainty bird's neck? Not for a million paid out o'
hand! Without crushing my fine gentleman down into powder? Not for all
the blunt of every one o' the Rothschilds! Curse his woman's face! I've
got to keep dark now; but when he's crushed, and smashed, and ruined,
and pilloried, and drove out of this fine world, and warned off of all
his aristocratic race-courses, then I'll come in and take a look at him;
then I'll see my brilliant gentleman a worn-out, broken-down swindler, a
dying in the bargain!"

The intense malignity, the brutal hungry lust for vengeance that
inspired the words, lent their coarse vulgarity something that was
for the moment almost tragical in its strength; almost horrible in its
passion. Ezra Baroni looked at him quietly, then without another word
went out--to a congenial task.

"Dat big child is a fool," mused the subtler and gentler Jew. "Vengeance
is but de breath of de vind; it blow for you one day, it blow against
you de next; de only real good is monish."

The Seraph had ridden back from Iffesheim to the Bad in company with
some Austrian officers, and one or two of his own comrades. He had left
the Course late, staying to exhaust every possible means of inquiry as
to the failure of Forest King, and to discuss with other members of the
Newmarket and foreign jockey clubs the best methods--if method there
were--of discovering what foul play had been on foot with the horse.
That there was some, and very foul too, the testimony of men and angels
would not have dissuaded the Seraph; and the event had left him most
unusually grave and regretful.

The amount he had lost himself, in consequence, was of not the slightest
moment to him, although he was extravagant enough to run almost to the
end even of his own princely tether in money matters; but that "Beauty"
should be cut down was more vexatious to him than any evil accident that
could have befallen himself, and he guessed pretty nearly the terrible
influence the dead failure would have on his friend's position.

True, he had never heard Cecil breathe a syllable that hinted at
embarrassment; but these things get known with tolerable accuracy about
town, and those who were acquainted, as most people in their set were,
with the impoverished condition of the Royallieu exchequer, however
hidden it might be under an unabated magnificence of living, were well
aware also that none of the old Viscount's sons could have any safe
resources to guarantee them from as rapid a ruin as they liked to
consummate. Indeed, it had of late been whispered that it was probable,
despite the provisions of the entail, that all the green wealth and
Norman Beauty of Royallieu itself would come into the market. Hence the
Seraph, the best-hearted and most generous-natured of men, was worried
by an anxiety and a despondency which he would never have indulged, most
assuredly, on his own account, as he rode away from Iffesheim after the
defeat of his Corps' champion.

He was expected to dinner with one of the most lovely of foreign
Ambassadresses, and was to go with her afterward to the Vaudeville, at
the pretty golden theater, where a troupe from the Bouffes were playing;
but he felt anything but in the mood for even her bewitching and--in
an marriageable sense--safe society, as he stopped his horse at his own
hotel, the Badischer Hof.

As he swung himself out of saddle, a well-dressed, quiet, rather
handsome little man drew near respectfully, lifting his hat--it was M.
Baroni. The Seraph had never seen the man in his life that he knew of,
but he was himself naturally frank, affable, courteous, and never given
to hedging himself behind the pale of his high rank; provided you did
not bore him, you might always get access to him easily enough--the Duke
used to tell him, too easily.

Therefore, when Ezra Baroni deferentially approached with, "The Most
Noble the Marquis of Rockingham, I think?" the Seraph, instead of
leaving the stranger there discomfited, nodded and paused with his
inconsequent good nature; thinking how much less bosh it would be if
everybody could call him, like his family and his comrades, "Rock."

"That is my name," he answered. "I do not know you. Do you want anything
of me?"

The Seraph had a vivid terror of people who "wanted him," in the
subscription, not the police, sense of the word; and had been the victim
of frauds innumerable.

"I wished," returned Baroni respectfully, but with sufficient
independence to conciliate his auditor, whom he saw at a glance cringing
subservience would disgust, "to have the opportunity of asking your
lordship a very simple question."

The Seraph looked a little bored, a little amused.

"Well, ask it, my good fellow; you have your opportunity!" he said
impatiently, yet good-humored still.

"Then would you, my lord," continued the Jew with his strong
Hebrew-German accent, "be so good as to favor me by saying whether this
signature be your own?"

The Jew held before him a folded paper, so folded that one line only was
visible, across which was dashed in bold characters, "Rockingham."

The Seraph put up his eye-glass, stopped, and took a steadfast look;
then shook his head.

"No; that is not mine; at least, I think not. Never made my R half a
quarter so well in my life."

"Many thanks, my lord," said Baroni quietly. "One question more and we
can substantiate the fact. Did your lordship indorse any bill on the
15th of last month?"

The Seraph looked surprised, and reflected a moment. "No, I didn't," he
said after a pause. "I have done it for men, but not on that day; I was
shooting at Hornsey Wood most of it, if I remember right. Why do you
ask?"

"I will tell you, my lord, if you grant me a private interview."

The Seraph moved away. "Never do that," he said briefly; "private
interviews," thought he, acting on past experience, "with women always
mean proposals, and with men always mean extortion."

Baroni made a quick movement toward him.

"An instant, my lord! This intimately concerns yourself. The steps of an
hotel are surely not the place in which to speak of it?"

"I wish to hear nothing about it," replied Rock, putting him aside;
while he thought to himself regretfully, "That is 'stiff,' that bit
of paper; perhaps some poor wretch is in a scrape. I wish I hadn't so
wholly denied my signature. If the mischief's done, there's no good in
bothering the fellow."

The Seraph's good nature was apt to overlook such trifles as the Law.

Baroni kept pace with him as he approached the hotel door, and spoke
very low.

"My lord, if you do not listen, worse may befall the reputation both of
your regiment and your friends."

The Seraph swung round; his careless, handsome face set stern in an
instant; his blue eyes grave, and gathering an ominous fire.

"Step yonder," he said curtly, signing the Hebrew toward the grand
staircase. "Show that person to my rooms, Alexis."

But for the publicity of the entrance of the Badischer Hof the mighty
right arm of the Guardsman might have terminated the interview then
and there, in different fashion. Baroni had gained his point, and
was ushered into the fine chambers set apart for the future Duke of
Lyonnesse. The Seraph strode after him, and as the attendant closed
the door and left them alone in the first of the great lofty suite, all
glittering with gilding, and ormolu, and malachite, and rose velvet, and
Parisian taste, stood like a tower above the Jew's small, slight form;
while his words came curtly, and only by a fierce effort through his
lips.

"Substantiate what you dare to say, or my grooms shall throw you out of
that window! Now!"

Baroni looked up, unmoved; the calm, steady, undisturbed glance sent a
chill over the Seraph; he thought if this man came but for purposes of
extortion, and were not fully sure that he could make good what he said,
this was not the look he would give.

"I desire nothing better, my lord," said Baroni quietly, "though I
greatly regret to be the messenger of such an errand. This bill, which
in a moment I will have the honor of showing you, was transacted by my
house (I am one of the partners of a London discounting firm), indorsed
thus by your celebrated name. Moneys were lent on it, the bill was made
payable at two months' date; it was understood that you accepted it;
there could be no risk with such a signature as yours. The bill was
negotiated; I was in Leyden, Lubeck, and other places at the period; I
heard nothing of the matter. When I returned to London, a little less
than a week ago, I saw the signature for the first time. I was at once
aware that it was not yours, for I had some paid bills, signed by you,
at hand, with which I compared it. Of course, my only remedy was to seek
you out, although I was nearly certain, before your present denial, that
the bill was a forgery."

He spoke quite tranquilly still, with a perfectly respectful regret,
but with the air of a man who has his title to be heard, and is acting
simply in hie own clear right. The Seraph listened, restless, impatient,
sorely tried to keep in the passion which had been awakened by the hint
that this wretched matter could concern or attaint the honor of his
corps.

"Well! speak out!" he said impatiently. "Details are nothing. Who drew
it? Who forged my name, if it be forged? Quick! give me the paper."

"With every trust and every deference, my lord, I cannot let the bill
pass out of my own hands until this unfortunate matter be cleared up--if
cleared up it can be. Your lordship shall see the bill, however, of
course, spread here upon the table; but first, let me warn you, my Lord
Marquis, that the sight will be intensely painful to you.

"Very painful, my lord," added Baroni impressively. "Prepare yourself
for--"

Rock dashed his hand down on the marble table with a force that made the
lusters and statuettes on it ring and tremble.

"No more words! Lay the bill there."

Baroni bowed and smoothed out upon the console the crumpled document,
holding it with one hand, yet leaving visible with the counterfeited
signature one other, the name of the forger in whose favor the bill was
drawn; that other signature was--"Bertie Cecil."

"I deeply regret to deal you such a blow from such a friend, my lord,"
said the Jew softly. The Seraph stooped and gazed--one instant of
horrified amazement kept him dumb there, staring at the written paper as
at some ghastly thing; then all the hot blood rushed over his fair,
bold face; he flung himself on the Hebrew, and, ere the other could have
breath or warning, tossed him upward to the painted ceiling and hurled
him down again upon the velvet carpet, as lightly as a retriever will
catch up and let fall a wild duck or a grouse, and stood over Baroni
where he lay.

"You hound!"

Baroni, lying passive and breathless with the violence of the shock and
the surprise, yet kept, even amid the hurricane of wrath that had tossed
him upward and downward as the winds toss leaves, his hold upon the
document, and his clear, cool, ready self-possession.

"My lord," he said faintly, "I do not wonder at your excitement,
aggressive as it renders you; but I cannot admit that false which I know
to be a for--"

"Silence! Say that word once more, and I shall forget myself and hurl
you out into the street like the dog of a Jew you are!"

"Have patience an instant, my lord. Will it profit your friend and
brother-in-arms if it be afterward said that when this charge was
brought against him, you, my Lord Rockingham, had so little faith in his
power to refute it that you bore down with all your mighty strength in a
personal assault upon one so weakly as myself, and sought to put an end
to the evidence against him by bodily threats against my safety, and
by--what will look legally, my lord, like--an attempt to coerce me into
silence and to obtain the paper from my hands by violence?"

Faint and hoarse the words were, but they were spoken with quiet
confidence, with admirable acumen; they were the very words to lash
the passions of his listener into unendurable fire, yet to chain them
powerless down; the Guardsman stood above him, his features flushed and
dark with rage, his eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working
under his tawny, leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown
himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much
carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed
in the coils of subtlety--the desperate disadvantage at which Right
is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of
Wrong--held the Seraph in their net now. He saw his own rashness, he saw
how his actions could be construed till they cast a slur even on the man
he defended; he saw how legally he was in error, how legally the
gallant vengeance of an indignant friendship might be construed into
consciousness of guilt in the accused for whose sake the vengeance fell.

He stood silent, overwhelmed with the intensity of his own passion,
baffled by the ingenuity of a serpent-wisdom he could not refute.

Ezra Baroni saw his advantage. He ventured to raise himself slightly.

"My lord, since your faith in your friend is so perfect, send for him.
If he be innocent, and I a liar, with a look I shall be confounded."

The tone was perfectly impassive, but the words expressed a world. For
a moment the Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a look that made him
feel nearer his death than he had been near to it in all his days; but
Rockingham restrained himself from force.

"I will send for him," he said briefly; in that answer there was more of
menace and of meaning than in any physical action.

He moved and let Baroni rise; shaken and bruised, but otherwise little
seriously hurt, and still holding, in a tenacious grasp, the crumpled
paper. He rang; his own servant answered the summons.

"Go to the Stephanien and inquire for Mr. Cecil. Be quick; and request
him, wherever he be, to be so good as to come to me instantly--here."

The servant bowed and withdrew; a perfect silence followed between these
two so strangely assorted companions; the Seraph stood with his back
against the mantelpiece, with every sense on the watch to catch every
movement of the Jew's, and to hear the first sound of Cecil's approach.
The minutes dragged on; the Seraph was in an agony of probation and
impatience. Once the attendants entered to light the chandeliers and
candelabra; the full light fell on the dark, slight form of the Hebrew,
and on the superb attitude and the fair, frank, proud face of the
standing Guardsman; neither moved--once more they were left alone.

The moments ticked slowly away one by one, audible in the silence. Now
and then the quarter chimed from the clock; it was the only sound in the
chamber.

CHAPTER XI.

FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE.

The door opened--Cecil entered.

The Seraph crossed the room, with his hand held out; not for his life
in that moment would he have omitted that gesture of friendship.
Involuntarily he started and stood still one instant in amaze; the next,
he flung thought away and dashed into swift, inconsequent words.

"Cecil, my dear fellow! I'm ashamed to send for you on such a blackguard
errand. Never heard of such a swindler's trick in all my life; couldn't
pitch the fellow into the street because of the look of the thing, and
can't take any other measure without you, you know. I only sent for you
to expose the whole abominable business, never because I believe----Hang
it! Beauty, I can't bring myself to say it even! If a sound thrashing
would have settled the matter, I wouldn't have bothered you about it,
nor told you a syllable. Only you are sure, Bertie, aren't you, that
I never listened to this miserable outrage on us both with a second's
thought there could be truth in it? You know me? you trust me too well
not to be certain of that?"

The incoherent address poured out from his lips in a breathless torrent;
he had never been so excited in his life; and he pleaded with as
imploring an earnestness as though he had been the suspected criminal,
not to be accused with having one shadow of shameful doubt against his
friend. His words would have told nothing except bewilderment to one who
should have been a stranger to the subject on which he spoke; yet Cecil
never asked even what he meant. There was no 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 it 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 nature 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