"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 is was a croupier who had been found cheating and fled; it sufficed to inflame the whole mob against the fugitive. Cecil looked round him once—such a glance as a Royal gives when the gaze-hounds are panting about him and the fangs are in his throat; then, with the swiftness of the deer itself, he dashed downward into the gloom of the winding passage at the speed which had carried him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old green Eton meadows. There was scarce a man in the Queen's Service who could rival him for lightness of limb, for power of endurance in every sport of field and fell, of the moor and the gymnasium; and the athletic pleasures of many a happy hour stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his terrible extremity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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