Chapter XXII
Your words have took such pains, as if they laboured
To bring manslaughter into form, set quarrelling
Upon the head of valour:—
He’s truly valiant that can wisely suffer
The worst that man can breathe, and make his wrongs
His outsides; wear them like his raiment carelessly,
And ne’er prefer his injuries to his heart,
To bring it into danger.
If wrongs be evils, and enforce us kill,
What folly ’tis to hazard life for ill!
TIMON OF ATHENS.
To write to Lady Louisa a full explanation of the affair was among the first of my resolutions; but would she believe me?—one against whom appearances, already, no doubt, coloured, distorted, and elaborated by Berkeley’s cunning insinuations, were so strong?
Without a word of inquiry, or hearing any exculpation, she and Cora had retired together, and with him, under his requested escort. What fatal use would he not make of the time thus given him! On, on went the swift train; but to me even the express seemed a laggard to-night!
Alas! that she I loved so deeply should think so meanly of me, as she undoubtedly did now.
If I called Berkeley out, and shot him, risking and breaking alike the civil and military laws of the land, I knew that my uncle would forgive, and that Cora would weep for me; I knew how Louisa would nervously shrink from the publicity of such an affair; but I knew also that none of them would forgive me for an alleged liaison with a creature apparently so worthless as the cast-off mistress of another—a liaison by which I lost the love of one so brilliant as the heiress of Chillingham. Of all such transactions, the old fox-hunting baronet, the mirror of honour, had a great horror, and within the seas that wash our shores there was no nobler heart than his. As yet, I could not see the end of the affair; my heart was swollen, and my head giddy, with rage; I longed only for friendly advice, and swift vengeance! If the story reached the ears of Sir Nigel, and he cut off my allowance, my pay as a captain of cavalry of the line—to wit, fourteen shillings and seven pence per diem—even with the contingent allowance of seventy or eighty pounds per annum (for burials and repair of arms, &c.), would never support me, even on service, in such an expensive corps as ours; thus, if I was a ruined man, it was all through the wiles of Berkeley! Pecuniarily I could not remain, and to retire, sell, resign, or exchange for India at such a crisis, when war was already declared in Europe, would be only to court disgrace and destruction.
Under any circumstances, to “send in my papers” was social ruin. I would sell my troop, and follow the regiment as a volunteer lancer, rather than not go to the seat of war in the East; and all this dilemma, this vortex of tormenting thought, this agony of anticipated shame, united with the loss of Louisa Loftus, I owed to the machinations, the hatred, and the jealousy of the only man I really disliked or despised in the whole regiment. At last I reached the barracks (where the last trumpet of tattoo had long since sounded), and sought the quarters of Jack Studhome, whom, to my confusion, and somewhat to my annoyance, I found engaged with the colonel on military business. In fact, with the aid of a couple of decanters of very unexceptionable mess port, and a box of cigars, they were going over the “Description Book,” which, for the information of readers not in the cavalry, I may mention is one of the sixteen ledgers kept by the regimental staff, being a register of the age, size, and description of the horses in each troop; the names and residence of the persons from whom they were bought, with the date of their purchase, and so forth, a column being appropriated for remarks, to show the manner in which each horse is disposed of.
“You here, Norcliff?” exclaimed Colonel Beverley, with surprise, as he closed the volume.
“Excuse me, colonel, I know that I should be at Canterbury; but I have ventured to head-quarters on a matter so very particular——”
“Now, Norcliff, what the devil is up?” interrupted Studhome, getting fresh glasses the while, and pushing the cigar-box towards me.
“Nothing wrong with your troop, eh?” said our lieutenant-colonel, lowering his eyebrows.
“No, colonel—a personal matter has brought me here,” I replied, while they, perceiving that I was pale and agitated, exchanged glances of inquiry.
“We shall soon be off, Norcliff,” said the colonel; “Travers and others have disposed of their spare horses; Scriven has sent his stud to Tattersall’s; the drag we shall leave here with the depôt. Wilford’s yacht rides at Cowes with the symbolical broom at her masthead. I have been changing the dismounted men every three days, so that, come what may, all shall be perfect lancers when the complete mount arrives; and we have had the horses inspected once in each week by the veterinary surgeon, to ascertain whether there is among them any contagious disease, as that, you know, would play the deuce with us on service. Dragoons without horses (poor Beverley foresaw not the horrors awaiting the cavalry before Sebastopol) would be like rifles without locks. I also wish the corps to be supplied with water-decks,* but cannot get them; and now, Norcliff, that you have drawn breath, empty your glass, and say in what manner we can assist you.”
“You shall hear, colonel,” said I, taking his proffered hand; “I sought Studhome to obtain his advice, as my oldest and one of my most valued friends in the regiment, and I shall gladly avail myself of yours, under the pledge of secrecy, as the name of a lady is concerned in what I shall have the honour to relate to you.”
“Ah,” said the colonel, throwing open his frogged surtout, and half closing his eyes, as he lounged on two chairs, with the air of one who waits and listens, “this prologue bodes something unpleasant.”
Beverley’s voice and manner were slightly affected, but withal were very pleasing. He was, as I have said elsewhere, a very handsome man, of middle age, with a keen dark grey eye, and close crisp hair, somewhat of a drawler in speech, but well and powerfully built, broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, and a good average dragoon officer. Under excitement his features and bearing changed; he became brief and rapid; his lips became decided, though his very black moustache concealed them.
I related succinctly the story of Miss Auriol, and the slanders concerning me circulated in Maidstone—slanders of which Studhome was quite cognizant; I adverted to my engagement with Lady Louisa, and detailed the trap I had fallen into, and the use Berkeley had made of it, adding that I had resolved to parade him—to call him out, and had told him so, face to face.
“Ah, and what did he say?” asked the colonel, knocking the ashes from his cigar with a jewelled finger.
“If you lived till the age of Methusaleh, Colonel Beverley, you would never guess.”
“Well?”
“Putting his glass in his eye, he lisped out coolly, ‘Bah! people don’t fight duels now. In our service at least, since Munro’s fatal affair with Fawcett,* hostile meetings have been hanging matters.’”
“The greater pity, say I,” continued Beverley.
“And he actually replied to you thus?” said Studhome.
“These were his words, or nearly so.”
Beverley’s brow knit, and a contemptuous smile curled his proud lip.
“Such cool impudence is delicious,” said he, laughing.
“But the matter cannot end thus!” I exclaimed, impetuously.
“Of course not, my dear fellow—of course not. Yet if the affair comes before the mess or the public, how are we to keep the name of Lady Loftus out of it? Though he might relish the éclât of having his trumpery cognomen jingled with that of Lord Chillingham’s daughter, and with yours, it is a very different matter for Lady Louisa. We must be cautious and circumspect, or we shall land you between the horns of a dilemma. Women make men’s quarrels infernally complicated.”
“I shall gladly avail myself of your advice, colonel, and Studhome shall act as my friend.”
Jack summoned his servant by a rapid process peculiar to barracks, and despatched him to the main guard to inquire whether Mr. Berkeley had passed in.
The answer came promptly that he was in his quarters.
“How long has he been there?”
“About half an hour, sir.”
“Egad, Norcliff, you have come by the same train from Canterbury,” said the colonel, after the servant had withdrawn. “How if you had been in the same compartment?”
“I might have been tempted to throw him out of the window.”
“Studhome, see Berkeley, and arrange this matter; but remember the honour of the regiment,” said the colonel, “as well as that of your friend, for at all risks and hazards I will have no public scandal about us—no handle given to the wretched whipsters of the newspaper press, when we are on the eve of departure for the seat of war.”
“Trust me, colonel,” said Jack, as he lit a fresh cigar, donned his gold-laced forage cap very much over the right ear, took up his riding-whip from force of habit, and hurried away.
The time of his absence passed slowly. I was in a dilemma, out of which I did not clearly see my way; and the colonel continued to punish Jack’s port, to smoke in silence, and peruse the “Description Book.”
Deeply in my heart I cursed alike the amenities of civilized life and the laws of modern society, which deprived me of the means of swift and certain retribution, even at the risk of my own life and limbs. Such trammels, in these days of well-ordered police, luckily, perhaps, compel us to conceal our hates and animosities; to submit quietly to wrong, insult, and obloquy, for which the very laws that pretend to protect and guide us afford no due reparation; trammels that avail greatly the coarse, the cowardly, and the mean, who may thus sneer or insult with impunity, when in the old pistol days their lives would have paid the forfeit; and whatever may have been the folly, error, or wickedness of duelling as a system, there can be no doubt that, when men had the test of moral courage as a last resort, the tone of society was higher, healthier, and better, especially in the army. Then practical jokes, rudeness, and quizzing were unknown at a mess-table; while an open wrong or insult bore with it the terrible penalty of a human life.
By the rules of the service I knew that no officer or soldier could send a challenge to any other officer or soldier to fight a duel, lest, if a commissioned officer, under the pain of being cashiered; if a non-commissioned officer or soldier, of suffering corporal punishment, or such other award as a court-martial might inflict.
The penalties of the civil law I knew to be still more severe; and yet John Selden, one of England’s most able, learned, and patriotic lawyers, says that “a duel may still be granted by the law of England, and only then. That the Church allowed it once appears by this: in their public liturgies there were prayers appointed for the duellists to say; the judge used to bid them to go to such a church and pray, &c. But whether this is lawful? If you make war lawful, I make no doubt to convince you of it. War is lawful because God is the only judge between two that are supreme. Now, if a difference happen between two subjects, and it cannot be decided by human testimony, why may they not put it to God to judge between them, with the permission of the prince? Nay; what if we should bring it down—for argument’s sake—to the sword. One gives me the lie: it is a great disgrace to take it; the law has made no provision to give remedy for the injury (if you can suppose anything an injury for which the law gives no remedy), why am not I, in this case, supreme, and may, therefore, right myself?”
While Beverley and I began to talk over such things, Studhome was, as he phrased it, “bringing Berkeley to book” in the affair.
He found that gentleman in rather a perturbed state of mind, soothing himself with a cigar, as he lounged in his vest and trousers on a luxurious sofa, in his elegantly-furnished room, the walls of which were covered with coloured engravings of horses and ballet-girls. A tall crystal goblet on the table bore evident traces of brandy and seltzer-water having been recently imbibed therefrom.
“So, after all that has occurred, you won’t meet Norcliff, as he wishes?” asked Jack, after the matter had been thoroughly gone into.
“Aw—decidedly not,” said he, emitting his words and a slender volume of smoke slowly together.
“In Britain, at least, as the law stands now, I can scarcely blame you, Mr. Berkeley,” said Studhome, stiffly; “but as the orders from London stand, we are soon to leave, and something must be done in the matter; for, as it is at present, you cannot both remain in the same regiment.”
“Aw—doocid good that,” replied Berkeley, twirling up his moustache; “but—aw—who is the muff that is to quit it, now that we have orders of readiness?”
“You, sir,” said Jack, rather perplexed.
“Thank you; but—aw—beg to decline. And this mysterious something which must be done—aw—eh?”
“I would recommend a candid confession on your part; such an explanation, in writing, as my friend, Captain Norcliff, may show to Lady Loftus and then commit to the flames, or return it to you.”
“The deuce!” drawled Berkeley, holding his cigar at arm’s length, and wheeling the sofa half round, to have a better view of our adjutant. “Is there any other little thing you would like?”
“I think not, sir.”
“My good friend, Studhome, you are, I have not a doubt, a very excellent adjutant, well up in lance, sword, and pistol exercise—knowing how to ‘set a squadron in the field,’ like the amiable Othello; but you—aw—aw—must really permit me to be the best judge of my own affairs.”
Studhome bowed haughtily, and then stood, cap and whip in hand, erect; so Berkeley resumed—
“You are aware of the whispers concerning Norcliff and that girl, Agnes Auriol—isn’t that her name?”
“Yes, sir; I am aware there have been malicious whispers, and I have my eyes now on the circulator of them.”
“Very good,” said Berkeley, colouring slightly; “they are very current among the 16th Lancers and 8th Hussars. I have known a little of the girl; but have—aw—tired of her now. We all tire, my dear fellow, of such affairs in time. Take a cigar—aw—you won’t—what a bore! well, so my advice to your irritated Scotch friend would be that, as she is at perfect liberty to leave my protection, she may enter quietly upon his; so there is an end to the doocid affair.”
“So you may affect to think,” said Studhome, eyeing the lounger with angry scorn.
“What could be more equivocal, as Lady Loftus admitted, than the circumstances under which we found them? He was supporting—actually caressing her; and then there was his proffered fifty-pound note. My dear fellow, people are not such devilish fools as—aw—to give fifty pounds to such girls for—aw—nothing!”
“Whatever you may pretend to think, or affect to say, of that affair, of my friend’s ultimate intentions, as a man of spirit, you cannot be unaware.”
“Aw—I don’t choose to speculate upon them.”
“This trifling, sir, is insufferable! He may lash you in the face with his whip before the whole regiment, when Beverley wheels it into line to-morrow, and so make you a scandal to us, to Maidstone, and the entire British Army, from the Life Guards to the Cape Rifles.”
“Lash me?”
“Yes; and soundly too!”
“I don’t think he will.”
“Why?”
“For then the whole story would come out, there would be an arrest—aw—and court of inquiry, and my Lady Louisa Loftus would have her august name paragraphed in every paper, from the Morning Post downwards.”
“And under this belief in his forbearance, which pays my friend a high compliment, you actually shelter yourself?” said worthy Jack Studhome, with intense scorn.
“I shall take my chance.”
“Then, sir, cunning as you are, and though believing that my friend must submit to lie under a vile imputation, and, if it so happen, be ruined with Lady Louisa Loftus and his friends, you cannot expect to get off scot free. The devil! we live in strange times. Are we sunk so low that officers and gentlemen, that honourable and gallant members, that noble lords, that counsellors learned in the law, and even jolly students, are to settle their disputes in pothouse fashion, by womanly vituperation or vulgar fisticuffs, without ever dreaming of a recourse to the pistol? Men of all ranks, from the premier peer down to the anonymous scribblers of the daily press—
Those grovelling, trodden, whipt, stript, turncoat things,
Made up of volumes, venom, stains, and stings,—
may now brand each other as liars, cowards, and ruffians, with perfect impunity. Do you understand me, sir?”
“Not quite.”
“How so? I speak plain enough!”
“Such fellows are—aw—out of my way.”
“Then you will understand this, sir,” said Studhome, grasping him fiercely by the shoulder, and with an expression in his eye which made even the insouciance of Berkeley to evaporate, “a few weeks must see us in the Levant, on the shores of Turkey, and before the enemy. A duel shall come off there, and to evade alike the laws of Britain and the rules of the service, the seconds shall bind themselves by a solemn promise to declare that he who may be wounded, or he who may be killed, was struck by a chance shot from the enemy. You comprehend this arrangement, sir?”
“Perfectly.”
“And your friend—who is he to be?”
“Captain Scriven, of ours.”
“Good—I shall see him instantly.”
“So that was your arrangement, Studhome?” asked Beverley.
“Yes; there was no other way. Scriven promises and agrees, and has passed his word for secrecy. Do you approve, colonel?”
“Why, I suppose that I must; and you, Norcliff?” he inquired.
“Wish to Heaven that I saw Malta, or even Gibraltar, sinking into the sea upon our lee quarter!” said I, with fierce fervour, as I shook Studhome’s hand, and for that night, at least, was obliged to content me, and return to my troop at Canterbury.
“If one in our ranks shows the white feather before the Russians, I believe Berkeley will be the man,” said Beverley, as he and Studhome smoked a last cigar with me on the platform before the down-train started.
Notes
* A piece of painted canvas, to cover the saddle, bridle, and girths of a cavalry horse, and sometimes pegged to the ground. The name of the corps was usually painted on the outside; and when the trooper was mounted for service, the deck was strapped over his portmanteau.
* The disastrous and reckless duel referred to—the last, I think, fought in our service—occurred in 1844, between the husbands of two sisters, in a quarrel about monetary matters—Lieutenant-Colonel David L. Fawcett, C.B., of the 55th Regiment, and Lieutenant and Adjutant Alexander T. Monro, of the Royal Horse Guards. The former was killed, and the latter, after suffering a short imprisonment, was restored to the service, but not to his regiment. The circumstances must be fresh in the memory of some of my readers.