“Where be all those
Dear dead women, with such hair too; what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old;”
It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion, because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'd you if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.
As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil's box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in the dining room. A cashmere is a Parisian's soul, idol, and fetich; servants could not find it; Cecil, who, to do him this justice, was always as courteous to a comedienne as to a countess, went himself. Passing the open window of another room, he recognized the face of his little brother among a set of young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They had no women with them; but they had brought what was perhaps worse—dice for hazard—and were turning the unconscious Star and Garter unto an impromptu Crockford's over their wine.
Little Berk's pretty face was very flushed; his lips were set tight, his eyes were glittering; the boy had the gambler's passion of the Royallieu blood in its hottest intensity. He was playing with a terrible eagerness that went to Bertie's heart with the same sort of pang of remorse with which he had looked on him when he had been thrown like dead on his bed at home.
Cecil stopped and leaned over the open window.
“Ah, young one, I did not know you were here. We are going home; will you come?” he asked, with a careless nod to the rest of the young fellows.
Berkeley looked up with a wayward, irritated annoyance.
“No, I can't,” he said irritably; “don't you see we are playing, Bertie?”
“I see,” answered Cecil, with a dash of gravity, almost of sadness in him, as he leaned farther over the windowsill with his cigar in his teeth.
“Come away,” he whispered kindly, as he almost touched the boy, who chanced to be close to the casement. “Hazard is the very deuce for anybody; and you know Royal hates it. Come with us, Berk; there's a capital set here, and I'm going to half a dozen good houses to-night, when we get back. I'll take you with me. Come! you like waltzing, and all that sort of thing, you know.”