The Rip's Redemption. A trooper's story

Front matter

THE RIP'S REDEMPTION ■' How long? he breathed."— /Vi£*> 284- Frontispiece THE RIP'S REDEMPTION A TROOPER'S STORY BY E. LIVINGSTON PRESCOTT author or "scarlet and steel," "a b_ask and/^ martyr " "THE APOTHEOSIS OF MR. TYRAWLEY," ETC. 3L0ntj0n JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED xi BERNERS STREET Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &• Co. At the Ballantyne Press To the Memory of A. B. — a floiver on a grave — and to all Derelicts, this Story, not wholly Fiction, is Dedicated, by the Author CONTENTS CHAP. PAOI I. THE CHARMING PRINCE .... I II. GOING UNDER . . . . . -17 III. OLD RAGS AND BONES .... 36 IV. A FORLORN GHOST . . . . -52 V. SOME HUMOURS 63 VI. queen's GUARD ...... 76 vii. regimental amenities .... 92 viii. kitty's legacy . . . . . .104 ix. ordeal by battle il6 x. the rip is objectionable. . . -131 xi. trooper Simpson's valet . . . 139 XII.

A FOOL AND HIS FOLLY . . . 151 XIII. "a great way off" .... 166 XIV. THE DEPTHS ARE TROUBLED . . . l8l XV. LOVE AND DUTY . . . . . I96 XVI. THE HELOT'S AMBITION . . . . CONTENTS VLLL CHAP. PAOK XVII. "THE SINNER". . . . . .221 XVIII. ORDEAL BY FIRE ..... 230 XIX. THE MOON AND THE BROOK . . .241 XX. THE RIP IS CROWNED ..... 249 XXI. THE TOURNAMENT . . . . • 2S9 XXII. THE DARK HOUR . . . . .272 XXIII. HIS LITTLE SHOW . . . . . 280 XXIV. R. I. P. . . . . . . .

Chapter I The Charming Prince

On a fair morning of spring — a coquettish spring, with small chill gusts of flower-scented breezes, a deep blue sky with hurrying silver clouds and coy breakings of golden sunshine — Kitty Tressilian and Ned Strafford sat in Rotten Row and made love. At least, Strafford made it and Kitty shyly accepted it. People will do this thing when April comes round and suggests to birds and human kind an immortal future of tenderness and fidelity, and many more pretty and sweet idylls of which time makes havoc, as it does of primroses and the turquoise - blue eggs in the hedge - sparrow's nest. Every spring re-creates such couples, never theless ; we have done it ourselves, and though A we despise it finely now, the west wind sighs something very like regret. " 0 primavera, gioventu del' anno ; 0 gioventu, primavera del' vita !

" Strafford made love very thoroughly, possibly because he had done it once or twice before in a tentative and dilettante manner. This, how ever, was the real passion, and Kitty, recognis ing the fact — by instinct, not experience — after six months' hard work on his part, extended to him a startled shy attention, which was her version of a return. Strafford's idea of enjoying the social Row, and the presence of his numerous acquaintances, was to turn his chair round with its back to them, and to look at Kitty. As he was broad shouldered, this attitude had the strategical advantage of hiding Kitty from possible rivals and interruptions ; and Kitty did not seem to mind it much, though she occasionally — for pride and propriety's sake, you know — put her head on one side, and made an interested remark on some mutual friend.

Strafford was rather good to look at. He had handsome, languishing, brown eyes, a big chestnut moustache, and a melancholy-hero-of romance air about him, even when he smiled. Kitty's maid, sitting a discreet foot away gazing into vacancy — doing as she would be done by, in fact — considered him the " very moral " of a mysterious and fascinating Spanish nobleman whose adventures she was perusing week by week in The Penny Promiser. She would have been quite content that her young mis tress should marry Strafford, though she was aware that he was twelve years Kitty's senior, and over head and ears in debt. Kitty's parents were of a different opinion, for she had a little fortune, was passably pretty in her slight girlish way, and more than pas sably good and loving. They maintained that she was not engaged to Strafford, but she and Strafford took an opposite view.

The inci dental facts of the latter being practically a pauper, deeply embarrassed, and bound to India — he had recently exchanged into a cheaper regiment there — had no importance whatever in Kitty's eyes, which had seen nothing but visions of life as yet. In Straf ford's, his own drawbacks as a suitor were alternately heightened and obscured by the force of a passion unequalled in his laisser alter existence. The world, beginning its season, passed and repassed, lifted its hat or nodded sweetly to Kitty, laughed or wondered at Strafford ; but the two were sublimely indifferent, and talked only of themselves. He openly stated that nothing else interested him in the slightest degree ; Kitty made big eyes of reproof, and occasionally a butterfly dart to some other subject, for dignity's sake and to intensify the pleasure of return, but always came back and settled shyly down.

She would not have been allowed so much of his society but for the gloomy truth, quoted with a sigh of relief by her elder sister, that Strafford was going back to India shortly ; an approaching agony which Kitty absolutely failed to realise. She scarcely yet knew what it was to feel unhappy, to lose anything, or to doubt anybody. It will be perceived that she had a great deal to learn. Strafford, catching a glimpse from time to time in her large bright eyes of her ideal of himself, was alarmed and a little pricked in con science, and tried by stray hints anent temptation and masculine peccability, to lower it. Kitty listened with perfect childish innocence, his remarks conveying no concrete idea what ever to her mind, though she put on a face, Strafford thought, like a grieved angel, and pitied him deeply, as if he were an innocent martyr.

Now, however, that their parting was looming near, the strange wisdom of love troubled her peace, and she began to feel instinctively for the only indissoluble link. Poor Strafford, who knew much more — pretty well all, in fact, that could be known — of the world's wickedness, if he had been but a moderate sharer in it, tried to avoid her little preachments, because they made him feel at once uncomfortably soft, and horribly bad and ashamed. On this particular morning, Kitty was plain tively persistent, and, when he had turned the subject for the hundredth time, she said, with that smile of coaxing rebuke and little air of motherhood which always pierced his armour, but intensified his reserve — " Why, you're just like Millicent's little god child ! " " I'm glad to hear I have sufficient grace in me to be like anybody's little godchild.

What does this particular one do ? " " When his mother brings him to see us, he sits on her knee, and, if he's naughty and she scolds him, he puts his hand up to her cheek and turns her head towards us, and says, ' 'Peak to Milly and Kitty.' " Strafford laughed uneasily, and attempted to avoid the lecture by overtly expressed admira tion of the lecturer ; but Kitty was only insulted by admiration at such a moment. The corners of her little mouth drooped, and a distant sug gestion of tears appeared in the liquid light of her eyes and the falter of her voice. To her enthusiastic soul all common things were sacred; how much more this shadow of unimaginable sorrow and danger. Strafford, perceiving it, resigned himself to the subject, but cast about for some method of giving it an impersonal turn, and partially suc ceeded ; for, though he was not as clever as Kitty, he was a very great deal older.

He lugged in a substitute, accordingly, looking over his shoulder with a sudden show of interest at a rider who had pulled up his horse at the railings to greet an acquaintance, and observing sententiously — " I wish that fellow were here to benefit by your sweet little sermon." Kitty was hurt, but she followed the direction of his glance, and demanded earnestly, with a remote touch of defiance — " Why ? " " Why ? Because, poor " he repressed a violent theological term, and substituted " beggar" — Kitty being, you must understand, not up to date — " if what one hears is true, he wants somebody to talk to him for his good. He's going the pace as fast as he can gallop, and I hear he's nearly got to the length of his tether. His pater has paid his debts once, and is breaking fast ; and his elder brother, who is a sancti monious prig, has the old man under his thumb now."

Kitty's eyes grew larger and larger as they turned alternately on Strafford and the rider in her effort at full comprehension. " But what does he do ? " Strafford mumbled a detail or two, reddening a little, then skimmed airily away from his friend's peccadilloes, leaving Kitty completely in the dark. He wound up with a playfully repeated — " Look at him now ! Don't you think you could take him in hand . " He watched, half jealously, to see the result of Kitty's solemn contemplation ; but she looked exactly as she would have done at another girl, with serious unconscious speculation and pity. The rider sat easily in his saddle, kicking his feet out of the stirrups, with the reins loose in his accurately gloved fingers. Horse and man were so absolutely well groomed and expensively got up, that it was obvious he was in the last stage of fashionable impecuniosity : so aggres sively airy and cheerful, that an undercurrent of dismay was suggested.

He carried himself with a joyful superior swagger of well-being, as if the world belonged to him, but he meant to give it, and everybody in it, a good time. He was a good-looking man of five-and twenty, whose eyes, with their tints of deep grey-blue darkened by black lashes, and gleams of mingled softness and humour, suggested his nationality, as did the slightest mellowing of his English. His arched black brows, set some what high above the eyes, straight short nose with the faintest upward tilt, and the facile curves of his lip above his even white teeth ; the very trick of drawing his moustache slowly through his fingers, were — though she was un conscious of it at the time — imprinted indelibly on Kitty's memory ; not by anything in himself, but by Strafford's forced comparison. He was indefinitely registered in her mind as the out ward presentment of the Prince Charming of fairy legend.

" Poor old boy ! He'd do you more credit as a pupil, my darling, than I shall, I'm afraid." Kitty looked away from the stranger, with sorrowful eyes. " Why ? " she asked again. " Oh, because Reggy's a soft-hearted Celt, in stead of a cold-blooded Saxon like your slave. He was a sort of mother's boy. The poor woman's dead now, I believe. He was awfully cut up, and pulled up short for a time ; but he's bolted again, and bound to smash before long." Kitty put aside this interesting problem of reformation to inquire wistfully — " Are you cold-blooded ? " "To everybody but you," &c, &c. Then, seeing she was really unhappy, he pro ceeded to assure her, in answer to many pleading glances and small sighs, of his own goodness, " as men go," and Kitty, in love, and seventeen, was comforted. The terrible hour of parting came : a low, sad, red sunset looked in through the windows of the smart house in Brook Street where Kitty lived, colouring the flower-boxes, half shabby, half gaudy with autumn blooms, like a tattered fashion.

The autumn wind drifted stray yellow leaves against the window with a gust of sobbing song ; the traffic rolled past, dull and diminished. It was like the end of everything, Kitty thought ; and it was the end of one part of life, if she had but known it. Strafford was paying the last of many visits — not forbidden, but discountenanced. He looked more melancholy than ever, and his reckless, gay laugh and wholly unnatural volu bility made Kitty's lips part and her eyes grow puzzled and piteous. She was far more sorrow ful and solemn in manner than he, but really — because trouble, and loss, and death were only words to her as yet — failed to realise what was happening to her. It was as if he were going to Brighton for a fortnight, or perhaps as far as Paris, though the earnestness of her love made even this tragic.

Strafford, who was well acquainted with the pain and uncertainty of life, occasionally choked a little mentally, even physically, in the midst of his laughter. He sat holding her slender hand — he had never had so much of it before, for she was as shy as a bird — and staring into her face with clouded eyes and a strange rigid smile. He had promised again and again that he would be "good" — he knew the difficulties involved much better than Kitty — and had listened, with a piercing sense of his own base unworthiness, to the faintest, softest whisper of a prayer. On this holy ground he felt un speakably unholy, and began to talk feeling down, stating what Indian ornaments he would send Kitty, and the like. She broke into the middle of it with an agonised — "But can't I do anything for you?" Strafford, contemplating India for himself, and a London season or two for Kitty, felt that he could not bear much more.

He was not overburdened with penetration, but he understood Kitty's loving and giving nature, and answered desperately, as if it were the one thing that had been on his mind all the time — " Why, yes, my treasure. There's that fellow I showed you — Roche- Vandeleur. If you ever come across him, preach him one of your dear little sermons, for my sake." "I— I'll find him out," said Kitty, lifting her slender neck, " and get introduced to him." " Do, dearest ; though, by-the-bye, now I think of it, there's a rumour that he's dropped out of society, or something. But I'll investigate, and put it in my first letter, and then you shall tell me if you have converted him ; won't you ? " Kitty promised, again and again, with a dim unpractical vision of keeping that promise in a splendid manner. Then the parting came ; with her arms about his neck, and her lips on his, little coy Kitty, for the first and last time Kitty and her lover exchanged but a few long, foolish, eloquent letters ; as many as they could put in, in the space allowed them by climate and Providence.

Strafford made a few feeble struggles to shake off the hopeless incubus of debt in which he had involved himself before he knew Kitty ; to save money ; to lead a clean and godly — what he called to himself " a Kitty " — life. Then, before there was time for him to tire, perhaps, of an utterly impossible romance, and for Kitty to find out that her Sir Galahad, her knight without fear or reproach, was very mortal and fallible man. the news of his death came home. It was the rapid death of India : a slight feel ing of illness neglected, demanding, too late, a concentration of every faculty on getting better, for Kitty's sake ; fever, delirium, in which he rode regimental steeplechases and made hot love to Kittv. and even called her " wife," or mixed up careless oaths with fragments of childhood's pravers.

Then followed stupor aud a weak last flicker of life, when, with sense in his dying eyes, he looked up and whispered in the weakest voice, " Poor little darling ! A better man — than I — ; " murmured a prayer for her, perhaps for himself, and so passed away, to the presence of Him who understands that superior education and position do not necessarily mean a better chance of find ing life eternal. When the tidiugs were first brought to Kitty, she denied them with extraordinary fierceness : that Strafford should die had never entered into her calculations, and appeared impossible. But as the sword found its slow passage to her heart, a long cry — the widow's cry — tore its way through her being, leaving a vacant wound, never to be filled. She went up, with her hands stretched out, groping before her like a blind girl, to her room, dragged down the blinds, locked the door, and crouched there in the dark est corner.

Outside, it was a dazzling summer day in full season, but round Kitty there was a great silence. Strafford's death and burial seemed to be happening, then and there. She had a vivid image of his passionate eyes looking up from his deathbed, and his hand feeling for hers. She saw, too, the procession of a military funeral, which he had sometimes, with a careless laughing reference to himself, described ; beheld the cloudless eastern sky, heard the tragic muffled music and the thud of the baked earth. She started up, wild-eyed, with her fingers in her ears, and, thenceforth, could bear the march of death as little as any superstitious private of her Majesty's service. Perhaps she would not have been happy with poor Strafford. Her nature might have de manded more than his could give. Kitty's ideals were ever too high for this imperfect earth.

She may have been spared — who knows what ? As he had said, taking refuge in gene ralities from the anxious questioning of her innocent eyes — " No man is good enough for a good girl." But the inference was only like an ugly fairy tale to a child, to her. After a few days Kitty came out of her room. She would have liked to put on mourning, but that would have meant the stares and speculation of her world. After a while she talked of Strafford sometimes to her sister, or to her maid, because the latter had always admired him, and said that he was the gentle man of all Kitty's suitors whom she could call " master." When a year or two had passed, Kitty, being so young, began to laugh and play again, but she never played at love-making, and there were little indications of a curious indifference to matters dear to her sex visible in her from time to time.

She never spoke to any human being of Strafford's spiritual state. If she had been a Catholic she might have prayed for his soul ; possibly she did, and perhaps He who is less fiercely orthodox than His followers, both in the Bible and out of it, was not thereby offended, or even shocked. Perhaps — there must always be a perhaps in man's view of his God.

Chapter II Going Under

A few weeks after Kitty had beheld him in the Row, Reginald Alured Roche- Vandeleur — he had had many pretty names given him, because he was a pretty baby, by his fond young mother — sauntered up Grosvenor Place on his thorough bred hack, with his usual air of amiable pro prietorship. There was, however, a line or two about his eyes, and something of tension in that airy smile, in which his lips were a little apart as if he were breathless. Both grew into an aspect of distinct dismay as he stopped before his father's house, and perceived that the shallow stone stair was unswept, and the blank face of a blind at every window. He tossed his rein to an idling stableman, ran up the steps and rang the bell imperatively, twice over, when, after some fumbling with bolts and bars, a dingy -capped and grimy -handed woman appeared at the half-opened door.

He 17 B THE KIl"S KKDKMPTlnN was about to stride pant hor, when she Stopped him, with a nervous, apologetic — " Please, sir, thc family's gone." "Gone!" he repeated, with a stammer of amazement. " What on earth do yon mean I Where's my father ? " The caretaker, witli a suspicion of a whimper, invited him in, aud as they .stood together in the dusk, penetrated here, and there, by yellow lines of outside sunshine, of the, veiled and sheeted dining-room, told her bale, not without sympathy, expressed by sniffs and the applicB tion of her apron to her cheeks. "It's Captain Roche - Vandeleur, ain't it1 I thought ho," as he gave an impatient nod. "Oh, sir, I was to tell you that the poor old gentle man hadn't been himHclf since you waw here last; and three, days hack, he. went ipiite, oil' hin head, and they had to put him away.

And Sir Clinton, he said I Was to tell you ho, nir, if you called, and to nay he waH stopping at the, (iron venor Hotel, and you could hear idl particulars. from him. He gave all the servants a month's Wages and packed them oil', and the, agent put me in — which he knows my character — and I've, covered everything up, and " Roche - Vandeleur s face, vividly expressing various emotions, was now nearly as white as his collar, and his eyes stared wildly. He was not a particularly robust man, in mind or body, and the thing was sufficiently startling and painful Moreover, it brought in its train some gloomy forebodings as to his own future. He muttered a stifled word of thanks, ran down the steps, instructed the ostler to take his horse home to the liverv-stable near his rooms, hailed a passing l»«ian_T- — walking was against his principles when there were cabs at hand — and had himself driven to the Grosvenor.

Sir Clinton Roche - Vandeleur was staying there, but was engaged The waiter ran up stairs, and returned with a request that he would wait a few minutes. His body waited ; that is to say, it lounged restlessly up and down the room, but his mind projected itself into the im minent interview with mingled dread and disgust. There was his lather, too, who had never given him a rough word, or refused to indulge a fancy of his; who had paid his debts once. and promised a few weeks since, after a find feeble lecture, to pay than again and set him on his legs once more. It was a painful, hateful thought, to imagine him among strangers, per haps coerced. He stamped his foot and drew his eyebrows together as the waiter reappeared and announced that Sir Clinton would see him now. Sir Clinton had attained a high position in the Civil Service of his country by the exercise of certain dry and dreary talents for statistics and organisation.

He had the accuracy of a machine, and its unmercifulness. No detail was too trivial for his narrow mind ; impulse and enthusiasm were to him inexplicable, and there fore sinful. He was married to a meek little wife, and there was a barrier, fourfold, of small, long-nosed male infants between Reginald and any possible heirship of the estate. The elder brother was small, thin, and dry ; prematurely bald about his conical head, but for a precise fringe of sandy locks, worn rather long ; hairless as to his face, with a delicate pinched nose, which had a little nip conveniently accommodat ing his gold eyeglasses ; the thinnest of lips, and a mortally cold eye of glassy grey. He spoke with a lisp, needless and annoying to chronicle, in a high-pitched voice, always in perfect gram mar, and with a neat finish of sentences.

He had been invulnerably virtuous, as the world counts virtue, from his youth, and looked down from an immense height on the follies and passions of general humanity. To him tempta tion was sin, and sin hopeless perdition. He did not love his stepbrother ; on the contrary, he disliked him, and not wholly without cause, seeing that Reginald had from boyhood secured all their father's heart, and as much of his money as he could lay hands on, to squander in profit less pleasures, while Sir Clinton's resources had been small, till he rose in his profession and married a Quaker heiress. He was sitting upright by a table with some documents before him — he never lounged or threw himself about — and arose with perfect propriety, extending three chilly fingers, with a tranquil, " How do you do ? " He disdained colloquialisms ; everything he said might have been written down on the spot, and would have required no correction after wards.

He was always distinctly severe in de meanour to his brother, appearing to reprobate his very existence. But Reginald was not in a state of mind to notice the disagreeable accessories, either present or future, of the situation. "Oh, I'm all right," he said impatiently. " But what's this about my father . I call it an awful shame to cart him off in this way ! Where is he . " he demanded, with a quaver of indigna tion in his voice, and a suggestion of moisture in his eyes. At five-and-twenty he was still a boy, governed, not by reason, but by affection and passion. " My father is at the residence of a physician celebrated for his treatment of mental disease, where he has every attention and comfort, though I am under some apprehension " " Where ? Give me the address. I'll go and see him," Reginald interrupted ; it was one of his offences that he was always interrupting Clinton.

" Not at present, I think," said the other, with a little rasping clearing of the throat, which was his nearest approach to embarrass ment. " His medical attendant is of opinion — I mean, he absolutely enforces perfect freedom from all trouble and annoyance." " Annoyance ? Bosh ! The dear old dad's always delighted to see me, and you know it." " He has so much cause, has he not ? Your visits were so entirely on his account ; productive of so much peace of mind and absence of pecuniary anxiety." Reginald snatched up a penholder from the table and twisted it in his fingers with a flushed cheek. " Well, I know It was Sir Clinton's turn to interrupt. " Considering that your unbridled extra vagance and sinful folly have been the main causes of what his physician characterises as an entire break up of the system, you display a degree of assurance I should have imagined even you incapable of, in suggesting that you should visit him."

The penholder snapped. " Does the doctor say that ? " " He does." " Look here, Clint ! are you trying to have me, as a sort of revenge ? " Sir Clinton's countenance assumed a pious horror at the accusation and the words in which it was clothed, but he replied dryly — " I deal only with facts. You can, if you desire it, see Sir Abel Houghton's statement." He selected a paper from those before him. Reginald stretched out his hand — a self-indulgent man's hand : soft-skinned, full-veined, fleshy, in spite of the length of the delicate fingers. He was a long time reading the scratchy scrawl, but cast it back at last, and, with his head half averted, began, with something like a choke in his voice, to mumble brief deprecating questions, putting himself in the wrong by muttered admissions of — " I did bother him, I know.

Poor old pater ! I am a blackguard," and so forth. Sir Clinton looked and listened sceptically ; attitude and tone were, in his view, theatrical. He broke in on the torrent of self-accusation — "Pray control yourself, Reginald. It is necessary that I should speak with you con cerning your own future. These overstrained expressions cannot undo what has been done." The younger man threw up his head like a horse sharply curbed, the action conveying the same angry admission of defeat. He had sufficient shreds of prudence to know that he was, accord ing to his own mental expression, " in a hole " — a deep and muddy one enough — and that it would be wise, if difficult, to conciliate the present head of the family. He tried weakly, however, to stave off the unpleasant subject ; his sorrow was really smarting and sincere.

" My prospects ! Oh ! that'll do in a day or two. I daresay my father told you, old fellow, that he was going to stump up and set every thing straight for me, and that I gave him my honour I'd chuck up gambling and betting, and be a good boy for the rest of my days. Old Bolton " — this was the family solicitor — " was to arrange it all. But hang that, now ! " The other drew himself up stiffly. " You appear to think it the most natural thing in the world that the estate should be crippled, and my own limited income further curtailed, in order that my younger brother may indulge with impunity in what the Scriptures very properly describe as riotous living ! " Sir Clinton was so absolutely superior that he even patronised the Bible, using it as a condemnatory text-book or treatise on the faults of any fellow creature who came under his displeasure.