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Updated: June 18, 2025
Her cry came too late; the volley was fired, and while the prisoner stood erect, grazed only by some of the balls, Cigarette fell, pierced and broken by the fire. She died in Cecil's arms, with the comrades she had loved around her. It is spring. Cecil is Lord of Royallieu, the Lady Venetia is his bride. "It was worth banishment to return," he murmured to her.
"The finest horse in the world may have his back broke by bad riding, and a screw has won before now when it's been finely handled. The finish was tight, wasn't it?" "Well rather. I have ridden closer spins, though. The fallows were light." Lord Royallieu smiled grimly.
Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to the family title on his father's death, has expired at Mentone, whither his health had induced him to go some months previous. The late Lord was unmarried. His next brother was, it will be remembered, many years ago, killed on a southern railway. The title, therefore, now falls to the third and only remaining son, the Hon.
Now, scarce a day passed but what it spoke to him some word of greeting or of affection, and his black, soft eyes would gleam with their old fire, because its tone brought back a thousand memories of bygone victory only memories now, when Forest King, in the years of age, dreamed out his happy life under the fragrant shade of the forest wealth of Royallieu.
It developed him into a magnificent soldier too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived under any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defended now. The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gates of Royallieu "Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume" verified itself in his case.
It was the old family place of the Royallieu House in which he had congregated half the Guardsmen in the Service for the great event, and consequently the bachelor chambers in it were of the utmost comfort and spaciousness, and when Cecil sauntered into his old quarters, familiar from boyhood, he could not have been better off in his own luxurious haunts in Piccadilly.
His liabilities were tremendous, his resources totally exhausted; but such was the latent recklessness of the careless Royallieu blood, and such the languid devil-may-care of his training and his temper, that the knowledge scarcely ever seriously disturbed his enjoyment of the moment. Somehow, he never realized it.
He was Viscount Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and he was dead forever in the world's belief; he must live, and grow old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his name and his rights buried, and his years passed as a private soldier of France.
She brought him pens and paper from the Turk's store, and dictated what he wrote: "I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs d'Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England.
How could he then bring himself to understand, as nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his father had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase "A Pauper and a Guardsman"? If he had ever been near a comprehension of it, which he never was, he must have ceased to realize it when pressed to dine with Lord Guenevere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while a groom dashed over to Royallieu for his change of clothes he caught a glimpse, as they passed through the hall, of the ladies taking their preprandial cups of tea in the library, an enchanting group of lace and silks, of delicate hue and scented hair, of blond cheeks and brunette tresses, of dark velvets and gossamer tissue; and when he had changed the scarlet for dinner-dress, went down among them to be the darling of that charmed circle, to be smiled on and coquetted with by those soft, languid aristocrats, to be challenged by the lustrous eyes of his chatelaine and chere amie, to be spoiled as women will spoil the privileged pet of their drawing rooms whom they had made "free of the guild," and endowed with a flirting commission, and acquitted of anything "serious."
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