Flashman And The Tiger

He was on the fringe of Oscar’s group—and so out of place among that posy of simpering pimps that I wonder I hadn’t noticed him earlier. But now recognition was instant, and mutual. His hair had gone, save a grey fringe about the ears, the splendid moustache was snow-white, and the lined brown face had turned boozer’s red, but there was no mistaking that hawk nose and the bright, shifting eyes. Dress him how and where you liked, he was still Tiger Jack.

He was looking at me with that odd quirky little smile at the corner of his thin mouth, and then the blue eyes turned from me to Selina, who was laughing happily at what someone was saying, fluttering her fan before her white shoulders, teasing the speaker innocently. Moran looked at her for a moment, and when his eyes came back to mine he was grinning—and it wasn’t a nice grin.

Now all this happened in an instant, while I was recognising him, and realising that he had recognised me. There was a second’s pause, and then as I was about to move forward and greet him he stepped quickly back, murmuring an excuse to Selly and the others, and slipped into the bar. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it seemed damned odd behaviour; however, it didn’t matter, and Selly was taking my arm and murmuring farewells, so I exchanged another disgusted glare with Wilde and led her away. She had noticed, though—sharp little creature that she was.

"Why did that gentleman—Colonel Moran—hurry off so suddenly?" says she, when we were in the carriage. "I’m sure he knew you."

"He did," says I. "At least, we met once—in a war."

"But then, so many of these people seem to behave … most curiously," says Selly. "Mr Oscar Wilde, for instance—is he not a very strange person, gramps?"

"That’s one way of putting it," says I. "And don’t call me `gramps', young woman; I’m grandpapa."

Now, why the blazes should Moran have avoided me? Lots of fellows do, of course, but he had no earthly reason that I could think of. We’d met only once, as you know, and been comrades-in-arms after a fashion—indeed, he’d saved my life. It, seemed odd, and I puzzled over it for a while, but then gave it up, and was snoozing in my corner of the carriage and had to be roused by a giggling Selina when we reached home in Berkeley Square.

Moran wasn’t alone in giving me the cold shoulder at that time, though. Only a couple of days after the theatre I was cut stone dead by someone a deal more important—the Prince of Wales, no less, shied violently away from me in the United Service card-room, and hightailed it as fast as his ponderous guts would let him, giving me a shifty squint over his shoulder as he went. That, I confess, I found pretty raw. It’s embarrassing enough to be cut by the most vulgar man in Europe, but when he is also a Prince who is deeply in your debt you begin to wonder what royalty’s coming to. For if ever anyone had cause to be grateful to me, it was Beastly Bertie; not only had I done my bit to guide his youthful footsteps along the path of vice and loose living (not that he’d needed much coaching), I’d even resigned Lily Langtry in his favour, turned a deaf ear to rumours that he and my darling Elspeth had behaved indecorously in a potting-shed, and only three years earlier had plucked him, only slightly soiled, out of the Tranby card scandal. If that wasn’t enough, he was still using a cosy little property of mine on Hay Hill to conduct his furtive fornications with the worst sort of women, duchesses and actresses and the like. Well, thinks I, as I watched him rolling off, if that’s your gratitude you can take your trollops elsewhere; I’d a good mind to charge him rent, or corkage. I didn’t, of course; a bounder he might be, but it don’t pay to offend the heir to the Throne.

Such rubs apart, I passed the next few weeks agreeably enough. There was plenty of interest about town, what with a Society murder—a young sprig of the nobility called Adair getting himself shot mysteriously in the West End—and a crisis in the government, when that dodderer Gladstone finally resigned. I ran into him in the lavatory of the Reform Club—not a place I belong to, you understand, but I’d been to a champagne and lobster supper in St James’s, and just looked in to unload. Gladstone was standing brooding over a basin in a nonconformist way, offensively sober as usual, when I staggered along, middling tight.

"Hollo, old ’un," says I. "Marching orders at last, hey? Ne’er mind, it happens to all of us. It’s this damned Irish business, I suppose—" for as you know, he was always fussing over Ireland; no one knew what to do about it, and while the Paddies seemed to be in favour of leaving the place and going to America, Glad-stone was trying to make ’em keep it; something like that.

"Where you went wrong," I told him, "was in not giving the place back to the Pope long ago, and apologising for the condition it’s in. Fact."

He stood glaring at me with a face like a door-knocker.