THE SACK OF MONTE CARLO

An Adventure of To-day

As narrated by Vincent Blacker, Esq.

Lieutenant H.M.’s East ——shire Militia

BY

WALTER FRITH

AUTHOR OF “IN SEARCH OF QUIET”

Quo timoris minus est, eo minus est Periculi

Livy, xii., 5

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1898

By WALTER FRITH.

IN SEARCH OF QUIET. A Country Journal, May

to July. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1.25.

A very entertaining book, written in a very entertaining

style.—Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette.

A book which will enchain the attention of the reader

from beginning to end.—Boston Advertiser.

NEW YORK AND LONDON:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO

Mrs. F. W. SHARON

IN RECOLLECTION OF MANY HAPPY HOURS IN

NEW YORK, ÉTRETAT, AND PARIS

London, October, 1897

CONTENTS

THE SACK OF MONTE CARLO

“I don’t say that it is possible; I only affirm it to be true.”

CHAPTER I

SOME SLIGHT EXPLANATION—OBJECTS OF THE EXPEDITION—LOVE THE PROMOTER—LUCY THATCHER—HER PORTRAIT BY LAMPLIGHT

The idea occurred to me, quite unexpectedly and unsought for, early one morning in bed; and, as ideas of such magnitude are valuable and scarce (at any rate, with me), it was not long before I determined to try and realize it.

The expedition was so successful, and we got, on the whole, so clear and clean away with the swag, or, as Mr. Julius C. Brentin, our esteemed American collaborateur, called it, “the boodle,” that, for my part, there I should have been perfectly content to let the affair rest; but, the fact is, so many of my friends have taken upon themselves to doubt whether we really did it at all, and the Monte Carlo authorities from the very first so cunningly managed to suppress all details (with their subsidized press), that I feel it due to us all to try and write the adventure out; since I know very well how, with most, seeing in print is believing.

Briefly, then, my idea was to sack or raid the gambling-tables at Monte Carlo, that highly notorious cloaca maxima for all the scum of Europe, which there gutters and gushes forth into the sapphire and tideless Mediterranean. I had worked details out for myself, and believed that, what with the money on the tables and the reserve in the vaults, there could not be much short of £200,000 on the Casino premises, a sum as much worth making a dash for, it seemed to me, as Spanish plate-ships to Drake or Raleigh. Nor did it seem likely we should have to do much fighting to secure it; for all the authorities I consulted assured me the place was by no means a Gibraltar, and, in fact, that half a dozen resolute gentlemen with revolvers and a swift steam-yacht waiting in the harbor would be more than enough to do the trick and clean the place out; which was pretty much what we found.

As for the morality of the affair, I confess that never in the least troubled me—never once. One puts morality on one side when dealing with a gaming-establishment, and to raid the place seemed to me just as reasonable and fair as to go there with a system, besides being likely to be a good deal more profitable. And since the objects to which we destined the money were in the main charitable, I soon came to regard the expedition strictly in pios usus (as lawyers say), and hope and believe the public will regard it in that light too.

Let me say right here—to quote Mr. Brentin again—that not one of us touched one single red cent of the large amount we so fortunately secured, but that it was all expended for the purposes (in the main, as I say, charitable) for which we had always intended it—with the single exception of a necklet of napoleons I had made for the fat little neck of my enchanting niece Mollie, which she always wears at parties, and keeps to this day in an old French plum-box, along with her beads and bangles and a small holy ring I once brought her from Rome; being amazingly fond of all sorts of bedizenments, as most female children are.

Mollie, therefore, was the only person who really had any of the swag, or boodle; though, of course, she doesn’t know it, and thinks it was properly won at play. For as for Bob Hines, who had some for the new gymnasium and swimming-bath at his boys’ school at Folkestone; and Mr. Thatcher (my dear wife Lucy’s father), who got his old family estate, Wharton Park, back; and the hospitals, convalescent homes, and sanatoriums, which all shared alike; and Teddy Parsons, of my militia, who had the bill paid off that was worrying him—that was all in the original scheme, and all went to form the well-understood reasons for our undertaking the expedition; without which inducements, indeed, it would never even have started.

So if, after this clear denial in print, the public still choose to fancy anything has stuck to my fingers, all I can ask them in fairness to do is to come to our flat in Victoria Street any morning between twelve and two, when they can see the accounts and receipts for themselves, all in order and properly audited by Messrs. Fitch & Black, the eminent accountants of Lothbury, E. C....

Now, they say love is at the bottom of most of the affairs and enterprises of the world, and so I believe it mostly is. At all events, I don’t fancy I should have undertaken, or, at any rate, been so prominent in this Monte Carlo affair, if I hadn’t at the time been so deeply in love with Lucy, and correspondingly anxious to get her father’s property back for them at Wharton Park. It is situate near Nesshaven, on the Essex coast; which, though to many it may not be a particularly attractive part of the country, is to me forever sacred as the spot where I first met the dear girl who is now my wife, coming back so rosily from her morning bath, through the whin and the sand, from the long, flat shore and the idle sea, carrying her own damp towel back to her father’s inn, “The French Horn.”

I can see her now as I saw her then, on that warm September morning eighteen months ago; sea and sky and monotonous Essex land all bathed in hazy sunshine, the whins still glistening with the morning mist, which at that time of the year lies heavily till the sun at mid-day warms them dry and sets the seed-cases exploding like Prince-Rupert drops—I can see her, I say, come towards me along the coast-guard path, round the pole that sticks up to mark it, and towards the wooden bridge that crosses one of the dikes.

If any line of that sweet face were faint in my memory, I have only to look across at her now, as she sits sewing under the lamp as I write, for all its charm and perfection to be present as first I saw it. I have only to put a straw-hat on the pretty, rough, dark hair, which in sunshine gleams with the bronze of chestnut, give her a freckle or two on the low, white forehead, color her round cheek a little more delicately rose-leaf, and there she is—not forgetting to take away the wedding-ring!—as she passed me on the Nesshaven golf-links that hazy September morning eighteen months ago. There is the straight nose, the short upper lip, the pure, fresh mouth, the plump and rounded chin, and the soft, pink lips that part so readily with a smile and show the beautiful white teeth, white as the youngest hazel-nuts....

Lucy felt my eyes were upon her, and looked up at me and smiled, with something of a blush, for she blushes very readily. She saw me still looking longingly, the invitation in my eyes, and after a moment’s hesitation (for, though we have been married nearly six months, she still is shy) she put down her sewing and came to me at my writing-table. She bent over me and put her arms round my neck, her warm cheek against mine. Her soft lips kissed me; I felt the tender, loving palpitation of her bosom as I bent my head back. Our sitting-room seemed full of silence, happy and melodious silence, while from outside in Victoria Street I head the jingle of a passing cab....

CHAPTER II

“THE FRENCH HORN”—MABEL HARKER, MY UNFORTUNATE ENGAGEMENT TO HER—MR. CRAGE AND WHARTON PARK

Though the idea to sack Monte Carlo did not occur to me till late in the year (in the September of which I first met Lucy Thatcher), I must first say something of my going down to Nesshaven in June, and the events which led to my being in a position to undertake an affair of such nerve and magnitude.

Lucy thought I should take readers straight to Monte Carlo, confining myself to that part of the work only; but, after talking it over, she agrees with me now that the adventure must be led up to in the natural way it really was or the public won’t believe in it, after all, and I shall have all my pains for nothing. So that’s what I shall do, in the shortest and best way I can; promising, like the esteemed old circus-rider Ducrow, as soon as possible to “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.”

Well, then, it was towards the middle of June when I joined the golf club at Nesshaven, just after my militia training month was over. I was introduced by Harold Forsyth (one of our Monte Carlo band later, and one of the stanchest of them), who had the golf fever very badly, and, I must say, was beginning to make himself rather a bore with it.

He and I went down from Liverpool Street and stayed at “The French Horn,” the inn kept by Mr. Thatcher, Lucy’s father; and after Forsyth had introduced me to the club and shown me round the links, he went back to his regiment, the “Devon Borderers,” then stationed at Colchester, very angry and complaining, as soldiers mostly are when obliged to do any work. I remained behind, not that I had yet seen Lucy, but rather to keep out of Mabel Harker’s way—the young lady to whom (as Lucy knows) I happened, much against my will, to be at that time unfortunately engaged to be married.

My first visit to “The French Horn” lasted three weeks, during which time I manfully held my ground, though heavily bombarded by Mabel’s letters, regularly discharged thrice a week from her aunt’s house in Clifton Gardens at Folkestone. At last, as Mabel came to stay at her sister’s in the Regent’s Park (on purpose, I believe), I was obliged to go up to town for ten days, and there passed a sad time with her at the University match, Henley, and the Eton and Harrow; at which noted places of amusement and relaxation I cannot help thinking I was the most unhappy visitor, though, to be sure, I tried hard not to show it.

But it was dreadful when I got back to my rooms in Little St. James’s Street and attempted sleep; for I really think that not being in love with the person you have bound yourself to marry keeps more men awake more miserably than any of the so-called torments of love, which, with scarcely an exception, I have never found otherwise than agreeable.

At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to “The French Horn,” and I never saw her again (thank goodness!) till the momentous interview between us in October, from which I emerged a free man; she having discovered in a boarding-house at Lucerne an architect named Byles, whom she’d the sense to see was a more determined wooer than I had ever been, and likely to make her a far better husband.

“The French Horn” is not an old house, having been built in about the year 1830, from designs made by Mr. Thatcher’s father, who had copied it from an inn he had once stayed in in Spain. For a country gentleman of old family, the father seems to have been a somewhat remarkable person. He had, for instance, been an intimate friend of the celebrated Lord Byron, and was the only man in England (so Mr. Thatcher always said) who knew the real story of the quarrel between the poet and his wife. Byron confided it to him at Pisa as the closest of secrets; but, as he had always told it to everybody when alive, and his son, my father-in-law, invariably did and still does the same, there must be a good many people in England by now who know all about it.

In fact, there was scarcely a golfer or bicyclist came to the house but Mr. Thatcher didn’t fix him sooner or later in the bar and ask him if he knew the real reason why Byron quarrelled with his wife and left England. And as it was a hundred to one chance that they didn’t, Mr. Thatcher always informed them in a loud, husky whisper, and shouted after them as they left, “But you mustn’t publish it, because it’s a family secret!”

And the reason was, according to Mr. Thatcher, that Lord Byron had killed a country girl when a young man (somebody he’d got into trouble, I suppose) and flung her body in the pond at Newstead; and that having, in a moment of loving expansion, bragged of it to his wife, Lady Byron had, very properly, promptly kicked him out of the house in Piccadilly; which, also according to Mr. Thatcher, was the origin of those touching lines:

“They tell me ’tis decided you depart:

’Tis wise, ’tis well, but not the less a pain,”

invariably quoted by him on the departure of a guest.

It was this same father of Mr. Thatcher’s who had parted with Wharton Park, their ancestral home. He had been a great gambler in his youth, and lost enormous sums at Crockford’s and on the turf, so that when he died, in 1850, he had nothing to leave his only son, my Lucy’s father, but three or four thousand pounds, very soon muddled away in unfortunate business speculations.

At last, about twenty years ago, it occurred to Mr. Thatcher to come down to Nesshaven and take “The French Horn,” close to the Park gates of his old home, where, until the golf mania set in, beyond gaining a bare livelihood, he did no particular good; having to depend on natural-history lunatics, who came there in winter and prowled the shore with shot-guns after rare birds, and, in summer, on families from Colchester—tradespeople and bank-clerks and so on—who spent their holidays lying about in the warm sand among the whins and complaining of the food. Betweenwhiles there was scarcely a soul about except the coast-guards, who came up to fill their whiskey-bottles, and a few bicyclists who ate enormous teas and never would pay more than ninepence.

But when a Colchester builder erected the club-house down on the links, Mr. Thatcher’s business looked up wonderfully, and he really began to make money, and even sometimes to turn it away, for the house was small. Harold Forsyth discovered it, being quartered so near, and it was he who introduced me, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.

It was a curious place, as most amateur buildings are. Forsyth had not told me anything about it, and I was indeed astonished when we first drove up; for, with its colored bricks, veranda, high-pitched roof, and odd carved wood-work, it reminded me somehow of an illustration to Don Quixote, and I quite expected to see a team of belled mules and hear the gay castanet click of the fandango. Instead of which, out came Mr. Thatcher in a dirty old cricket blazer.

It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was decorated in the Moorish fashion (rather like the old London Crystal Palace; where, by-the-way, I have eaten pop-corn many a time as a boy, but cannot honestly say I ever enjoyed it), and would hold, I dare say, a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts or a printer’s wayz-goose.

The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.

What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can’t conceive—possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever there’s a links and they can get permission to perform.

Mr. Thatcher’s wife, a doctor’s daughter, had long been dead; but his old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die. Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn’t in the least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way, if she wasn’t watched, she would cheat outrageously.

She came of a good old Norfolk family, and actually remembered the jubilee of George III. in 1810; but when asked for details of that touching and patriotic event, all she could say was, “Well, I remember the blacksmith’s children dressed in white.”

Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the church to visit her husband’s grave and see the tablet inside was kept clean.

So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained, by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.

Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently, since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square, he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.

Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in 1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man, who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged in hand-to-hand fighting.

When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed, slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.

I remember he called out to me over the gate in a rasping voice, “Hi, there, you young Cockney! what’s the time?” Whereupon I haughtily replied it was time he thought of his latter end and behaved himself. At which he fell to cursing and shaking his stick, and making sham, impotent efforts to get over the gate. For they told me he was mortally afraid of dying, as all bad (and, for the matter of that, many good) men are. He knew, of course, Mr. Thatcher was the rightful owner of the place, and he would sometimes come down to “The French Horn” and jeer him about it, offering it for £30,000, which, he dared say, Mr. Thatcher had in the house. And more than once, curse his senile impudence! Mr. Thatcher told me he had offered to marry Lucy!—but this is really too horrible a subject to be dwelt on.

In short, I loathed the old wretch so heartily that it was perhaps the happiest moment of my life (with the exception of that blessed February morning when I stood at the altar of Nesshaven church with Lucy and heard her sweet and tremulous “I will”) when, after our triumphant return from Monte Carlo, Mr. Thatcher and I went up to Wharton Park with the £30,000 in notes and gold and paid the old ruffian out over the coarse kitchen-table, almost the only furniture of the grand drawing-room, where there were still the old yellow silk hangings—as will all come in its place, later on.

Lucy Thatcher at this time, in June and July, was staying with her aunt, Miss Young, her mother’s sister, who kept a girls’ school in the Ladbroke Grove Road, out at Notting Hill. She taught some of the younger children and made herself generally useful, taking them out walks in Kensington Gardens; for Mr. Thatcher wisely thought her too beautiful to be always at “The French Horn,” since bicyclists and golfers are somewhat apt to be too boldly attentive to the lovely faces they meet with on their roundabouts. Nor can I altogether blame them. So, as I have said, I never saw her till my return in September, when her beauty and modesty—which in my judgment are synonymous—at once captured me, and always will hold me captive till I die.

CHAPTER III

I CONTINUE TO KEEP OUT OF MABEL HARKER’S WAY AND GO TO GORING—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—WANDERINGS WITH LUCY—MR. CRAGE REHEARSES HIS OWN FUNERAL

As August approached I began to feel apprehensive as to the right course to pursue with regard to Mabel Harker, my fiancée. I don’t want to say anything unkind about her here in print, but, the fact is, the engagement had been an unfortunate one from the first. Let me only observe that I really honestly think if a man is to choose between behaving like a brute (as people say you do when you break off an engagement) and making himself miserable for life (as I most certainly should if I had married Mabel), he had much better select the former course. At any rate, I know now that if I had had the brutality, or the courage, to tell Mabel point-blank at first that I was very sorry, but I didn’t care for her sufficiently to marry her, I should have spared myself a vast deal of annoyance and self-reproach, which now I understand to have been altogether unnecessary; seeing, I know now very well, she didn’t really care for me in the least, but simply regarded me as a lay-figure (with eight hundred a year) to stand beside her at the altar rails and mechanically say “I will” and “I do” and the rest of it.

After her visit to her sister’s in the Regent’s Park, in July, she had gone back to Folkestone, and I was in some tremor whether she might not desire me to spend the holiday months with them there; but, most fortunately, Mrs. Harker, her aunt, received a very good offer for her house in Clifton Gardens, which she determined to take, and go abroad to Switzerland, where she and Mabel could live in a pension and save quite three-fourths of the home rent.

Mabel wanted me to join them, but I managed to get out of it, and very lucky I did; for it was at that very pension at Lucerne she met Charles Byles, the architect, her present husband, and a great ass he must have looked with that small face of his and huge mustache, and a rope round him for going up Pilatus; besides being slightly bandy.

As for me, I went off down to my sister’s, Mrs. Rivers, married to the publisher, who had taken a little house on the river at Taplow, where I spent the end of August and early part of September with great content, more especially in the middle of the week, when my precious brother-in-law (a dull fellow and a prig) was away doing his publishing in town.

I left Taplow the second week in September, and something gentle, yet persuasive and strong, seeming to call me back to “The French Horn,” off I went there; and there, as I have already mentioned, I met and fell madly in love with Lucy Thatcher at first sight, a passion deepening to a tempest before October dawned.

Now, as I am telling the truth in this work, and not writing a romance, I have to admit that the month I had of Lucy’s dear companionship, before I knew I was free, was by no means spent idly, and that I made all the running with her of which my amorous wits are capable, just as though I had been really unappropriated.

Nor was this altogether wrong, for I felt quite sure Providence would stand my good friend, as always in such affairs before, and direct Mabel Harker’s hopes into another, sounder matrimonial channel than mine. Even if Providence had not, but had stood aloof and fought shy, I should then most certainly have deemed it necessary to play the part myself, seeing how deeply and truly my heart was now for the first time engaged.

Dear! dear! at what amazing speed that happy month flew past; how little there seems I can say about it now. Isn’t it strange that Time, whom poets prefigure as an ancient person with anchylosed joints, further encumbered, notwithstanding his great age, with a scythe and an enormous hour-glass, is yet on occasion capable of showing the panting hurry of a sprinter?

With Lucy I was alone almost all the time, for Mr. Thatcher, very properly, wouldn’t allow her to help in the bar—a department he gracefully presided over himself in his dirty blazer, grasping the handle of the beer engine, and sometimes, on Saturday nights mostly, slightly shaken with a gentlemanly but unmistakable attack of hiccoughs. So dear Lucy had nothing much to do but go bathing and help her grandmother in the garden, gathering the plums and raking down the ripening apples. And though there were days when, womanlike, she shunned me and kept out of my way (so as not to make herself too cheap), yet she was very frank and simple and trusting in giving me at other times her constant companionship; and as on the days when she desired to be more alone I always respected her wish and kept away (just turning at the fourth hole on the links to watch her light, firm figure crossing down to her bathing-tent on the shore, and waving the putter at her), she was, as she has since told me, pleased at my delicacy and perception, and showed her pleasure when we again met by the extraordinary brightness of her eyes and the sweet readiness of her smile.

It was harvest-time, and though Mr. Thatcher had no acreage of his own, still there was plenty of it round him under cultivation, and a fine time it was for the Tap, for which there was a separate entrance, with a painted hand pointing to it for those who couldn’t read. While my sweetheart and I strolled about the lanes by day, gathering blackberries and plucking at the wisps of corn caught by the high hedges and low branches from the passing wagons, on warm evenings we would sit alone in the garden, listening to the hearty rustic revelry of premature harvest-homes from the inn, and, when it was very still, hearing the faint, mysterious rustle of the waves on the long, sandy shore, as though the lulling sea were whispering to the land, “Hush! hush! now go to sleep like a good child. You’ve had a long day and must be tired—hush!”

It was at this time, as I very well remember, we strolled up late one afternoon to Wharton Park, her old ancestral home, and a very curious and unedifying sight we witnessed there. We went in at the empty lodge gates, and had a look in first at the church in the Park grounds, of which Mr. Thatcher kept the key in the bar; for there was no rectory, and the parson came over only on Sundays from Nesshaven for an afternoon service—at six in summer and at three in winter.

The ancient, bird-haunted edifice was pretty full of deceased Thatchers—all of them, in fact, I believe, lie there, except the Lord Mayor of Henry VIII.’s reign, who gets what rest he can in a church off Cornhill, and Mr. Thatcher’s grandfather, who is buried out at Florence; and where there aren’t tablets and tombs of old-time, worthy Thatchers, there are kindly memorials to their servants, house-keepers, and bailiffs for forty years and so on; which when Lucy and I had duly and reverently inspected and sighed over, we had a peep in at the vestry, where hung the parson’s crisp surplice behind a piece of religious arras, and a framed and glazed view of Wharton in 1750 (the mansion that was burned), with pompous gentlemen in three-cornered hats giving their hands to ladies in immense hoops up the centre path; and a tattered, begrimed notice of the reign of Queen Anne, affording the clergy instructions for sending parishioners up to St. James’s to be touched for the king’s evil.

And when we had mourned over these things, and inspected the fragment of the holy-water scoop, and the blunt, whitewashed squint, and the broken place where once the mass-priests sat, and the Wharton pew, with an icy cold stove in it and a little frame of dingy red curtain hung round on rods and rings, so that the hinds shouldn’t see when the quality Thatchers fell asleep—not in the Lord!—on drowsy summer Sunday afternoons—as, alas! they haven’t had the opportunity of doing for many years past now; then we went on up to the house, leaving the drive, however, and dodging across the fields to the ha-ha, for fear of meeting that old villain Crage.

We got up through a small spinney to the end of the ha-ha that faces the house, and, as we were quite close, saw with our own eyes a most strange and monstrous sight—a sight so strange that many readers would scarcely credit it, had they not noticed that truth and not fiction is my object.

Hidden in the spinney, we were not more than forty yards from the house, which is long and low and not particularly beautiful—in fact, decidedly Gothic and unsightly. In front of it, lengthways and pretty broad, runs a gravel path, and up and down that broad gravel path was stamping and swearing old Mr. Crage; stamping and swearing and shaking his stick at six men (laborers of his, Lucy said, and all men she knew) who were actually carrying a coffin, a smart, brand-new coffin with dandy silver handles, on their shoulders.

The old wretch was positively rehearsing his own funeral! We could very plainly hear him cursing the men for walking too fast and jolting him, and so on; as though, once the miserable old hunks were cold, it mattered how anybody carried him.

Then he made them rest the coffin on one end while he showed them himself the pace they should travel and the demeanor they ought to exhibit; and truly, if it hadn’t been scandalous and horrible it would have been ludicrous to see the way the blaspheming old scamp trailed the path before them, dragging one foot along after another, with head and shoulders bent in sham sorrow and reverence; trying, in short, to play-act the distressed, grief-stricken mourner, touched to the quick at his own loss.

When he had finished his parade, he shook his stick at the six men, and cursed them, raving and foaming, for damned scoundrels and thieves and disrespectful ruffians, who would be glad to see him dead, and would whistle and dance while carrying him off, instead of doing it all in the proper depressed manner he had just shown them; while the men stood and looked at him stupidly and sullenly, and, I’ve no doubt, would have liked to jump on him there and then and beat him to a pulp, finishing once and for all with so dreadful a mockery by making it real.

Dear Lucy and I stole away, quite shocked and silent. Afterwards she told me old Crage had had the coffin a long time, and rehearsed the funeral once before; but that lately, having by threats of an action screwed twenty pounds out of his daughter for money he had lent her (on which, by-the-way, Miss Crage had promptly run away and got married), he had had the silver handles added; and, now that the coffin was, in his estimation, quite perfect, had doubtless gone through the unholy ceremony again, so that when the hour struck there might be no excuse for a hitch.

So Lucy and I stole away back to “The French Horn” in shocked silence. Pleasant and human it sounded, when we got on the road again, to hear a carter singing as he rattled homeward in his empty wagon.

CHAPTER IV

I AM FREE OF MABEL HARKER—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—DISASTROUS INTERFERENCE OF HAROLD FORSYTH IN MY AFFAIRS

It was the 13th of October, as I very well remember, that, shortly after Mabel’s return to England from Switzerland, she wrote me an incoherent epistle, begging me to come up to town and see her at once, for that she was the most miserable of girls and had sad news for me, signed “your heartbroken Mabel.” I must say I was glad to hear it, and greatly looked forward to the sad news; since I very well knew it could only be that another wooer had stepped up on to the Regent’s Park tapis, and one a good deal more determined to win her than I. Directly I got there and found the fire wasn’t lit in the drawing-room, though it was horribly cold, I knew I was right, and the interview was meant to be brief and painful.

It was the same room, by-the-way (though the fire had been lit for us then!) in which I had made my unfortunate declaration in the early spring, soon after Easter—a declaration precipitated by Mabel, who began playing the piano, but soon broke down over it and wept, alleging me to be the cause of her unhappiness; which, being uncommon tender-hearted where the sex are concerned, completely bowled me over and drove me to propose.

When she came in this time, with melancholy mouth but unmistakably triumphant eyes, she at once told me the sad news; to which I listened with as gloomy a face as I could, demanding in hoarse tones the name of my successful rival. I could scarcely contain my mirth when I heard it was Byles, the man she had so often laughed at in her letters from Lucerne, as girls not infrequently do at the man they are one day destined to marry. But I must say I think she might at any rate have offered to send me my presents back, for there are many of them (particularly a diamond and sapphire ring—cost me eighteen pounds) I should have liked to have given Lucy. I make no manner of doubt that if it had been garnets and carnelian, I should have had it back at once in a registered letter.

Directly our painful interview was over, I hurried back to Nesshaven and “The French Horn,” feeling happier than I had done for months past, a free man, and my heart beating so rapturously I believe an old lady in the carriage with me heard it, she looked so frightened at my restlessness.

But at “The French Horn” a blow awaited me, from which, when I think of it, I yet reel; for judge of my stupor when, on my gay return, I was met, not by Lucy, towards whom I was so impetuously rushing to tell all, but by the whiskified thunders of Mr. Thatcher, who took me at once into the bar-parlor, and proceeded there and then to claw me about the ears with the angry rhetoric of a theatrically outraged heavy father.

Of course he was quite right; but then I was myself now quite right, too; and when he talked in real Adelphi fashion about stealing affections and repaying him in this way, I was—thank Heaven!—in a position to be angry too, and give him as good as he gave me.

So I let him fume on till he ran himself down, when I temperately explained what my position really was, and how I was altogether free; and how, above all, that if Lucy cared for me, as I very well knew she did, I was going to marry her at once, and (if not precisely in the immediate neighborhood of “The French Horn”) settle down and live happily ever after.

Whereupon Mr. Thatcher’s easily corrugated brow began as easily to clear, and he steadied himself and seized and shook me by the wrong hand. So we sat down and had a cigar and a split whiskey-and-soda, and he was good enough to say he had known all along (from the way I had always paid my bill, I suppose) that he could trust me implicitly, and all would come right in the end.

But in the meantime he had shipped off dear Lucy to her aunt’s school in the Ladbroke Grove Road, where she had gone back—very tearfully, poor child, at the news of my supposed treachery—to her altogether uncongenial employment with the younger children.

By judicious pumping I discovered it was Harold Forsyth who had blown upon me and “queered my pitch,” as showmen say, having come over from Colchester to play golf, and been seized upon by the watchful Thatcher, who of course had noticed my unremitting attentions to his daughter. Upon which Harold, either because he fancied it his duty (old friends are often very inconsiderate) or from sheer stupidity, had let slip the disastrous news of my engagement to another lady; though, as a matter of fact, at the very moment of their conversation it was off and I was free.

Old Mrs. Thatcher took the situation in at a glance, and, either from a natural desire to see her granddaughter properly settled or from pure friendship for me, who had always been attentive to her, and once took a bee out of her hair (that animal being almost the only living thing she really feared), immediately suggested I should go off at once to the Ladbroke Grove Road, provided with a letter to the aunt from Mr. Thatcher, in which everything was explained, and I was given authority to interview and settle matters with my dear sweetheart. So, next morning early, off I drove to Nesshaven Station in the milk cart, gay as a lark—that chorister of the poor and the cheerful well-to-do—and by twelve o’clock was rattling in a cab down the Ladbroke Grove Road.

CHAPTER V

ANGLESEY LODGE—MY INTERVIEW WITH LUCY IN KENSINGTON GARDENS—NOT SO SATISFACTORY AS I COULD DESIRE

There was a piano-organ playing in front of Anglesey Lodge as I drove up; it was playing the old “Les Roses” waltz, and quite dramatic and affecting the music sounded as I impatiently waited in the drawing-room, hung with Doré’s works to impress parents, and with a model of the Taj under glass, done in soapstone, and sent by some girl-pupil, I imagine, who had married and gone out to India.

The aunt soon joined me, smiling, with Mr. Thatcher’s open letter in her hand, and a very handsome woman she must have been—indeed, still was—with traces, on a florid scale, of Lucy’s simple and yet delicate beauty.

She was so friendly, and made herself so fascinating, it was fully half an hour before I could get away. She told me Lucy was out with some of the pupils, and that, if I went to Kensington Gardens and walked down the Broad Walk, I should be sure to see them. Further, if we made it up (as we surely should, she graciously added), she begged me to come back to lunch at half-past one; though she must ask me not to walk home with the young ladies through the streets for fear of adverse neighborly comments, and upsetting them for the afternoon studies.

I was soon at the entrance to the gardens in the Bayswater Road, where the keeper’s lodge is, with its glass bottles of sweets and half-penny rock-buns; and, true enough, there was dear Lucy, sitting on one of the seats facing the walk, reading to one of the little girls, while the other bigger ones, perhaps half a dozen of them, were playing rounders in French, among the trees and the dead leaves.

“Combien de rounders avez-vous?” cried one of them as I came up; and “Courrez, Maud, courrez!” cried another, clapping her hands, as the tennis-ball in its torn cover whizzed close by me, whacked by a young person with a racquet, who was soon off on her round in a short frock but with uncommonly long legs.

I came quite close behind Lucy, taking care not to make the leaves rustle. She was reading Bonnechose’s History of France aloud, something about the wars of the Fronde and Cardinal Richelieu.

“ ‘The conduct of the cardinal at this juncture—’ ” she was saying with great seriousness, when the little girl beside her, who naturally wasn’t attending, looked up and saw me. I gave her a friendly smile, and after that moment’s careful scrutiny which females of all ages indulge in, she smiled back. The next moment Lucy looked at her and then round up at me, giving a soft, frightened “Hah!” and then going as white as a sheet.

Really, it is quite impossible to say at what age a comprehension of love, its torments and its joys, arises in the fresh girlish breast. The pretty creature seated at Lucy’s side couldn’t have been more than eleven, but she saw at once I loved her teacher and desired to be alone with her; so she immediately rose, staid and composed as a woman, shook her long hair, and, with complete unconsciousness, strolled off and joined the other older girls; while they, not to be behindhand in delicacy, soon stopped their somewhat noisy game, and, forming a sympathetic group at some little distance under an elm, stood there talking in whispers with their backs to us; pretending to be immensely interested and absorbed in the ’buses rumbling down the Bayswater Road.

But for her little frightened cry, Lucy received me in silence, and didn’t even give me her hand. She sat there on the seat—cut and scarred with other, happier lovers’ records—with her head slightly turned away from me; perfectly composed, apparently, after the first shock and natural agitation of seeing me again so suddenly were over.

I asked her how she was and how long she had been in town; she said she was quite well, and had been there since the day before yesterday.

Then she said, calmly, “Can you tell me the time, please?” and on my replying it was a quarter to one, murmured she must be going home to dinner, and made as if she would rise.

I stopped her with, “Please, Lucy, let me speak to you first.” So she remained perfectly still, though with her pretty head still turned away from me.

Eloquent, or, at all events, talkative, as I generally am with the sex, I admit I couldn’t for the life of me tell how to begin.

At last I said I was afraid she must think badly of me, and then waited of course for her contradiction; but as it never came, and she never made a sign, I went on to say I shouldn’t dare approach her were it not I was a free man; that my affair with—with the other lady was finally at an end, and so I came to her first and at once with my whole heart. As I spoke, I watched her closely, if only in the hope I might detect some slight twitching of her small ungloved hands, or some involuntary twittering of her eyes or lips, when I told her I was free; but she sat so like an antique, or, for the matter of that, a modern statue, I began to grow frightened, since I know very well how implacable even the tenderest of women can sometimes be when it suits them.

“Oh, Lucy dear!” I stammered, “d-don’t be hard on me. I loved you the moment I saw you. I never really loved the other one. Since the day I first set eyes on you, I have never given any other woman a serious thought. You can’t be so unkind as to break my life in pieces, merely because I’ve been careless, merely because I spoke to you before I was quite sure I was free? Why, I was free of her directly I saw you, and if she hadn’t released me of her own accord, as she has done—Oh, Lucy! don’t leave me in this dreadful suspense! Do, my dear girl, say something kind to me, for mercy’s sake!”

“I don’t feel kindly towards you, Mr. Blacker,” Lucy answered, cold and stern, “and I can’t pretend. I know quite well what’s happened. You thought I was only an innkeeper’s daughter—”

“Oh, Lucy!”

“And that so long as you were staying there you might as well amuse yourself.”

“Love is no amusement, Lucy—it’s a most fearful trial.”

“But did you ever, when you were daring to make love to me,” she said, suddenly turning on me with amazing fierceness, “even cease writing love letters to her? Tell me that, Mr. Vincent Blacker!”

I groaned; for the truth is I had written more warmly to Mabel Harker all that delightful month at “The French Horn” than usual; from the simple fact that, myself feeling happier, I naturally wished Mabel to share, in a sense, in my joy. So what could I do but groan?

“If we hadn’t found out quite by accident you were engaged,” Lucy went on, “should we have ever found it out from you? Were you making any effort of any sort to free yourself? You were acting an untruth to me all that time. How can I tell you are not acting an untruth to me now?”

“I wasn’t in the least acting an untruth when I said I loved you. How can you say such a thing, Lucy dear?”

“You mustn’t call me by my Christian name,” she answered, pale, and setting her lips tight; and then she was silent again.

“You are very hard on me,” I cried, after a pause, “and I hope you will never live to regret it. What could a man do differently, situate so unfortunately as I was?”

“You should have been perfectly honest and frank. At least, you should have made sure you were off with the old love before you tried to be on with the new.”

“But you talk as if these things always lay within our power! I didn’t purposely fall in love with you—I simply couldn’t help myself! And into the other affair I had been more or less entrapped.”

“Yes,” she replied, with some scorn, “and three months hence you will be saying exactly the same thing to the next girl.”

“I shall never speak to any one again,” I answered, solemnly and truly, “as I am speaking now to you. You can believe me or not, as you please, but I can never think of any one as I think of you, and I never have. If you will only think of me kindly, and try to make excuses for me; if you will only consult your own heart a little—”

“I mustn’t allow myself to be turned round by a few soft speeches,” said Lucy, looking almost frightened and rising before I could prevent her. “You have hurt me very much, and I don’t know that my feelings will ever alter, or that I should allow them to.”

“But you will let me see you again?” I humbly entreated.

“I don’t know. Certainly not for some little time.”

“I may write to you?”

“No, certainly not!”

“This is all very poor comfort, Lucy,” I groaned, “after the journey I have taken on purpose to see you and make it all right.”

“What other comfort do you deserve, Mr. Blacker?” she asked me, haughtily, and immediately moved away from the seat towards her young ladies.

“I will come down at Christmas, if I may,” I said, tenderly and humbly; but she never replied, and the next moment was marshalling the girls for walking home.

They walked to the gate in the Bayswater Road in a group, and formed up two and two as they got outside.

Lucy never turned her head once, but nearly every young lady treated herself to a look behind; when they might have seen me plunged down in melancholy on the seat, digging a morose pattern into the Broad Walk with the point of my stick.

I drawled back unhappily across the Gardens and down the empty Row to Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly, and to the club.

Christmas! and this was only October!

Sympathetic readers (and I desire no others) can have no conception what I suffered during the next few days.

CHAPTER VI

EARLY DIFFICULTIES—I FAIL TO PERSUADE THE HONORABLE EDGAR FANSHAWE, THE REVEREND PERCY BLYTH, AND MR. PARKER WHITE, M. P., TO JOIN OUR MONTE CARLO PARTY

Lucy declares I have written enough about her, and now had better get on to the Monte Carlo part—who went with me, and why they went, and so on.

I dare say she’s right; for though we neither of us know anything whatever about writing, she says she represents the average reader, and, having been told (as well as I could do it) something about “The French Horn” and my love-affair there, is, as an average reader, growing anxious to learn how I got the party together for so apparently hazardous, not to say hopeless, an enterprise.

I must just mention, however, that, after my sad interview with her in Kensington Gardens, I at once wrote to Mr. Thatcher and told him exactly what had occurred, informing him of my intention to come down at Christmas and try and settle matters with his daughter. At the same time I begged him to send me up the clothes and portmanteaus I had left behind me at “The French Horn.” They arrived, accompanied by a scrawl from Mr. Thatcher, urging me to be a man and bear up and all would come right, and enclosing a rather larger bill than I fancied I owed, but which I thought it politic to pay without protest of any kind.

Even the old lady, his mother, sent me a line, in a very upright fist, kindly informing me “brighter days were in store.” A simple prophecy, that long has ceased to interest me; since I have invariably had it from the innumerable fortunetellers, by cards and tea-leaves and the crystal, whom for years past I have rather foolishly been in the habit of consulting, but never derived any real benefit from.

As for my great idea to sack Monte Carlo, it came to me one morning (quite unexpectedly, as I have said) when I was lying in bed, trying to summon up resolution to rise for another dull and irksome day. It was still a long time off Christmas, and life was lying on me with extreme heaviness; for, as I think I have explained, I am in the militia, and when once my month’s training is over have nothing to do with myself except live on my eight hundred a year and amuse myself as best I can; and my idleness was rendered further indigestible at this period by the unhappy state of my relations with dear Lucy, whom I could neither see nor write to.

But the idea that I should get a small, resolute party together, and raid the tables at Monte Carlo, brought a new interest into my life; and after making a few quiet and judicious inquiries (for I had never been there), I determined to set about the affair in earnest and see if I could get any one to join me.

My first efforts in that direction, as is generally the case with anything new and startling, were not at all successful; but the more opposition and ridicule I met with, the more obstinate and determined I became. As for the morality of the affair, that, as I have said, has never troubled me from first to last. Does any one think of calling the police immoral when they go and raid a silver gambling-hell in Soho? For the life of me I have never been able to see the difference between us, except that in our case there was needed a greater nerve and address.

Now my sister, Mrs. Rivers, the wife of the publisher, lives in Medworth Square, S. W., and, on considering her intimates, I made up my mind to approach the Honorable Edgar Fanshawe first. He has a brother in the Foreign Office, and relations scattered about everywhere in government employ, so I decided he would be a good man to have with us in case the affair proved a fiasco and we all got into trouble, a chance that naturally had to be provided for.

Fanshawe, I should explain, was at one time in the Guards, but now writes the most dreadfully dull historical novels, which my brother-in-law publishes, and no one that I have ever met reads. Every autumn, sure as fate, among the firm’s list of new books you see announced, Something or Other, a Tale of the Young Pretender; or, Something or Other Else, an Episode of the Reign of Terror; with quotations from the Scots Herald, “this enthralling story”; or, from the Dissenters’ Times, “no more powerful and picturesque romance has at present issued,” etc. Or The Leeds Commercial Gazette would declare it “the best historical novel since Scott,” which I seem to have heard before of many other dull works.

Fanshawe is a purring, mild, genteel, rather elderly person, who listens to everything you are good enough to say most attentively and politely, with his head on one side, and never will be parted from his opera-hat. When I attacked him one night after dinner in Medworth Square he was in his usual autumnal condition of beatitude at the excellence of the reviews of his latest historical composition (which, as usual, scarcely sold), and beamed on me with delighted condescension, stuffing quantities of raisins.

“What shall you be doing in January?” I cautiously began. “Would you be free for a little run over to Monte Carlo?”

Unfortunately, the Honorable Edgar is the sort of person who, half an hour after dinner, will undertake to do anything with anybody, and then write and get out of it immediately after breakfast next morning, when he’s cold; so I quite expected the reply that Monte Carlo in January would suit him exactly, and what hotel did I propose to stay at?

“Now I’ve an idea,” I went on, drawing a little closer. “You’ve been to Monte Carlo, of course, and know what a quantity of money there is in the place.”

“Some of it mine,” smiled Fanshawe. “I beg your pardon for interrupting you.”

“Well,” I said, “how would you like to join a little party of us for the purpose of getting it back?”

“A syndicate to work a system?”

“Nothing so unprofitable.”

“I don’t know of any other way.”

“My idea,” I went on, sinking my voice, “is shortly this: that half a dozen of us should join and take a yacht—a fast steam-yacht—”

“Rather an expensive way of doing it, isn’t it?” objected Fanshawe, in alarm. He doesn’t mind what he pays to have his books published, but is otherwise mean.

“Not when you consider the magnitude of the stakes.”

“Why, the most you can win, even if you break the bank, is only a hundred thousand francs!”

“But consider the number of the tables, to say nothing of the reserve in the vaults, and the money lying about already staked!”

The old boy looked puzzled, but nodded his head politely all the same. “That’s true,” he said, vaguely.

“The place is not in any sense guarded, as no doubt you remember.”

“No, I don’t know that I ever saw a soldier about, except one or two, very bored, on sentry go, up at Monaco. But what has that to do with it?”

“Why, half a dozen resolute men with revolvers could clear the whole place out in five minutes,” I murmured, seductively. “The steam-yacht lies in the harbor, we collect the money, or as much of it as half a dozen of us can carry away, and, once on board the lugger—”

Fanshawe pushed his chair back and stared at me.

“—We go full-steam ahead to one of the Greek islands, divide the swag, scuttle the steamer, make our way to the Piræus, inspect the Acropolis, and come home, viâ Corfu, as Cook’s tourists. Or go to the Holy Land, eh, by way of completely averting suspicion?” And I winked and nudged him, nearly falling over in my effort to get at his frail old ribs.

“My dear friend!” gasped the startled Fanshawe; “why propose such an elaborate pleasantry? It’s like school-boy’s talk in a dormitory.”

“I never felt further from my school-days in my life,” I answered with determination. “The affair is perfectly easy—easier than you think. All it wants is a little resolution, and the money’s ours.”

“But it’s simple robbery.”

“Oh, don’t imagine,” I at once replied, “I propose anything so coarse as burglary and the melting-pot. No; I say to myself, here is the most iniquitous establishment in Europe, simply reeking with gold, of which an enormous surplus remains at the end of the year to be divided, principally among Semitic Parisians, who lavish it on their miserable pleasures. Here, on the other hand, are numerous deserving establishments in London—hospitals and so on—with boards out, closing their wards and imploring subscriptions. The flow of gold has evidently got into the wrong channels, as it always will if not sharply looked after. Be ours the glorious enterprise to divert it anew—”

“My good friend,” interrupted Fanshawe, “if I thought you serious—”

“Never was more serious in my life!”

“But, gracious me, suppose you’re all caught?”

“Oh, there is a prison up at Monaco, I believe,” I answered, lightly; “but they tell me prisoners come and go just as they please. That doesn’t in the least alarm me. Besides, Europe would be on our side—at all events, the respectable portion of it—and would hail our coup with rapture, even if it ended in failure. And with your brother in the Foreign Office, they’d soon have you back. Now what do you say? Will you make one?”

“My dear Blacker, you really must be crazy!”

“At a given signal, when the rooms are fullest, some of us—two would be enough—drive the gamblers into a corner and make them hold up their hands. The others loot the tables and the vaults. Then we turn out the electric light—”

“Any more wine, Fanshawe?” called out my brother-in-law.

Fanshawe rose, and I saw at once by the limp way he pulled his waistcoat down he was no good.

“Well,” I said, as I followed him into the drawing-room, “if you won’t join us, you must give me your word not to breathe a syllable of what we are going to do. It’s an immense idea, and I don’t want any one to get hold of it first, and find the place gutted by some one else before we can get a look in.”

Fanshawe’s only reply was that if I got into trouble he would thank me not to apply to him to bail me out; so we mutually promised.

I don’t know that, on the whole, I very much regretted him; he is, after all, a very muddle-headed, nervous old creature; but my hopes were for a time a good deal dashed by the refusal of the Reverend Percy Blyth to join us (much as he approved of the scheme), though I did my best to tempt him with the offer of new stops for his organ out of the boodle. He is the clergyman of St. Blaise’s, Medworth Square, and intimate with all the theatrical set, for whom he holds services at all sorts of odd hours; the natural result of which is he is on the free list of nearly every theatre, and has given me many a box.

Now every school-boy knows how priceless the presence of a parson is to all human undertakings—on a race-course, for instance, for thimble-rigging, the three-card trick, and other devices. They call him the bonnet, and if you have any trifling dispute about there being no pea, or the corner of the card being turned down, you are likely to be very much astonished to find the clergyman (who, of course, is only a cove dressed up) take the proprietor’s part and, at a pinch, offer to fight you, or any other dissatisfied bystander.

So I naturally thought it would be a good thing for us if we had a real parson in the party, if only as a most superior bonnet, to avert suspicion; though, if I had only thought a little, I might have known the idea wouldn’t work, since Blyth couldn’t very well have gone into the Casino rooms in parson’s rig, and I didn’t really want him for anything else.

There was only one other of my sister’s friends I approached on the subject before I had recourse to my own—Parker White, a bouncing sort of young man who had just got into the House of Commons, and who, I thought, might possibly be useful. But, as I cautiously felt my way with him, he looked so frightened, and talked such balderdash about his position and filibustering and European complications (complications with Monaco, if you please, with an army of seventy men!) that I pretended it was all a joke and turned the conversation.

To tell the truth, I was not much disappointed in Parker White, since I know very well how most of those younger men in the House are all gas and no performance; but, all the same, he was pretty cunning; for, to put it vulgarly, he lay low and waited, and when talk began to get about of what we had done, and the Casino Company’s shares fell immediately in consequence of our success, he bought them up like ripe cherries; and then, when it was all contradicted by a subsidized press (which made me wild and drove me to writing this work in self-defence), and the shares jumped up again, he promptly sold and made a good thing out of it.

But he has never had the grace to thank me for putting the opportunity in his way; which is so like those men in the House who speculate on their information on the sly and then blush to find it fame.

CHAPTER VII

I INTERVIEW MR. BRENTIN—HIS SYMPATHY AND INTEREST—SIR ANTHONY HIPKINS AND THE YACHT AMARANTH—WE DETERMINE TO LOOK OVER IT

I soon began to see that, out of so conventional an atmosphere as Medworth Square, I was not likely to gather any great profit to my scheme; that, if my idea were ever to bear fruit, I must set to work among my own particular friends in my own way.

On thinking them over, I determined to approach Mr. Julius C. Brentin first, an American gentleman whom I knew to be above prejudice, and to whom I could talk with perfect freedom and security.

He is a man of about fifty-five, a Californian, of medium height (which, like many Americans, he always pronounces heighth), with black hair, black eyebrows, and a small black mustache. He carries cigars loose in every pocket, and he will drink whiskey with you with great good-humor till the subject of the immortality of the soul crops up, when he suddenly becomes angry, suspicious, and, finally, totally silent. And that subject he always introduces himself, though for what reason I never can conceive, unless it be to quarrel and part. I had met him in the street a day or two before, when he told me he had recently married a New York young lady and was staying at the “Victoria”; he begged me to come and call, and on going there I found him chewing a green cigar in the smoking-room, his hat on the bridge of his pugnacious nose, and a glass of Bourbon whiskey beside him.

He reached me out a hand from the depths of his breeches pocket, as though he had just found it there and desired to make me a present of it, and pulled me down by his side. Then he gave me a long, black cigar out of his waistcoat pocket, worked his own round to the farther corner of his mouth, while with a solemn gesture he pointed to his trousers, carefully turned up over small patent-leather boots.

“Mr. Blacker,” he said, “observe my pants. I am endeavoring to please Mrs. Brentin; I am striving to be English. You English invariably turn up the bottom of your pants; it is economical and it is fashionable, don’t yer know.” And Mr. Brentin winked at me a glittering, beady black eye.

I hoped Mrs. Brentin was quite well, and he replied:

“Mrs. Brentin has gone way off to Holborn, sir; she has organized an expedition with Mrs. William Chivers, ay socially prominent Philadelphian, in search of the scene of the labors of your Mrs. Gamp. From there she goes to the Marshalsea, to discover traces of Little Dorrit. She knows your Charles Dickens by heart, sir, and she follows him ayround. This is her first visit to the old country, and I humor her tastes, which are literary and high-toned, by staying at home and practising the English accent. I have studied the English accent theoretically, and I trace it to the predominance among your people of the waist muscles. We as a nation are deficient in waist muscles. So I stay at home and exercise them in the refined society of any stranger who can be indooced to talk with me. It is a labor of some difficulty, Mr. Blacker, which is gradually driving me to drink; for the strangers in this hotel are shy, and apt to regard me in the unflattering light of ay bunco-steerer.”

Mr. Brentin sighed, drank, and worked his jaw and cigar with the solemnity of a cow masticating.

“At other times, sir,” he drawled, “I stroll a block or two, way down the Strand. I compose my features and endeavor to assoom the vacant expression of ay hayseed or countryman. I have long desired to be approached by one of your confidence-trick desperadoes, but my success so far has been mighty small. They keep away from me, sir, as though I had the grippe. I apprehend, Mr. Blacker, that in my well-meant efforts to look imbecyle, I only look cunning. If they would only try me with the green-goods swindle, I should feel my time was not being altogether misspent. It is plaguy disheartening, and I might as well be back in Noo York for all the splurge I am making over here. And how have you been putting in your time, sir, since last year, when we went down to the Durby—I should say, the Darby—together?” he asked, turning his head my way.

On any other day, I have no doubt, I should have given Mr. Brentin a spirited and somewhat lengthy sketch of my doings during the last year and a half; but my recent failures in Medworth Square had taught me the value of time, and I plunged at once into the real object of my visit.

Directly, in rapid, clear-cut outline, I began to make my scheme clear, Mr. Brentin turned and looked at me; from the rigid lines of my speaking countenance he saw at once I was in earnest, and transferred his gaze to his pants and boots. Once only he gave me another rapid look, an ocular upper-cut, apparently to satisfy himself of my sincerity, when my mask spoke so strongly of enthusiasm and determination I felt I had completely reassured him, and was, in fact, gradually overhauling his will. As I went on, he began to breathe gustily through his nose and give a series of small kicks with his varnished toe, indications of growing ardor for the enterprise and a desire to immediately set about it that simply enchanted me.

When I descended to details, it was my turn to watch him. The cigar he was chewing was a complete indicator of his frame of mind. As I spoke of half a dozen resolute men with revolvers, it rose to the horizontal; when I mentioned the steam-yacht and a bolt for the harbor, it drooped like a trailed stick; while, as I sketched our rapid flight to the Greek Archipelago and division of the spoil, it stuck up like a peacock’s tail, a true standard of revolt against the narrowness and timidity of our modern life.

The American mind works so quickly I was not at all surprised when Mr. Brentin suddenly sat up, took the cigar out of his mouth, and hurled it to the other end of the smoking-room.

Bravo! for I knew it signified away with prejudice, away with conventionality, away, above all, with fear! It was a silent, triumphant “Jacta est alea, Rubicon transibimus!”

Then he turned to me.

“Mr. Blacker,” he excitedly whispered, “by the particular disposition of Providence there is a party now lying up-stairs, ay titled gentleman with an enlarged liver, the fruit of some years spent in your colonial service, who owns and desires to part with one, at all events, of the instruments of this enterprise of ours.”

“The yacht?”

“The steam-yacht, sir. It is called the Amaranth, and lies at this moment at Ryde.”

“What is the owner’s name?”

“He was good enough to introdooce himself to me one afternoon last week in the parlor as Sir Anthony Hipkins.”

“Hipkins? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Sir,” replied Mr. Brentin, “I know very little of your titled aristocracy, but I admit it did not sound right to me. However, I talked it over with my friend, the clerk in the bureau, and he assured me that Hipkins is his real name; that he has been for some years judge on the Gold Coast, and, by the personal favor of your Queen Victoria, has been lately elevated to the dignity of knighthood, as some compensation for his complaint caught in the service. He had the next room to us, but the midnight groaning-act in which he occasionally indulged was too much for Mrs. Brentin, and we were forced to shift.”

“Has he spoken to you about his yacht?”

“He introdooced himself right here in the parlor, and offered it me for three thousand pounds.”

“What did you say?”

“I presented him to Mrs. Brentin right away, as I invariably do when I want an inconvenient request refused. She explained that ay steam-yacht was very little use to her in the journeys she is at present taking about this city in search of the localities of Charles Dickens. Whereupon Judge Hipkins, who impressed me as being brainy, immediately replied, ‘What about Yarmouth and little Em’ly’ ”

“What did Mrs. Brentin say to that?”

“Why, sir, Mrs. Brentin thought three thousand pounds too much to pay for the privilege of approaching Yarmouth by sea; more especially as she is a bad sailor, and commences to be sick at her stomach before leaving the kay-side. Now, however, Mr. Blacker,” he said, rising, “we will, if you please, go and find Sir Anthony Hipkins, and we will buy his steam-yacht.”

The rapidity of the American mind somewhat alarmed me; still, I felt there was nothing for it but to follow Mr. Brentin. He went straight to the bureau, and, on inquiring for Sir Anthony, learned he was up-stairs ill in bed, and that his wife was with him.

As we went up in the lift, Mr. Brentin winked at me. “It is in our favor, sir, that the judge is sick; we will be sympathetic, but we will not offer more than two thousand five hundred pounds.”

We found No. 246, and Mr. Brentin knocked. A deep groaning voice called to us to come in.

“The judge must be real bad if he has sent for his wife,” observed Mr. Brentin. “On reflection, we will try him with two thousand. Come right alawng in, sir, and I will present you.”

I followed him into the bedroom, and there we found Sir Anthony lying, propped up in bed. He was a long, gaunt man, with a grizzling beard, a hook-nose, like a tulwar, and a quantity of rough, brown hair turning gray. By his side was sitting a small, dry, prim old lady, reading from a book, with gold pince-nez, and notwithstanding our entrance she went steadily on.

“Stop that now, Nanny,” Sir Anthony called, fretfully, stretching his hand out of the bed over the page, “and let us hear what these men want.”

“Sir Anthony and Lady Hipkins,” said Mr. Brentin, politely, with a bow to each, his hat in his hand, “permit me to present to you my young friend, Mr. Vincent Blacker. He is in want of a yacht, and though he has his eye on several, would be glad to learn particulars of yours before concluding.”

Sir Anthony rolled his bony head on the pillow and groaned. Directly he withdrew his hand from the page the dry old lady went on with her reading in a curious, dull, flat voice. Mr. Brentin came to the foot of the bed, and, leaning his arms on the brass rail, surveyed him sympathetically.

“Are you too sick, judge,” he asked, “to discuss business matters with us?”

“And in the eleventh year of Joram, the son of Ahab—” droned her ladyship.

“Go away, Nanny,” shouted Sir Anthony, pointing to the opposite door; “go into the next room, or go out and take a walk.”

Mr. Brentin opened the door, and, after putting the Bible on the bed under Sir Anthony’s big nose, Lady Hipkins left the room quietly, as she was directed.

“You’re Mr. Brentin, ain’t you?” asked the judge. “Beg your pardon for not recognizing you. What did you say your friend’s name was?”

Mr. Brentin explained that I was Mr. Vincent Blacker, a gentleman of position and the highest integrity, an officer in Queen Victoria’s militia.

“Oh, ah!” said the judge, sitting up in bed and scratching his legs ruefully. “And he wants to buy a yacht?”

“He has almost concluded for the purchase of one,” Mr. Brentin replied, “but I have suggested he should wait—”

The judge began most unexpectedly to laugh, bending his head between his knees and stifling his merriment with the counterpane.

“The judge is better,” observed Mr. Brentin, with a wave of his hand. “The presence of gentlemen who sympathize with his complaint, and the likelihood of completing—”

“It’s too damn ridiculous,” laughed the judge, “to be caught shamming Abraham like this, by George! Serves me right. You see, Mr. Blacker, after three years of the Gold Coast I was naturally anxious to see whether London had greatly altered in my absence, and, consequently, neglected to go and reside at Norwood with her ladyship. Whereupon her ladyship wrote, demanding the reason of my lengthy stay in the metropolis. What was I to do but say I was too ill to move, but that the minute I was well enough—” Sir Anthony went off laughing again, and I laughed too.

“But that midnight groaning-act of yours, judge,” asked the shocked Brentin, “which so much disturbed and alarmed Mrs. Brentin and myself?”

“Oh, that was genuine enough,” chuckled Sir Anthony; “but it was more the thought of having to go to Norwood and attend the concerts at the Crystal Palace than any actual physical pain.”

Mr. Brentin’s visage clouded over, and he grew sombre and grave. With true American chivalry, he could not bear the idea of any one imposing on a woman, especially an old and plain one.

“However,” said the judge, “I’m rightly punished by her ladyship’s descending on me and forcing me to go to bed—not to mention the Book of Kings, and all my smoke cut off.”

“This will be ay lesson to you, judge, I trust,” observed Mr. Brentin, sternly.

“First and second lesson, by George! And now let’s talk about the yacht. Your friend wants to buy a yacht?”

I must say I was a good deal alarmed at Brentin’s coolness and precipitancy in so readily bringing me forward as purchaser of the Amaranth, and, as I listened to their conversation, quite made up my mind not to bind myself irrevocably to anything. Three, or even two, thousand pounds! My idea was doubtless a remarkable one, but I had no notion of backing it to that amount—at all events, with my own money. So, with an air of sham gravity, I listened, assuming as solid an air of wealth as I could on so short a notice, determined at the last moment to make the necessary fatal objections, which would finally effectually prevent my being saddled with the thing.

The judge explained that the yacht had only just been left him by an uncle who had died very suddenly in the “Albany”; that it was in complete order, ready victualled and manned; that it had usually been sent round to the Riviera, and joined there overland by his uncle, who spent the winter months on board till the advent of spring enabled him to return to London; that there it was lying at Ryde, awaiting his orders, and that he had accidentally heard that Captain Evans, in default of instructions, was actually employing it for excursions on his own behalf, and taking the Ryde people for trips in the Solent and runs over to Bournemouth at so much a head when the weather was favorable; which would all have to be accounted for, added the judge, of course. It was a large yacht, of about four hundred tons, and, rather than be bothered with it, the judge would let it go for three thousand pounds.

“Why don’t you go down and see it,” he asked, “before you decide? And, if I were you, I wouldn’t let Evans know you are coming; if it’s a fine day, you are sure to catch him at some of his little games, and that’ll give you a hold over him.”

“Three thousand pounds is ay large sum of money, judge,” objected Mr. Brentin.

“Not bad; but then it’s a large yacht. Now look here, don’t you haggle with me,” he went on, irritably, “because I don’t like it. You can either take it or leave it. I won’t let it go for a penny less. Rather than that, I’ll go and live on board and spend my time crossing between Portsmouth and the island. I should be safe from her ladyship, at any rate, for even coming up in the lift upsets her.”

We shook his hand and left him composing himself to receive Lady Hipkins again. She was walking up and down the corridor as we came out, and Mr. Brentin went up to her and bowed.

“The judge is real bad, ma’am,” he said, with great gravity, “and should not be left. He has been explaining to us what a comfort you and your reading are to him, and how much he looks forward to being taken down to Norwood and nursed back to his former robust health at your hands. If I may venture to advise, you should procure a hotel conveyance as soon as possible and drive him way down home by easy stages. The air in this city, ma’am, is not good for ay man of the judge’s temperament and physique.”

“You have a kind face,” her ladyship answered, in her strange, flat voice, “and mean kindly, I am sure. But I am extremely deaf, and have not heard one word you have said. Perhaps you would kindly write it down for me?” she added, handing him a little book.

“It’s of no consequence,” bawled Mr. Brentin through his hands. “Good-afternoon!”

“Why doesn’t the old shakes carry a trumpet” he said, angrily, as we went down-stairs. “What’s the matter with a trumpet?”

In the hall, before leaving him, I hastened to explain I had no thought of expending three thousand pounds in the purchase of Sir Anthony’s or any yacht whatsoever; that my contribution to the expedition would be the idea, and so many of the resolute men as I could lay hands on among my friends.

“That will be all right, Mr. Blacker,” Brentin loftily replied; “I will see after the yacht portion of the affair. It can be made good to me, if I run short, out of the boodle, and, if it all fails, I have no doubt I shall have my money value in excitement. In the meantime, sir, let us waltz in and secure the yacht, to begin with. If you will be free in the morning, we will descend upon Ryde and Captain Evans. If we find him going to sea, so much the better; we shall have the opportunity of testing the sailing capacities of the Amaranth. Good-day to you, sir. I have to thank you for infusing my exhossted veins with a breath of the true spirit of the forty-niners, who made the State of California what she is. The holding up of ay Sacramento bank will be nothing to this, sir, if we don’t spile—that is, spoil—it.”

CHAPTER VIII

WE GO TO RYDE—THE AMARANTH—ACCIDENTAL MEETING WITH ARTHUR MASTERS AND HIS LADY FRIEND—I ENROLL HIM AMONG US PROVISIONALLY—WE DECIDE TO PURCHASE THE YACHT

I don’t know that it would be altogether necessary to the course of the narrative of this work to say much about our visit to Ryde and the Amaranth were it not that, while there, we accidentally encountered Arthur Masters, an old friend and school-fellow of mine. He was staying at Seaview, and, being in a mazed condition of lovelornness (for nothing short of it would have induced him to neglect the harriers of which he is master in Hertfordshire), had come over for the day with the young lady, and was spending it there mainly on the pier, being uncommonly warm and fine for November.

Mr. Brentin and I had just arrived, and were keeping our weather-eye open for the Amaranth, when we came on Arthur and his young lady sitting on the pier in the sun. She was introduced to us as Miss Rybot, and wore a straw-hat and a shirt, just as though it were summer.

We told them we had come down about a yacht, and, if we could only find her, were thinking of making a small trial-trip across the Solent.

As we were talking and persuading them to accompany us, up comes a sailor in a blue jersey, with Amaranth across it in red, and hands us a printed bill.

“The Amaranth, fast steam-yacht (Captain Evans, Commander), will sail daily from Hyde pier-head (weather permitting) for a two hours’ trip in the Solent. Fares: Saloon, half a crown; fore cabin, one shilling.”

“Doing much business?” asked Mr. Brentin carelessly, cocking his eye on the man.

“Pretty fair, mister,” the sailor replied, “when the weather’s like this. There’s a good few aboard already.”

“Is there?” Mr. Brentin innocently remarked. “All right. Give Captain Evans Sir Anthony Hipkins’s compliments and say we will come aboard right away.”

“Sir Anthony! Lord love you!” ejaculated the sailor, and was off pretty fast down to the pier-head.

“We will give the captain a few minutes to clear out his Ryde friends,” observed Mr. Brentin with a wink, “and then we will pro-ceed.”

And, sure enough, as we got leisurely down to the pier-head there we found a boat just landing from the Amaranth, half a dozen excursionists in her with hand-bags and bottles, talking fast among themselves and giving frightened glances back at the yacht lying in the tideway two or three hundred yards off.

“Anything wrong on board, my friend?” drawled Mr. Brentin to a large, puce-faced man with a red comforter loosely knotted round his throat, as he clambered up the pier steps.

“Anythin’ wrong?” echoed the terrified man. “Captain says rust ’as suddenly got into the b’ilers and ’e’s afraid they’ll bust. That’s all!—Mother, where’s Emma?”

“We shall have the ship to ourselves,” remarked Mr. Brentin. “Music provided, too. Sakes alive!”