The Sack of Monte Carlo 16

The Sack of Monte Carlo 16

A few minutes later, remembering I had left my book on the table where I

had been writing to Lucy, I went down-stairs again to fetch it. Mrs.

Wingham was still there, sitting at the table writing a letter. The

envelope, already written, was lying close by my book, and I couldn’t

help reading it.

 

It was positively addressed to “Jas. B. Thompson, Esq., 3 Aldrich Road

Villas, Brixton Rise, S. E. London.”

 

I felt so faint I could scarcely get out of the room again and up the

stairs.

 

But such is our insane confidence, where we ourselves and our own doings

are concerned—such, at any rate, was mine in my lucky star—that I

really felt no difficulty in persuading myself the whole thing was

merely a coincidence, and that the writing of the letter had nothing

whatever to do with either my or Teddy Parsons’s divulgations; more

especially as the Bailey, on which Thompson evidently piqued himself,

was omitted.

 

And I determined to say nothing about it to Brentin, partly because I

didn’t care about being blackguarded by an American, and partly because

I felt convinced it was all an accident, and nothing would come of it.

Nor, in my generosity, did I do more to Teddy Parsons than temperately

point out the folly he had been guilty of, and beg him to be more

careful in future, which he very cheerfully promised, and for which

magnanimity of mine he was, as I meant he should be, really uncommonly

grateful.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XIV

 

ARRIVAL OF THE _AMARANTH_—ALL WELL ON BOARD—THEIR FIRST

EXPERIENCE OF THE ROOMS

 

 

THE next afternoon, soon after four, the _Amaranth_ arrived in harbor.

 

Bob Hines was gambling, as usual, but Brentin, Teddy, and I went down to

the Condamine to meet them. Teddy and Brentin had had their row out in

the morning, to which I had listened in silence—with the indulgent air

of a man who doesn’t want to add to the unpleasantness—and now were

pretty good friends again. It was clearly understood, however, that no

new acquaintances were to be made, male or female, and that henceforth

any one of us seen talking to a stranger was immediately to be sent

home.

 

I fear the party from the _Amaranth_ did not have a very good impression

of Monte Carlo to begin with, for they landed in the Condamine, just

where the town drain-pipes lie, and came ashore, each of them, with a

handkerchief to the nose.

 

“So this is the Riviera!” snuffled my good sister. “I understood it was

embosomed in flowers.”

 

They all looked very brown and well, and seemed in high spirits.

 

As for the yacht, she had behaved splendidly all through, and the

conduct and polite attentions of Captain Evans and the crew had been

above all praise. The only difficulty had been to explain away the shell

and the three cannon; for which Forsyth had found the ingenious excuse

that they were wanted for the Riff pirates, in case we determined to

voyage along the African coast, where they are said to abound and will

sometimes attack a yacht.

 

We all strolled up the hill together, and, such were their spirits,

nothing would content the new arrivals but an immediate visit to the

rooms. Miss Rybot, especially, was as cheerful as a blackbird in April;

she had come there to gamble, she said, and gamble she would at once.

She and Masters were evidently on the best of terms, and even the

captious Brentin was pleased with what people who write books call her

“infectious gayety.”

 

“You have your own little schemes,” she cried, “and I have mine. I am

going to win fifty pounds to pay my debts with, and then I am going

home, whether you have finished or not. And if I haven’t finished, you

will all have to leave me here.”

 

They were soon provided with their pink admission-cards (ours had that

morning, after the usual pretended scrutiny and demur, been exchanged

for white monthly ones), and, after leaving their cloaks, passed through

the swing-doors into the rooms.

 

It was just that impressive hour—the only one, I think, at Monte

Carlo—when the Casino footmen, in their ill-fitting liveries, zigzagged

with faded braid, bring in the yellow oil-lamps with hanging green

shades, and sling them from the long brass chains over the tables. The

rest of the rooms lie in twilight, before the electric light is turned

up. Dim figures sweep noiselessly as spectres over the dull-shining

parquet floor, and, like a spear, I have seen the last long ray of

southern sunshine strike in and touch the ghastly hollow cheek of some

old woman fingering her coins, lifeless and mechanical as Charon

fingering his passage-money for the dead; but, just over the tables, the

yellow light from the lamp falls brilliant, yet softly, brightly

illuminating the gamblers’ hands and some few of their faces, throwing

the white numbers on the rich green cloth as strongly into relief as

though newly sewn on there of tape.

 

“_Faites votre jeu, messieurs!_” croaks the croupier, in his dry,

toneless voice.

 

With deft fingers he spins the active, rattling little ball.

 

“_Le jeu est fait!_”

 

The white ball begins to tire, drops out of its circuit.

 

“_Rien ne va plus!_”

 

A few seconds of leaping indecision and restlessness, before the ball

falls finally into a number and remains there, while the board still

spins.

 

“_Trente-six!—Rouge, pair et manque!_”

 

The croupiers’ rakes are busy, pulling in the money lost; the money won

is thrown with dull, heavy thuds and clinks on to the table. In a few

moments it is begun all over again.

 

“_Faites votre jeu, messieurs!_”

 

“So this is Monte Carlo!” whispered my sister, in the proper, hushed

tones, as though asking me for something to put in the collection. “My

one objection is, no one looks in the least haggard or anxious. I

understood I should see such terrible faces, and they all look as bored

as people at an ordinary London dinner-party. Take me round.”

 

Brentin came with us, and we visited each of the busy roulette-tables in

turn. Monte Carlo was very full, and round some of the tables the crowd

was so deep it was impossible to get near enough to look, much less to

play. But between the tables there were large vacant spaces of

dull-shining, greasy parquet; the tables looked like populous places on

the map, and the flooring like open country. Here and there stood the

footmen, straight out of an old Adelphi melodrama; some of them carried

trays and glasses of water, and some gave you cards to mark the winning

numbers and the colors.

 

“It is not quite so splendid and gay as I imagined,” my sister observed.

“In fact, it’s all rather dim and dingy. Do you know it reminds me of

the Pavilion at Brighton more than anything else. And how common some of

the people are! Isn’t that your friend, Mr. Hines?”

 

Bob Hines was sitting in rather a melancholy heap, with a pile of

five-franc pieces in front of him, and a card on which he was morosely

writing the numbers as they came up.

 

“Let’s ask him how he’s doing?”

 

“Never speak to a gambler,” I whispered; “it’s considered unlucky.”

 

“Judging from his __EXPRESSION__, he will be glad to get something back in

your raid! And why seat himself between those two terrible old women?”

 

“They look,” Brentin murmured, “like representations of friend Zola’s

the fat and the lean. Sakes alive! they’d make the fortune of a dime

museum. Those women are freaks, ma’am, freaks.”

 

Hines was sitting between two ladies; one, with a petulant face of old

childishness, was enormously stout. Her eyebrows were densely blackened,

her pendulous cheeks as dusty with powder as the Mentone road. She was

gorgeously overdressed; her broad bosom, fluid as of arrested molten

tallow, was hung with colored jewels, like a _bambino_. With huge gloved

hands and arms she was wielding a rake, whereof poor Bob had

occasionally the end in his face. Beside her, on the green cloth, lay a

withered bunch of roses, dead of her large, cruel grasp. At her back

stood her husband, a German Jew financier, who couldn’t keep his

pince-nez on. Continually he smoothed his thin hair and tried to get her

away, grumbling and moving from leg to leg; for hours he would stand

behind her chair, supplying her with money, for she nearly always lost.

Occasionally she grabbed other people’s stakes, or they grabbed hers.

Then she was sublime in her horrible ill-humor; half rising, with her

great arms resting on the table, she shouted at the croupiers to be

paid, in harsh, rattling, fish-fag tones. The sunken corners of her

small mouth were drawn upward; the deep-set eyes worked in dull fury;

you saw short, white teeth that once had smiled in a pretty Watteau

face. Now the body was old and torpid and swollen; but the rabbit

intelligence was still undeveloped, except in the direction of its

rapacity.

 

Poor Bob Hines! He was indeed badly placed! On his other side sat a

lath-and-plaster widow in the extensive mourning of a Jay’s

advertisement. Her face was yellow and damaged as a broken old fresco at

Florence; thin, oblong, brittle, only the semi-circular, blackened

eyebrows seemed alive. The dyed, pallid hair looked dead as a Lowther

Arcade doll’s; dead were her teeth, her long, thin, griffin hands with

curved nails. Decomposition, even by an emotion, was somehow palpably

arrested; perhaps she was frozen by the bitter chill of fatal zero.

Horrible, old, crape-swathed mummy, one would have said she had lost

even her husband at play. Who could ever have been found to love her? At

whom had she ever smiled? at what had she ever laughed or wept? Bride of

Frankenstein’s monster, she worked her muck-rake with the small, dry,

galvanized gestures of an Edison invention. Poor Bob Hines! It sickened

me to think these women, and others perhaps worse, were of the same

sisterhood with Lucy. What a day when we should sweep them all out

before us, as the fresh autumn wind sweeps the withered leaves across

the walks of Kensington Gardens! “So this is Monte Carlo!” murmured my sister again. “It stifles me! Take me out to the Café de Paris and give me some tea.”