The Sack of Monte Carlo 2

The Sack of Monte Carlo 2

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.