The Sack of Monte Carlo 7

The Sack of Monte Carlo 7

“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.”