Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 2

“And what may be this knowledge of which you are so proud?” said she, coldly.

“Oh, as to that,” said he, in some confusion at the tone she had assumed, “it concerns many a thing you never heard of. The turf, and the men that live by it, make a little world of their own; they don’t bother their heads about parties or politics, – don’t care a farthing who ‘s ‘in’ or who ‘s ‘out.’ They keep their wits – and pretty sharp wits they are – for what goes on in Scott’s stable, and how Holt stands for the St. Léger. They ‘d rather hear how Velocipede eat his corn, than hear all the Cabinet secrets of Europe; and for that matter, so would I.”

“I do not blame you for not caring for State secrets, – it is very possible they would interest you little; but surely you might imagine some more fitting career than what, after all, is a mere trading on the weakness of others. To make of an amusement a matter of profit is, in my eyes, mean; it is contemptible.”

“That’s not the way to look on it at all. The first men in England have race-horses.”

“And precisely in the fact of their great wealth do they soar above all the ignoble associations the turf obliges to those who live by it.”

“Well, I ‘ll give it up; there’s my word on’t I ‘ll never put my foot in Tattersall’s yard again. I ‘ll take my name off the Turf Club, – is that enough?”

She could not help smiling at the honest zeal of this sacrifice; but the smile had none of the scorn her features displayed before.

“Oh, Lizzy!” cried he, enthusiastically, “if I was sure we could just live on here as we are doing, – never leave this little valley, nor see more of the world than we do daily, – I’d not exchange the life for a duke’s fortune – ”

“And Holt’s stable,” added she, laughing. “Come, you must not omit the real bribe.”

He laughed heartily at this sally, and owned it was the grand temptation.

“You are certainly very good-tempered, Annesley,” said she, after a pause.

“I don’t think I am,” said he, half piqued, for he thought the remark contained a sort of disparagement of that sharpness on which he chiefly prided himself. “I am very hot at times.”

“I meant that you bore with great good-humor from me what you might, if so disposed, have fairly enough resented as an impertinence. What do I, what could I, know of that play-world of which you spoke? How gentlemen and men of fashion regard these things must needs be mysteries to me; I only wished to imply that you might make some better use of your faculties, and that knowledge of life you possess, than in conning over a betting-book or the ‘Racing Calendar.’”

“So I mean to do. That’s exactly what I ‘m planning.”

“Here’s the soup cooling and the sherry getting hot,” cried Grog, as he shouted from the window of the little inn, and waved his napkin to attract their notice.

“There’s papa making a signal to us,” said Lizzy; “did you suspect it was so late?”

“Seven o’clock, by Jove!” cried Beecher, as he gave her his hand to cross the stepping-stones. “What a fuss he ‘ll make about our keeping the dinner back!”

“I have eaten all the caviare and the pickles, and nearly finished a bottle of Madeira, waiting for you,” said Grog; “so, no dressing, but come in at once.”

“Oh, dearest Lizzy!” cried Beecher, as they gained the porch, “just one word, – only one word, – to make me the happiest fellow in the world or the most miserable.” But Lizzy sprang up the stairs, and was in her room almost ere his words were uttered.

“If I had bad but another moment,” muttered Beecher to himself, “just one moment more, I’d have shown her that I meant to turn over a new leaf, – that I was n’t going to lead the life I have done. I ‘d have told her – though, I suppose, old Grog would murder me if he knew it – of our grand martingale, and how we mean to smash the bank at Baden. No deception about that, – no ‘cross’ there. She can’t bring up grooms and jockeys and stable-helpers against me now. It will all be done amongst ourselves, – a family party, and no mistake!”

All things considered, Annesley Beecher, it was just as well for you that you had not that “one moment” you wished for.

CHAPTER XXIV. A DEAD HEAT

Some eight or ten days have elapsed since the scene we have Just recorded, – not one of whose incidents are we about to relate, – and we are still at Holbach. As happens so frequently in the working of a mathematical question, proofs are assumed without going over the demonstrations; so, in real life, – certain postulates being granted, – we arrive at conclusions which we regard as inevitable.

We are at Holbach, but no longer strolling along its leaf-strewn alleys, or watching the laughing eddies of its circling river, – we are within doors. The scene is a small, most comfortably furnished chamber of the little inn, where an ample supper is laid out on a sideboard, a card-table occupying the centre of the room, at which two players are seated, their somewhat “charged” expressions and disordered dress indicating a prolonged combat, – a fact in part corroborated by the streak of pinkish dawn that has pierced between the shutters, and now blends with the sickly glare of the candles. Several packs of cards litter the floor around them, thrown there in that superstitious passion only gamblers understand, and a decanter and some glasses stand on the table beside the players, who are no others than our acquaintances Grog Davis and Paul Classon.

There is a vulgar but not unwise adage that tells us “dogs do not eat dogs,” and the maxim has a peculiar application to gamblers. All sorts and manners of men love to measure their strength with each other, – swordsmen, swimmers, pedestrians, even hard drinking used to have its duels of rivalry, – gamblers never. Such an employment of their skill would seem to their eyes about as absurd as that of a sportsman who would turn his barrel against his companion instead of the cock-pheasant before him. Their “game” is of another order. How, then, explain the curious fact we have mentioned? There are rivalries that last life-long; there are duels that go on from year to year of existence, and even to the last leave the question of superiority undetermined. The game of piquet formed such between these two men. At every chance meeting in life, – no matter how long the interval or how brief the passage might be, – they recurred to the old-vexed question, which fortune seemed to find a pleasure in never deciding definitively. The fact that each had his own separate theory of the game, would have given an interest to the encounter; but besides there was now another circumstance whose import neither were likely to undervalue. Davis had just paid over to Paul Classon the sum of two hundred napoleons, – the price of a secret service he was about to perform, – and the sight of that glowing heap of fresh gold – for there it lay on the corner of the table – had so stimulated the acquisitiveness of Grog’s nature that he could not resist the temptation to try and regain them. The certainty that when he should have won them it would only be to restore them to the loser, for whose expenses on a long Journey they were destined, detracted nothing from this desire on his part A more unprofitable debtor than Holy Paul could not be imagined. His very name in a schedule would reflect discredit on the bankruptcy! But there lay the shining pieces, fresh from the mint and glittering, and the appeal they made was to an instinct, not to reason. Was it with the knowledge of this fact that Paul had left them there instead of putting them up in his pocket? Had he calculated in his own subtle brain that temptations are least resistible when they are most tangible? There was that in his reverence’s look which seemed to say as much, and the thoughtless wantonness of his action as his fingers fiddled with the gold may not have been entirely without a purpose. They had talked together, and discussed some knotty matters of business, having concluded which, Davis proposed cards.

“Our old combat, I suppose?” said Paul, laughing. “Well, I ‘m always ready.”

And down they sat, hour after hour finding them still in the same hard straggle, fortune swinging with its pendulous stroke from side to side, as though to elicit the workings of hope and fear in each alternately. Meanwhile they drank freely, and from time to time arose to eat at the side-table in that hurried and greedy way that only gamblers eat, as though vexed at the hanger that called them from their game. They were both too great proficients in play to require that absorption of faculties inferior gamblers need. They could, and did, talk of everything that came uppermost, the terms of the game dropping through the conversation like the measured booming of great guns amid the clattering crash of musketry. Luck for some time had favored Holy Paul; and while he became blander, softer, and more benign of look, Grog grew fierce, his eyes fiery, and his words sharp and abrupt. Classon’s polished courtesy chafed and irritated him, but he seemed determined to control his anger as far as he might, and not give his adversary the transient advantage of temper. Had spectators been admitted to the lists, the backers would have most probably taken the Churchman. His calm countenance, his mild, unexcited eye, his voice so composed and gentle, must have made Paul the favorite.

“We shall scarcely have time for another game, Kit,” – he’d have called him Grog, but that he was losing, – “I perceive the day is beginning to break.”

“So am I, for the matter of that,” said Davis, with a bitter laugh. “You have won – let me see – forty-six, and twenty-seven, and a hundred and twelve, – that was a ‘thumper,’ – and thirty-four, besides that loose cash there, – about two hundred and forty or fifty naps, Master Paul. A very pretty-night’s work, and more profitable than preaching, I take it.”

“Regarding the matter as a mere monetary question – ”

“No gammon, – cut the cards,” broke in Davis; “one game must finish us. Now, shall we say double or quits?”

“If you really wish me to speak my candid mind, I ‘d rather not.”

“I thought as much,” muttered Grog to himself; and then, in a louder voice, “What shall it be then. – one-hundred and fifty? Come, even if you should lose, you’ll get up winner of a clean hundred.”

“Would that it were at the expense of some one I love less!”

“Answer my question,” said Davis, angrily. “Will you have a hundred and fifty on the last game, – yes or no?”

“Yes, of course, Kit, if you desire it.”

“Cut again; there is a faced card,” said Davis. And now he dealt with a slow deliberation that showed what an effort his forced composure was costing him.

Classon sat back in his chair watching the cards as they fell from the dealer’s hand, but affecting in his half-closed eyes and folded arms the air of one deep in his own musings.

“I will say this, Davis,” said he, at last, with the slow utterance that announces a well-matured thought, “you have managed the whole of this business with consummate skill; you have done it admirably.”

“I believe I have,” said Davis, with a sort of stern decision in his tone; “and there was more difficulty in the case than you are aware of.”

“There must have been very considerable difficulty,” rejoined Paul, slowly. “Even in the very little I have seen of him I can detect a man whose temperament must have presented the greatest embarrassments. He is proud, very proud, suspectful to any extent. I have five cards – forty-seven.”

“Not good.”

“Three queens.”

“Four tens.”

“So, then, my tierce in spades is not good, of course. I play one.”

“Fifteen and five, twenty, and the tens ninety-four. The first honor I have scored this hour. The difficulty I allude to was with my daughter; she would n’t have him.”

“Not have him? – not accept a peer of the realm?”

“Who told her he was a peer? She only knows him as the Honorable Annesley Beecher.”

“Even so. As the Honorable Annesley Beecher, he is a man of high connections, – related to some of the first people. A dub – play a club. I take it that such a man is a very high mark indeed.”

“She wasn’t of your mind, that’s clear,” said Davis, abruptly; “nor do I believe it would have signified in the least to have told her that he was a Lord.”

“Romantic!” muttered Paul.

“No, not a bit.”

“Loved another, perhaps.”

“How should she? She never saw any other except a one-eyed Pole, that taught her music at that Belgian school, and a sort of hairy dwarf, that gave lessons in drawing! A hundred and seventeen. It’s your deal.”

“And he himself has no suspicion of his brother’s death?” said Classon, as he gave out the cards.

“Not the slightest. He was trying to write a letter to him, to break the news of his marriage, only yesterday.”

“Cleverly done, – most cleverly done,” said Paul, in ecstasy. “If he had come to the knowledge, he might very possibly have refused her.”

“I rather – suspect – not,” said Grog, dwelling slowly on each word, while his countenance assumed an expression of fierce and terrible determination. “A lucky take in, that, – the queen of diamonds: it gives me seven cards. Refuse her! by Heaven, he’d have had a short experience of his peerage! Kings and knaves – six, and seven I play – twenty-three. Piqued again, Holy Paul! No, no; he’d never have dared that.”

Classon shook his head doubtingly.

“You might just as well tell me, Paul Classon, that you ‘d refuse to marry them,” said Davis, as he struck the table with his clenched fist, “and that I would bear it! I have a way of not being denied what I have determined on; that has done me good service in life. That blear-eyed boy – the Attaché at the Legation in Frankfort – wanted to refuse me a passport for the Honorable Annesley Beecher and Mrs. Beecher, saying that, until the marriage, there was no such person. But I whispered a word to him across the table, and he gave it, and there it is now.”

“Going to Italy!” said Classon, as he read from the document which Grog had thrown down before him; “wonderful fellow, – wonderful fellow, – forgets nothing!” muttered he to himself.

“Yes, but he does, though; he has just forgotten four kings and suffered you to count four queens, Master Paul, – a tribute to your agreeability somewhat too costly.”

“Even to the travelling-carriage, Kit,” resumed Classon, not heeding the sarcasm; “and a more complete thing I never saw in my life. You picked it up at Frankfort.”

“Yes, at the Hôtel de Russie; got it for two thousand two hundred francs, – it cost ten, six months ago. A quint in spades, and the cards divided; I score thirty-one.”

“And when is he to learn that he has succeeded to the title?”

“When he’s across the Alps, – when he is out of the land of rouge et noir and roulette; he may know it then, as soon as he pleases. I ‘m to join them at Como, or Milan, as I can’t well ‘show’ at Baden, even at this late time of year. Before I come up he ‘ll have heard all about Lacking-ton’s death.”

“Will it ever occur to him, Kit, to suspect that you were aware of it?”

“I don’t know; perhaps it may,” said Grog, doggedly.

“If so, will the impression not lead to a very precarious state of relations between you?”

“Maybe so, – seven hearts and five spades, you are ‘capoted.’ There, Paul, that doesn’t leave so much between us, after all. What if he does suspect it? The world suspects fifty things about me that no man has ever yet dared to lay to my charge. If you and I, Master Paul, were to fret ourselves about the suspicions that are entertained of us, we’d have a pleasant life of it. Your good health.”

“To yours, my dear Kit; and may I never drink it in worse tipple would be the only additional pleasure I could suggest to the toast. It is wonderful Madeira!”

“I have had it in the London Docks since the year ‘81; every bottle of it now, seeing that the vines are ruined in the island, is worth from thirty shillings to five-and-thirty. I won it from Tom Hardiman; he took the invoice out of his pocket-book and flung it across the table to me. ‘Grog,’ says he, ‘when you take it out of bond, mind you ask me to dinner, and give me a bottle of it?’ But he’s gone, ‘toes up,’ and so here’s to his memory.”

“‘Drunk in solemn silence,’ as the newspapers say,” broke in Paul, as he drained his glass.

“Yes,” said Davis, eying the wine by the light, “that’s a tipple this little inn here is not much accustomed to see under its roof; but if I were to stay a little longer, I ‘d make something of this place. They never heard of Harvey’s sauce, Chili vinegar, Caviare, Stilton; even Bass and British gin were novelties when I came. There, as well as I can make it up, you are a winner of fifteen naps; there they are.”

“Dear me, I fancied I stood safe to come off with a hundred!” said Paul, lugubriously.

“So you did, without counting the points; but you ‘ve lost five hundred and sixty-four, – ay, and a right good thing you ‘ve made of it, Master Paul. I ‘d like to know how long it is since you earned such a sum honestly.”

Classon sighed heavily as he swept the cash into his pocket, and said, “I’m unable to tell you; my memory grows worse every day.”

“When you go back to England, you can always brush it up by the Police sheet, – that’s a comfort,” said Davis, with a savage laugh.

“And what will the noble Viscount have to spend yearly?” asked Classon, to change the theme.

“Something between eight and ten thousand.”

“A snug thing, Kit, – a very snug thing indeed; and I take it that by this time o’ day he knows the world pretty well.”

“No; nothing of the kind!” said Grog, bluntly; “he’s a fool, and must stay a fool!”

“The more luck his, then, to have Christopher Davis for his father-in-law.”

“I ‘ll tell you what’s better still, Holy Paul, – to have Lizzy Davis for his wife. You think she’s going to make a great match of it because he’s the Lord Viscount and she is my daughter; but I tell you, and I ‘m ready to maintain it too, I never met the man yet was worthy of her. There may be girls as handsome, though I never saw them, – there may be others as clever, that I’m no judge of; but this I do know, – that for pluck, real pluck, you ‘ll not find her equal in Europe. She’d never have married him for his rank; no, if it was a dukedom he had to offer her. She ‘d never have taken him for his fortune, if it had been ten times the amount. No, she would n’t consent to it, even to take me out of my difficulties and set me all straight with the world, because she fancied that by going on the stage, or some such trumpery, she could have done that just as well. She’d not have had him for himself, for she knows he’s a fool, just as well as I do. There was only one thing I found she could n’t get over: it was the thought she dare not marry him; that to thrust herself into the station and rank he occupied would be to expose herself to insults that must crush her. It was by a mere chance I discovered that this was a challenge she ‘d have rather died than decline. It was for all the world like saying to myself, ‘Don’t you go into the ring there, Kit Davis; my Lords and the gentlemen don’t like it.’ ‘Don’t they? Well, let’s see how they’ll take it, for I am a-going!’ It was that stung her, Paul Classon. She did n’t want all those fine people; she did n’t care a brass farthing about their ways and their doings! She ‘d not have thought it a hard lot in life just to jog on as she is. She did n’t want to be called a countess, nor live like one; but when it was hinted to her, that if she did venture amongst them, it would be to be driven back with shame and insult, then her mind was made up at once. Not that she ever confessed as much to me; no, I found out her secret by watching her closely. The day I told her I forget what anecdote about some outrageous piece of insolence played off on some new intruder into the titled class, she suddenly started as if something had stung her, and her eyes glared like a tiger’s; then, catching me by the hand, she said, ‘Don’t tell me these things; they pain me more to hear than real, downright calamities!’ That was enough for me. I saw her cards, Paul, and I played through them!”

Classon heaved a deep sigh, and was silent.

“What are you sighing over, Paul?” asked Davis, half morosely.

“I was just sorrowing to myself to think how little all her pluck will avail her.”

“Stuff and nonsense, sir! It is the very thing to depend on in the struggle.”

“Ay, if there were a struggle, Kit, but that is exactly what there will not be. You, for instance, go into Brookes’s to-morrow, you have been duly elected. It was a wet day, only a few at the ballot, and somehow you got in. Well, you are, to all intents, as much a member as his Grace there, or the noble Marquis. There’s no commotion, no stir when you enter the room. The men at their newspapers look up, perhaps, but they read away immediately with only increased attention; the group at the window talks on too; the only thing noticeable is that nobody talks to you. If you ask for the ‘Globe’ or the ‘Chronicle,’ when the reader shall have finished, he politely hands it at once, and goes away.”

“If he did, I’d follow him – ”

“What for? – to ask an explanation where there had been no offence? To make yourself at once notorious in the worst of all possible ways? There’s nothing so universally detested as the man that makes a ‘row;’ witness the horror all well-bred people feel at associating with Americans, they’re never sure how it’s to end. Now, if all these considerations have their weight with men, imagine how they mast be regarded by women, fifty times more exacting as they are in all the exigencies of station, and whose freemasonry is a hundred times more exclusive.”

“That’s all rot!” broke in Davis, his passion the more violent as the arguments of the other seemed so difficult to answer. “You think to puzzle me by talking of all these grand people and their ways as if they weren’t all men and women. That they are, and a rum lot, too, some of them! Come,” cried Davis, suddenly, as though a happy thought had just flashed across his mind, “it was the turn of a straw one day, by your own account, that you were not a bishop. Now, I ‘d like to know, if that lucky event had really taken place, wouldn’t you have been the same Holy Paul Classon that sits there?”

“Perhaps not, entirely,” said Classon, in his oiliest of voices. “I trust that I should, in ascending to that exalted station, have cast off the slough of an inferior existence, and carried up little of my former self except the friendships of my early years.”

“Do you fancy, Master Paul, that gammon like this can impose upon a man of my sort?”

“My dear and worthy friend,” rejoined Classon, “the tone in which I appeal to you is my tribute to your high ability. To an inferior man I had spoken very different language. Sentiments are not the less real that they are expressed with a certain embroidery, just as a Bank post-bill would be very good value though a Choctaw Indian might deem it a piece of waste-paper.”

“I ‘d like to see you try it on with Lizzy in this fashion,” said Davis. “I don’t think even your friend the Choctaw Indian would save you.”

“I should be proud of even defeat at such hands!” exclaimed Paul, rapturously.

“You ‘d have little to be proud of when she ‘d have done with you,” cried Grog, all his good-humor restored by the mere thought of his daughter.

“Have you spoken to his Lordship about what I mentioned?” said Paul, half diffidently.

“No,” said Grog; “on reflection, I thought it better not. I ‘m sure, besides, that there’s no Church preferment in his gift; and then, Classon, he knows you, as who does not?”

“‘Quæ regio terræ non plena est?’ Ay, Grog, you and I have arrived at what the world calls Fame.”

“Speak for yourself, sir; I acknowledge no partnership in the case. When I have written letters, they have not been begging ones; and when I have stretched out my hand, there was no pistol in the palm of it!”

“Very true, Kit; I never had a soul above petty larceny, and you had a spirit that aspired to transportation for life.”

Davis bounded on his chair, and glowered with a fearful stare at the speaker, who meanwhile drained the decanter into his glass with an unmoved serenity.

“Don’t be angry, my ancient friend,” said he, blandly. “The cares of friendship, like the skill of a surgeon, must often pain to be serviceable. Happy let us call ourselves when no ruder hand wields the probe or the bistoury!”