THE LAKE OF WINE
BY
BERNARD CAPES
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1898
COPYRIGHT.
Copyright, 1898,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLV
CHAPTER XLVI
CHAPTER XLVII
CHAPTER XLVIII
CHAPTER XLIX
CHAPTER L
CHAPTER LI
CHAPTER LII
CHAPTER LIII
CHAPTER LIV
CHAPTER LV
EPIGRAPH.
_“So fares the unthrifty lord of Linne_
_Till all his gold is gone and spent:_
_And he maun sell his lands so broad,_
_His house and landes and all his rent._
. . . . . . .
_Thus he hath sold his land so broad,_
_Both hill and holt, and moore and fenne,_
_All but a poore and lonesome lodge,_
_That stood far off in a lonely glenne._
_For soe he to his father hight:_
_‘My sonne, when I am gonne,’ sayd hee,_
_‘Then thou wilt spend thy lande so broad,_
_And thou wilt spend thy gold so free:_
_But sweare me nowe upon the roode,_
_That lonesome lodge thou’lt never spend;_
_For when all the world doth frown on thee,_
_Thou there shalt find a faithful friend.’_
. . . . . . .
_Away then hyed the heire of Linne_
_O’er hill and holt, and moore and fenne,_
_Untill he came to the lonesome lodge,_
_That stood so lowe in a lonely glenne._
. . . . . . .
_Then round his necke the corde he drewe,_
_And sprang aloft with his bodie:_
_When lo! the ceiling burst in twaine,_
_And to the ground came tumbling hee._
_Astonyed lay the heire of Linne,_
_Ne knewe if he were live or dead:_
_At length he looked, and sawe a bille,_
_And in it a key of gold so redd._
_He took the bill, and lookt it on,_
_Strait good comfort found he there:_
_Itt told him of a hole in the wall,_
_In which there stood three chests in-fere._
_Two were full of the beaten golde,_
_The third was full of white monèy;_
_And over them in broad lettèrs_
_These words were written so plaine to see:_
_‘Once more, my sonne, I sette thee clere;_
_Amend thy life and follies past;_
_For but thou amend thee of thy life,_
_That rope must be thy end at last.’”_
THE LAKE OF WINE.
CHAPTER I.
Some time in June of the year 1800 (as privately chronicled) there
came a famous evening at Whitelaw’s Club in St. James’s Street, off
Piccadilly, London. There and then--according to the unattested
evidence of an eyewitness--Mr. Ladislaw lost his head, Lord Dunlone
his mistress, Sir Robert Linne his fortune, and Major Dalrymple his
life. Thus it appears these four were all losers, and each of a
material property, save the first, who, alone of the quartette,
commuted his self-possession for a very real equivalent in hard cash.
“Whitelaw’s” in those days ran, of a host of gambling clubs, the
deepest. It was there all heavy potations and long stakes (at which
many a self-martyr burned); but the first of these were put down and
the second up with an accepted solemnity of decorum that was
traditional to the place and the sign of its moral endowment. Fox, in
his heavier moments, had been known to hazard in its glooms
occasionally, and to lose, of course; and--equally of course--to find
immediate balm for his scorched fingers in the inevitable “Herodotus.”
Selwyn, also, and Topham Beauclerc, and many another Georgium sidus,
had played and hiccupped within its pregnant walls; but always with
gravity and a weight of personal responsibility towards the
foundation. “Brookes’s” might have held in its time more showy
revelry; “Almack’s” have gambled in broad-brimmed straw hats, bedecked
with flowers, and masks to hide the play of emotions. “Whitelaw’s”
would have none of these. It had ever stood coldly aloof from flash
and notoriety, accepting Todd’s definition of a club as “An
association of persons subjected to particular rules,” rather than
that of Johnson (the rendering has a warm personal flavour), who calls
it “An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.”
From first to last it remained ponderous in self-importance and rigid
in exacting the observance of its unwritten codes of conduct. If its
gaming operations were large, it desired the company of no
feather-brain “plungers”; but rather of players of substance, to whom
cards were a market, not a raffle.
Therefore, when on this particular night no fewer than four of its
members--like those in the fable--suddenly revolted against the
central system, and, for a space of minutes, made havoc of its
respectable traditions, it is no wonder that “Whitelaw’s” rose at the
outrage like one man, and, in the upshot, pronounced sentence of club
ostracism upon the delinquents. This, as it affected three, is matter
of private history. The fourth escaped the distinction there and then
through the interposition of “the man with the scythe.”
Faro was the game, and the stakes were swingeing The four had played
from three o’clock of a Thursday afternoon to six of the Friday
morning. In the white spread of day their eyes showed up blood-shot,
their cheeks grimy with candle soot, their hair slack and unstrung. My
lord Dunlone, who was a slipslop youth, colourless and jejune, with
stains of wine on his chin and high cravat, brooded in fathomless
sulkiness, the only pronounced expression he was ever real master of.
His neighbour, Sir Robert Linne, had the look of a fine tormented
devil, desperate and at bay.
These were the losers. Of the winners, Mr. Ladislaw was a perspiring
cabbage of a man, stunted and over-headed; and he seemed drunk and
amazed with his good fortune; and the major presented a lean and
hungry appearance, as if his passions were devouring worms--which
indeed I believe they were.
About six of the clock there came a pause in the game--the lull before
the crash. Mr. Ladislaw, twinkling prosperity, bent obsequiously to
the baronet, his cards clumped together in one hand.
“The stakes as before, Sir Robert?” he said in a small, confidential
voice.
The other gave a hollow laugh, checking it frowningly in mid-career.
“I think so,” he said. “If there happens a margin, why--we must make
it a broad one, on paper.”
“As you please, sir.”
Major Dalrymple, with his thick lips dropped apart, was gazing
breathingly at his sulky neighbour. The latter, conscious of the
inquiring scrutiny, pulled himself erect--a cub of ill-temper.
“Curse it!” he muttered, with a surly sidelong glance. “What am I
being stared at for, curse it?”
“Your pardon, my lord,” said the major, in a high, stiff voice. “I
looked only to inquire your stake.”
“I can settle it myself, sir, without your help”--and, with a very
meaning action, he held his cards face-downwards upon his breast.
The major went back in his chair, his corded hands thrust out rigidly
before him on the table.
“My lord Dunlone,” he said, “impugns not only my judgment, but my
honour!”
“Oh, curse it!” cried the Viscount. “What have I said?”
“It was your action spoke, sir.”
Sir Robert laughed recklessly.
“You’re hard on my lord. He clasped his dear love to his bosom--no
more. ’Tis an amorous way he has.”
The dyspeptic face of the soldier went dark. He recognized an allusion
in the bantering words. The Viscount Dunlone, in fact (it was
notorious), had outbidden him in the favour of a certain Mademoiselle
Carminelle, a _figurante_ at Vauxhall in the suit of Mr. “Tom
Restless”; and, popularly, he was supposed to have aged under the
disappointment.
“Come!” cried the baronet. “Give us the privilege of driving to the
devil our own way. You mustn’t criticize the actions of dying men. We
writhe with wounds, sir, while you are sound.”--He turned to Mr.
Ladislaw, who sat staring, apprehensive. “I stake my all,” he said;
and named a sum sufficiently desperate.
There were a few late _habitués_ in the room. One of these, a dry,
long man, with a face like a puckered medlar and a short-sighted
contraction of the eyelids, had been . for some time a stealthily
intent observer of the quartette. Now this individual, humouring a
habit of his by drawing in his breath with a wincing sound, gave his
chair a shift, and seemed to be awaiting results, at a distance, with
some secret interest.
“Stake, and have done with it!” cried Sir Robert boisterously to the
young lord.
The latter turned an insolent, languid glance on Major Dalrymple. They
were a contrast. The soldier set, spare, bilious, with a great hooked
nose and cracked heavy lips; the other a ruffled _petit-maître_ of
the first folly, pearl-powdered, cherry-mouthed, a model of sartorial
elegance from his choking cravat--so amplified as that his face looked
like a peach stuck in a napkin--to his full pantaloons of
apricot-coloured velvet.
“I stake,” lisped this exquisite--“I stake your reversion, sir.”
There were influences of wine and ill-fortune fermenting in the fool’s
empty head. Otherwise he would have hardly dared such perilous banter.
“I fail to gather your lordship,” said the soldier, going red.
“The adorable Carminelle,” began the Viscount drawlingly, when the
other jumped up with a furious face, upsetting his chair in the act,
and clapped his left hand instinctively upon his thigh.
There was a moment’s commotion. One or two in the room rose; but the
dry, short-sighted stranger sat on, quietly rubbing his chin.
Nonplussed for the moment, as it seemed, by the absence of his weapon,
Major Dalrymple gasped, hesitated--and sat down again. As he did so,
some were aware of a blue streak across his forehead that remained
there after his flush of passion had subsided.
“I stake a thousand pounds against that,” he said, with a sudden fall
to intense quietness of intonation.
The incident passed, and the deal. There was a stern spirit of
expectancy in the room. This was not “Whitelaw’s” way--either as
regarded the outburst, or the nature of the declaration that had
produced it.
Then, all in a moment, Sir Robert Linne had leaped up and flung his
cards in Mr. Ladislaw’s face, and the major was on his feet again,
stamping and declaiming.
The baronet’s victim, taken completely by surprise, started and fell
over on his back, his chair splintering beneath him. The place was in
an uproar at once--red and angry visages on all sides. Only Sir Robert
stood placid with folded arms, smiling grimly down on the havoc he had
wrought.
“I call all to witness,” screamed the major, panting and struggling in
the arms of two who had seized him, “that I accepted my lord’s stake,
but not his infernal insult. I have won the right of protection over
an outraged lady, and I now call upon him to answer for his brutal
abuse of her name in public”--and, despite his captors, he whipped up
a glass of wine from the table, and dashed it at the stupid face of
the lordling, who still sat, sullenly defiant of the spirit he had
evoked. The glass cut his forehead and half-stunned him for the
moment.
“Mr. Jephson,” cried the soldier, glaring round, and selecting one
from the excited group about him--“you will do me the service to
ac----”
The word snapped in his teeth like a pipe-stem. With a groan he sank
upon the ground, and his face was purple from ear to ear.
An instant’s silence followed, then babble of voices and the pressing
inward of the spectators around the fallen man. Lord Dunlone sat
mopping his red forehead in foolish vacancy; and Sir Robert Linne
strode over to Mr. Ladislaw, who had been helped to his feet and stood
apart and alone.
“I took full licence for a ruined man,” said the baronet; “and am
prepared to give the fullest satisfaction.”
The injured one almost whimpered.
“That is the devil of _luck_,” he said hysterically. “You force a
quarrel on me, and deprive me of the fruits of it.”
“Oh, sir! Not necessarily.”
“You know I’m damned bad at shot and thrust.”
The loser smiled wickedly. The only stealthy witness of the little
scene was the short-sighted man.
“You desire to compound the insult, then?” said Sir Robert.
“Oh! surely, sir, with your kind permission.”
The other laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. Mr.
Ladislaw took a forward step and ventured timidly:
“You exaggerated, I trust, when you spoke of yourself as ruined?”
“Do you question my statement, sir?”
He flapped round with a mockery of fierceness. The little man fell
back, scared.
“Oh, dear me, no!” he cried.
Sir Robert laughed again, shot a contemptuous look at the group by the
table, and went quietly from the room.
In the Club-hall he came to a momentary pause.
“The fellow should have fought,” he muttered. “I would have made
myself a broad target to him.”
Then he sighed.
“But there’s a shorter cut.”