AT MONTE CARLO.
Mr. Maurice Capt, though an ambitious man and a clever one withal, had
risen no higher in the world since we saw him last; he was still
Reginald Haggard's valet, but his wages were good and he had a little
den of his own where his meals were served to him from the housekeeper's
table in solitary state. The valet was by this time a man of property;
his wants were few and his little economies, as he called them, were
large. Nobody but his banker was aware of the extent of his
accumulations; he couldn't have saved it all out of his pay, but he had
managed to amass a comparatively large sum which stood to his credit in
four figures. Was Mr. Capt a gambler, a backer of horses, or a dabbler
in stocks and shares? Not a bit of it. Mr. Maurice Capt was the
proprietor of a secret. For seventeen years Mr. Capt had drawn from this
queer property of his a varying but comfortable income. When Lucy
Warrender first came into her eight hundred a year, Mr. Capt's income
had very sensibly increased. It wasn't paid quarterly or half-yearly;
the manner in which it was drawn was sufficiently original. The bills
which Mr. Capt drew whenever he thought fit upon Miss Lucy Warrender
were always honoured. Mr. Capt was in the habit of writing to the lady
in the humble tone of a suppliant. The letters always stated with
praiseworthy clearness what was the sum required, and the demand was
always met with business-like promptitude. How Miss Warrender managed to
satisfy this insatiable bloodsucker I cannot tell, for though she had
eight hundred a year of her own, she certainly lived up to it, perhaps
beyond it. But Miss Warrender gambled in many ways; she speculated and
had quite a large account which she had opened with a very old friend
of former years, Mr. Dabbler, once of the firm of Sleek and Dabbler, but
now trading by himself, and though dropping his h's as freely as ever,
one of the biggest brokers on the Stock Exchange and an alderman of the
City of London. I suppose Alderman Dabbler must have been very much in
love with Miss Warrender, though he never actually had the impertinence
to propose to her. Her transactions with him were numerous, and did not
pass through his books. Most of her speculations were made upon his
advice, and many a handsome cheque testified either to the astuteness of
Miss Lucy Warrender, or to the generosity of Mr. Alderman Dabbler. Poor
Dabbler, he was but one of the many irons in Miss Warrender's fire. Miss
Warrender betted; it was even said that she ran horses as "Mr. Simpson."
She would stand upon the _plateau_ at Monaco at the shooting matches,
and in an entrancing costume and a pair of ten-button gloves, her face
carefully shaded from the blazing sun by an enormous parasol, she would
watch the birds fall right and left and die in agony, or drop wounded
into the sea, and still continue to back the bird or the gun, as seemed
to her good, with the cosmopolitan _habitués_ of the rather Bohemian but
money-spending set in which she moved. It was a very miscellaneous set:
peers, members of parliament, journalists, jockeys, people who lived by
their wits but who somehow always managed to wear new garments of
fashionable cut, actresses, singers, dancers, of European reputation,
and some of them with no reputations at all, fashionables of enviable
notoriety or the reverse; all these various sorts of people were
hail-fellow-well-met with Miss Warrender upon the _Plateau_ at Monte
Carlo, or within the walls of the great gambling house.
Lucy Warrender had kept her good looks; I expect if she hadn't she would
have gone under long before. She enjoyed herself in a sort of feverish
way; she was a notoriously lucky woman when she gambled, and she gambled
habitually and heavily. But just on the particular day we meet Miss
Warrender again, Fortune had been unkind. The lady was sitting gazing
out from her window on the second floor of the Hotel de Russie upon the
sunlit tranquil turquoise sea. I don't think that she saw much beauty in
the scene, for though she stared at the blue sea and the bluer sky, she
appeared to be rapt in thought.
There are some women who are always well dressed, whose flounces and
whose furbelows are ever fresh and crisp; Lucy Warrender was one of
these. It would be very easy to extract from _The Queen_ a poetic
description of the pretty pale blue tea-gown that Lucy Warrender wore,
but I must leave it to your imagination, reader. The pale blue and the
profusion of delicate filmy lace suited Lucy Warrender's dreamy blonde
beauty. Seventeen years had passed lightly over her head; perhaps the
golden locks were a trifle more golden than of old, and if their
luxuriance was due a little to art, the secret was only known to Lucy
and her maid. Her foot, thrust into a heel-less Tunisian slipper of blue
velvet embroidered with seed pearls, beat the floor impatiently. The
strong sunlight showed that there really were a few tiny wrinkles,
faintest lines on the ivory forehead and at the corners of the pretty
mouth, whose ruddy lips were arched like Cupid's bow. But though the
lips were arched, the mouth was determined, almost cruel; but the
cruelty of the mouth suddenly disappeared as the door opened, and the
whole face was instantly illuminated by the smile that men termed
infantine and angelic, but which rivals of her own sex styled affectedly
sentimental.
It was Lucy's maid who entered the room, a big burly woman, still the
fine animal of yore, Fanchette--the Fanchette who had succeeded the
unhappy Hepzibah, and who had nursed the boys Lucius and George.
"I have got them, mademoiselle," she said in French, as she smoothed out
a little heap of blue bank notes; "seven thousand francs as usual; and a
brave pair of earrings too, to produce that from the harpies of the
_Mont de Piété_ at Nice. The employé made me the usual compliment,
mademoiselle, and as he paid me the money he declared that the pair of
single stones were the most beautiful he had ever seen. The rascal took
care not to say it till we had made our bargain. _Ciel_, I trust
mademoiselle will be _en veine_ to-night, for I shan't feel easy till I
see the stones sparkling again in mademoiselle's ears."
Lucy counted the notes, she dismissed the _bonne_, and then she
soliloquized; not in so many words, as do heroines of melodrama, but
this is what she said to herself, at all events the substance of it:
"I am sick of life, I am sick of planning and plotting and being looked
upon as an adventuress. I am sick of being bowed to and spoken to by
people who in the old time would not have presumed to beg for an
introduction. I am getting _déclassée_. Perhaps one doesn't feel it so
much here, for we are pretty well all adventurers more or less, here in
the gambler's paradise, though some of us have plenty of money." Miss
Warrender stood before the smouldering hearth and gazed with stern
scrutiny at her own features in the mirror. "Yes," she soliloquized,
"Georgie, though she is two years older than I am, has certainly worn
the better of the two; she is lovely Mrs. Haggard still. And what am I?
A hag, a dreadful grinning hag, a woman to be flirted with, danced with
and supped with, a woman who has ceased to be respected. Why, that
dreadful old Baron Teufelsdroch called me his _belle petite_ the other
day, and I have no champion now to take the old sinner by the throat and
shake the life out of him."
Lucy sank into the only comfortable chair in the room, and then she did
a dreadful thing. Dreadful to our minds, dear reader, for we are
respectable and insular and we have our prejudices, our glorious insular
prejudices. We can sympathize with "The Sorrows of Werther," we can even
shed tears perhaps over the bread-and-butter cutting Charlotte, but were
Charlotte to light a cigarette! Oh horror--fie--for shame--pschutt: the
lady would at once be outside the pale of respectability, totally
unworthy of our love and sympathy; worse still, to our minds she would
cease to be even good-looking or to deserve the lovely and romantic name
of Charlotte at all. One can't tell why it is so: the preternaturally
hideous heroes of our fashionable lady novelists seek consolation in the
strongest and most expensive cigars or in rough cut cavendish. Dirk
Hatteraick even places a quid of pigtail in his mouth, and that bold
buccaneer and the heroes of the lady novelists still remain dear
delightful darlings, and bright eyes grow dim over their hairbreadth
escapes, their struggles and their woes. Spare then a little of your
sympathy for poor Lucy Warrender, that bankrupt rake, as she coiled
herself up in the big easy chair and took from her pocket a tiny silver
case and extracted a _Laferme_ cigarette. Remember, reader, that
Fanchette, you, and I, are the only accomplices of her guilty weakness.
She took an ember from the fire with the tongs and lighted the little
cylinder, and as she did so her features once more, as of old, became
lighted up with the soft placid smile of girlish enjoyment, as the angel
face became surrounded by a halo of tobacco smoke. Why shouldn't poor
Lucy seek consolation as did the other villains and heroes of romance?
It evidently wasn't the first cigarette by many that Lucy had smoked,
for she inhaled the smoke scientifically and ejected it from her
nostrils like an _habituée_.
Nemesis sooner or later finds the sinner out, and when we called Lucy
Warrender a bankrupt rake it was done advisedly, for Miss Warrender had
come to the end of her tether. The earrings which she had pawned--a
sordid act, for they had been a love-token, the souvenir of a reckless,
wicked and unhappy attachment--were literally the lady's last stake. She
took the little roll of notes from her pocket and methodically counted
them once more.
"So this is the end of it all," said Lucy to herself; "a few dirty
pieces of paper and that is all. And if I lose them all to-night as
something tells me is but too likely, then I must be a beggar, and must
stretch out my hands for alms--or bid good-bye to all the bright
sunshine and the happy, pleasant memories," and she laughed a hard
bitter little laugh. "But why should I be sorry to go? Happiness is not
for such girls as I have been. My secret has been well kept, so far, but
will it be a secret long? For I can't afford to pay for silence now. If
I land a heavy stake, or break the bank, all will be well: if not, I
must go where I hope to find forgetfulness. But what if there should be
no forgetfulness beyond the grave?" As her thoughts dwelt on the words
she shuddered. "The cold, cruel, silent grave. Silent! Yes, that was
something--and after--if there be an after." And then the thought of the
happy girlish days at The Warren came back to her. The remembrance of
the stupid faithful people she had known, and liked, and laughed at, and
then the dreadful time at the Villa Lambert and what followed; and then
her own triumphantly-successful trick--successful, perhaps, from the
very simplicity of its audacity; and then her weary worthless
after-life, with its sickening treadmill round of so-called gaiety and
amusement. And then the child; why had he not died? It was for no love
of her child that, by her agency, young Lucius had been foisted into the
position of Haggard's heir. She had thought no further than to hide her
shame, and in doing it she had unwittingly disinherited her own
cousin's child. Why had Lucius not died?
Lucy's melancholy meditations were disturbed by the entrance of
Fanchette, who handed her mistress a letter and left the room as
silently as she had entered it. Lucy recognized the hand, and knew full
well what the letter would certainly contain. She had guessed aright.
Another demand for money from the man Capt. The words were respectful
enough, there was no threat, but Lucy Warrender understood what it
meant--the money or exposure.
A thousand pounds! As well might the daughters of Danaus try to fill
their sieves with water, as Lucy Warrender attempt to satisfy the
insatiable greed of the remorseless Capt. Miss Warrender placed the
letter in the fire, and saw it consumed to ashes.
"Unless I win heavily," she thought, "you will not be gratified, Maurice
Capt. Then, I suppose, you will try your master, but I fancy you will
have a bad quarter of an hour with him." The thought gave her evident
pleasure; it even made her smile.
And then she darkened the room, and flinging herself upon the sofa lay
down to sleep away the hot afternoon till it should be time for dinner
and the subsequent roulette.
Eight o'clock saw Miss Warrender in a charming toilette of electric
blue. The little bonnet with its short curling feathers did not hide the
great wavy masses of golden hair; the little cape with its fur trimming,
and the tiny muff, even the gloves and the boots, were of the same
colour. As Lucy Warrender entered the Rooms she smiled, and she talked
with several of her acquaintances. That hoary old sinner, General
Pepper, C.B., bowed profoundly to her, and paid her his old-fashioned
compliment.
"Dayvilish pretty little woman," he remarked to his friend Colonel
Spurbox, late of the Carabineers; "knew her years ago in Rome. Wears
well and don't look her age. Those little plump fair women never do.
Gad, she's not got her earrings on; sent them to her uncle's, I suppose.
She'll go for the bank, Spurbox, to-night. Plucky little devil. I hope
she'll win."
The eyes of the two warriors gazed after the retreating maid with
sympathetic admiration.
"Crisp little thing, eh?" continued the general.
"Monstrous," echoed his comrade, with ready acquiescence. "Let's go and
drink her health, and then we'll go into the thick of it and see how she
gets on."
The two old bucks ambled off to drink Lucy Warrender's health; they
wished her well. Much good may it do her.
As Miss Warrender walked towards the great room where the worshippers of
the Goddess Fortune most do congregate, the big _suisses_, in their
handsome liveries and chains of office, bowed obsequiously; they all
knew her as an _habituée_ and a constant customer of the tables. When
she reached the roulette table itself, that veteran diplomatist, one of
the oldest and most faithful of her admirers, the Duc de la
Houspignolle, offered to vacate his chair, with many a protestation and
a succession of courteous bows.
"I have been unlucky, dear Mademoiselle Warrender; Fortune has frowned
on me, but now I am far happier, for I exchange her frowns for the
smiles of Venus."
"I won't take your chair, duke," said Lucy. "I may lean upon it, and try
to be your Mascotte and to bring you luck."
But somehow or other, whether the pretty Englishwoman's presence upset
the old gambler's calculations or not I cannot tell, but he lost, and in
a quarter of an hour rose from his seat.
"Revenge me on the Philistine, dear lady, if you can," said the old man,
"for I am _décavé_--but don't take my unlucky chair, I pray you. You
will?" he continued in astonishment. "Well, if you will you must; at
all events take my card, it may help you," and he handed her the little
card with the big black-headed pin, by means of which the experienced
players mark and register the exact result of each successive _coup_.
Lucy Warrender took the chair with a smile, and laughed gaily, as with
the card she received a little tender squeeze from the wicked old hand,
and then she sat down with a full determination, as the Americans put
it, "to plank down her bottom dollar." Lucy Warrender was sitting next
to the croupier. She handed him one of her thousand-franc notes and he
gave her in exchange a little _rouleau_, neatly sealed at both ends,
containing the equivalent in gold. For nearly three-quarters of an hour
Miss Warrender confined herself to stakes of one or two Napoleons at a
time, which she pushed out before the little glittering pile in front of
her, and which were placed upon the desired square with wonderful
rapidity by the obsequious croupier. It is a curious fact that your
croupier, that well-paid but honest official, for some mysterious reason
or other always mentally identifies himself with the bank; it gives him
absolute pleasure to rake in the winnings, and he feels some strange
vicarious twinge of agony when he commences the process of paying out.
But whenever Miss Warrender won, this particular croupier pushed her
gains towards her with a little smile, and strange to say didn't seem to
feel it in the least. And now Lucy looked at her card. For twenty-seven
_coups_ she had placed a single Napoleon upon the number twenty-seven.
Of course, at roulette, some number or zero itself is bound to come up
every time, but number twenty-seven was invariably unlucky. Lucy
Warrender's left hand was thrust into the pocket of her dress; it
clutched, as an Ashantee warrior clutches his fetish, the key of her
room at the Hotel de Russie, and from the key hung its little brass
label--it was number twenty-seven. For three-quarters of an hour then,
and for twenty-seven _coups_, Miss Warrender had pursued her
Will-o'-the-Wisp; the one or two Napoleons that she staked each time was
mere child's play to her, for as we know she was in the habit of
gambling heavily. At the twenty-eighth _coup_ Miss Warrender changed the
amount of her stake upon the unfortunate number; for the twenty-franc
piece she substituted a hundred-franc note and handed it to the
croupier; he thrust it into the great glass and metal cash-box at his
side and pushed five Napoleons on to the square marked twenty-seven.
"_Messieurs, le jeu est fait. Rien ne va plus_," said the bald-headed
high priest of the table, who sat exactly opposite the gentleman with
the rake, who had so deftly carried out Miss Warrender's directions. He
seized the big plated handle, gave it the necessary twirl as he said
the words, and tossed the little ball of fate, with the usual
professional spin, upon the rapidly-revolving disc. Round flew the wheel
of fortune, and round flew the ball, making little irregular jumps. As
the whirling disc revolves less rapidly, every eye is fixed upon the
ball. The wheel is about to stop. The ball jumps into 15, thence into
17. The wheel has almost stopped; the ball will surely rest in No. 23.
No, it has not quite stopped, it goes a little further yet. Heads are
craned forward. Lucy Warrender clutches the key of her bedroom tighter
than ever. And then the bald-headed high priest of Baal calls out in the
regulation monotone, "_Vingt-sept. Rouge Impair et Passe!_"
Rhadamanthus, Minos and Æacus stretch out their rakes, and gold, notes,
and fat five-franc pieces, which have been staked by the unhappy backers
of black, even, the zero and the various numbers (all but twenty-seven,
lucky twenty-seven) are swept away in an instant. Then the croupiers
cover the stakes of the lucky backers of odd and red with their
equivalents; nothing remains on the table now but fortunate Lucy's five
Napoleons. The croupier at her side gives it the little professional
knock with his rake, sweeps the five Napoleons back towards Miss
Warrender, and counts out to her from his cash-box, with unerring
rapidity, the sum of three thousand five hundred francs in notes. There
is a little hum of applause. "_Faites vos jeux, messieurs."_ Down rained
the notes, the Napoleons, the British sovereigns and the five-franc
pieces, and the game continues with monotonous regularity.
For three mortal hours Lucy Warrender clutched her hotel key, and played
with varying success. At one time there was quite a little heap of notes
and gold in front of her, upon which she discreetly laid her fan. She
had steadily backed the number twenty-seven for varying but ever
increasing amounts. The number twenty-seven had come up no less than
eight times and had been the cause of Miss Warrender's winning heavily.
The keenest eye at that time could have detected no wrinkle on Lucy's
lovely girlish face. But fortune after a while ceased to favour her; the
crowd of admiring onlookers, "the gallery," that had stood behind her
chair attracted by her successes gradually dwindled, and the heap of
gold and notes in front of her slowly but surely took unto themselves
wings and flew away. But the gouty old Frenchman, the Duc de la
Houspignolle, faithful knight that he was, still stood behind her chair.
Old Pepper and the veteran Colonel Spurbox, of the Carabineers, still
leered at her, in mingled pity and admiration, from the other side of
the great roulette table. Lucy Warrender still clutched her key, and
still backed fatal number twenty-seven; her mouth was dry and parched as
she took out her last thousand-franc note, and, it not being permitted
to stake that sum at roulette, she took it to the _Trente et Quarante_
table, and lost it at a single _coup_.
The lady had played her last stake and lost it. She rose to leave.
"Let me be your banker, dear Miss Warrender," whispered the aged
Mephistopheles who stood behind her chair.
"No, duke, not that. I haven't quite sunk to that yet, you know."
"Always _farouche_, dear Miss Warrender, but I apologize," he continued
as he gave her his arm.
Perhaps the little hand that rested on it trembled slightly, but Lucy
was a Warrender, and plucky; she nodded and bowed in every direction;
she smiled and simpered as sweetly as of yore; she sat in the great
restaurant at one of the little marble tables and sucked an _orangeade
glacée_ through two straws, and then the Duc de la Houspignolle escorted
her back to the Hotel de Russie with all respect, where Fanchette
anxiously awaited her arrival.
Fanchette didn't ask her mistress how she had prospered, for her gesture
as she flaccidly dropped into her lounge-chair told the woman all she
wished to know.
"You can go, Fanchette," said Lucy; "if I want anything I'll touch the
hand-bell."
The woman yawned, courtesied and departed.
Lucy Warrender opened her writing-case and commenced an affectionate
letter to her uncle. In it she said incidentally:
"There are quite a number of people here that we know. The old Duc de la
Houspignolle, still quite the old beau; and that dreadful old General
Pepper, the man we met at Rome, and who was mixed up in Reginald's
affair with poor Barbiche, and Colonel Spurbox. They talk of making up a
party to run across to Nice. I think of joining them. If we go we shall
leave the day after to-morrow; everything of course depends upon the
weather. I----"
Here Lucy Warrender deliberately let her pen fall upon the paper. Then
she got up, looked at herself in the glass and frowned; and then she did
a thing she hadn't done for years. She knelt down at her bed-side and
said her prayer to heaven, the very prayer she had been accustomed to
say as a little child upon her nurse's lap. Then she took a printed
receipt of the _Mont de Piété_ for a pair of brilliant solitaire
earrings, and burnt it in the flame of the candle.
"No one will miss me," she muttered to herself, "no one, save Maurice
Capt, for I have been an income to him, and Georgie, perhaps. Poor
Georgie!" she added with a sigh. She never even thought of Lucius; she
knew full well that even had the youth known she was his mother, _he_
would assuredly not have missed her.
"I wonder whether the old duke will be there," she continued to
herself; "all the English are sure to come. We never miss a funeral;
it's one of our sad pleasures," she added with a hollow laugh. Then she
took from her dressing-case a dark blue fluted medicine bottle; it was
labelled, "The sedative mixture, a teaspoonful for a dose at bedtime.
POISON." The last word had a little special red label all to itself. The
bottle was nearly full. Miss Warrender deliberately poured out
seven-eighths of its contents into a tumbler, then she recorked the
bottle, replaced it in her dressing-case and swallowed the contents of
the tumbler at a draught, and then carefully and deliberately washed the
glass and dried it with the towel. Then she sat herself down in the
lounge-chair. In ten minutes she dozed; she soon slept peacefully and
calmly. In half-an-hour she had ceased to exist.
"On the 23rd inst., at the Hotel de Russie, Monte Carlo, Lucy, the only
daughter of the late Colonel George Warrender, of the H. E. I. C.
Service, aged 35, suddenly of heart-disease."
This was the first intimation to Lucy Warrender's friends in London of
her sudden death.
"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Charmington, now quite the old woman, "I wonder
how she managed that lovely-coloured hair."