sir?”
“Oh, really; quite important, I assure you. More important than one would have believed, watching their silly ways. You fancy a chap’s bluffing when he’s doing nothing of the sort. I’d enormously have liked to know it before we played. Things would have been so awfully different for us”—he broke off curiously, paused, then added—“for you.”
“Different for me, sir?” His words seemed gruesome. They seemed open to some vaguely sinister interpretation. But I kept myself steady.
“We live and learn, sir,” I said, lightly enough.
“Some of us learn too late,” he replied, increasingly ominous.
“I take it you failed to win the hundred pounds, sir?”
“I have the hundred pounds; I won it—by losing.”
Again he evaded my eye.
“Played, indeed, sir,” said I.
“You jolly well won’t believe that for long.”
Now as he had the hundred pounds, I couldn’t fancy what the deuce and all he meant by such prattle. I was half afraid he might be having me on, as I have known him do now and again when he fancied he could get me. I fearfully wanted to ask questions. Again I saw the dark, absorbed face of the gipsy as he studied my future.
“Rotten shift, life is,” now murmured the Honourable George quite as if he had forgotten me. “If I’d have but put through that Monte Carlo affair I dare say I’d have chucked the whole business—gone to South Africa, perhaps, and set up a mine or a plantation. Shouldn’t have come back. Just cut off, and good-bye to this mess. But no capital. Can’t do things without capital. Where these American Johnnies have the pull of us. Do anything. Nearly do what they jolly well like to. No sense to money. Stuff that runs blind. Look at the silly beggars that have it——” On he went quite alarmingly with his tirade. Almost as violent he was as an ugly-headed chap I once heard ranting when I went with my brother-in-law to a meeting of the North Brixton Radical Club. Quite like an anarchist he was. Presently he quieted. After a long pull at his pipe he regarded me with an entire change of manner. Well I knew something was coming; coming swift as a rocketing woodcock. Word for word I put down our incredible speeches:
“You are going out to America, Ruggles.”
“Yes, sir; North or South, sir?”
“North, I fancy; somewhere on the West coast—Ohio, Omaha, one of those Indian places.”
“Perhaps Indiana or the Yellowstone Valley, sir.”
“The chap’s a sort of millionaire.”
“The chap, sir?”
“Eyebrow chap. Money no end—mines, lumber, domestic animals, that sort of thing.”
“Beg pardon, sir! I’m to go——”
“Chap’s wife taken a great fancy to you. Would have you to do for the funny, sad beggar. So he’s won you. Won you in a game of drawing poker. Another man would have done as well, but the creature was keen for you. Great strength of character. Determined sort. Hope you won’t think I didn’t play soundly, but it’s not a forthright game. Think they’re bluffing when they aren’t. When they are you mayn’t think it. So far as hiding one’s intentions, it’s a most rottenly immoral game. Low, animal cunning—that sort of thing.”
“Do I understand I was the stake, sir?” I controlled myself to say. The heavens seemed bursting about my head.
“Ultimately lost you were by the very trifling margin of superiority that a hand known as a club flush bears over another hand consisting of three of the eights—not quite all of them, you understand, only three, and two other quite meaningless cards.”
I could but stammer piteously, I fear. I heard myself make a wretched failure of words that crowded to my lips.
“But it’s quite simple, I tell you. I dare say I could show it you in a moment if you’ve cards in your box.”
“Thank you, sir, I’ll not trouble you. I’m certain it was simple. But would you mind telling me what exactly the game was played for?”
“Knew you’d not understand at once. My word, it was not too bally simple. If I won I’d a hundred pounds. If I lost I’d to give you up to them but still to receive a hundred pounds. I suspect the Johnny’s conscience pricked him. Thought you were worth a hundred pounds, and guessed all the time he could do me awfully in the eye with his poker. Quite set they were on having you. Eyebrow chap seemed to think it a jolly good wheeze. She didn’t, though. Quite off her head at having you for that glum one who does himself so badly.”
Dazed I was, to be sure, scarce comprehending the calamity that had befallen us.
“Am I to understand, sir, that I am now in the service of the Americans?”
“Stupid! Of course, of course! Explained clearly, haven’t I, about the club flush and the three eights. Only three of them, mind you. If the other one had been in my hand, I’d have done him. As narrow a squeak as that. But I lost. And you may be certain I lost gamely, as a gentleman should. No laughing matter, but I laughed with them—except the funny, sad one. He was worried and made no secret of it. They were good enough to say I took my loss like a dead sport.”
More of it followed, but always the same. Ever he came back to the sickening, concise point that I was to go out to the American wilderness with these grotesque folk who had but the most elementary notions of what one does and what one does not do. Always he concluded with his boast that he had taken his loss like a dead sport. He became vexed at last by my painful efforts to understand how, precisely, the dreadful thing had come about. But neither could I endure more. I fled to my room. He had tried again to impress upon me that three eights are but slightly inferior to the flush of clubs.
I faced my glass. My ordinary smooth, full face seemed to have shrivelled. The marks of my anguish were upon me. Vainly had I locked myself in. The gipsy’s warning had borne its evil fruit. Sold, I’d been; even as once the poor blackamoors were sold into American bondage. I recalled one of their pathetic folk-songs in which the wretches were wont to make light of their lamentable estate; a thing I had often heard sung by a black with a banjo on the pier at Brighton; not a genuine black, only dyed for the moment he was, but I had never lost the plaintive quality of the verses:
“Away down South in Michigan,
Where I was so happy and so gay,
‘Twas there I mowed the cotton and the cane——”
How poignantly the simple words came back to me! A slave, day after day mowing his owner’s cotton and cane, plucking the maize from the savannahs, yet happy and gay! Should I be equal to this spirit? The Honourable George had lost; so I, his pawn, must also submit like a dead sport.
How little I then dreamed what adventures, what adversities, what ignominies—yes, and what triumphs were to be mine in those back blocks of North America! I saw but a bleak wilderness, a distressing contact with people who never for a moment would do with us. I shuddered. I despaired.
And outside the windows gay Paris laughed and sang in the dance, ever unheeding my plight!
CHAPTER TWO
In that first sleep how often do we dream that our calamity has been only a dream. It was so in my first moments of awakening. Vestiges of some grotesquely hideous nightmare remained with me. Wearing the shackles of the slave, I had been mowing the corn under the fierce sun that beats down upon the American savannahs. Sickeningly, then, a wind of memory blew upon me and I was alive to my situation.
Nor was I forgetful of the plight in which the Honourable George would now find himself. He is as good as lost