Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  He lost. That was but a small matter, of course. He had won to begin with; and a stroke of luck at the first outset is responsible for the greater part of the most reckless playing. Time after time he staked and played staked and played staked and played again, sometimes losing, sometimes winning; but on the whole, the system, as he had anticipated, proved fairly trustworthy. The delirium of play had taken full possession of him, body and soul, by this time. He was piling up gold; piling it fast; how fast, he never stopped to think or count: enough for him that the system won; as long as it won, what waste of time at a critical moment to stop and reckori the extent of his fortune.

  He only knew that every now and then he thrust a fresh handful of gold notes into his pocket for Elsie and went on playing with feverish eagerness with the residue of his winnings left upon the table.

  By two o’clock, however, he began to get hungry. This sort of excitement takes it rapidly out of a man. Lock had disappeared from the scene long since. He wanted somebody to go and feed with. So he leaned over and whispered casually to Raffalevsky: “Shall we turn out now and take a mouthful or two of lunch together?”

  Raffalevsky looked back at him with a pale face. “As you will,” he said wearily. “I’m tired of this play. Losses, losses all along the line. The system breaks down here and there, I find, in actual practice.”

  So Hugh had observed with a placid smile for the last hour or two.

  They left the tables, and strolled across the square to the stately portals of the Hotel de Paris. Hugh was in excellent spirits indeed. “Permit me to constitute myself the host, Monsieur,” he said with his courtliest air to Raffalevsky. He had won heavily now, and was in a humor on all grounds to spend his winnings with princely magnificence.

  The Russian bowed. “You are very kind, monsieur,” he answered with a smile. Then he added, half apologetically, at the end of a pause: “And, after all, it was my own system.”

  The carte was tempting, and money was cheap cheaper than in London. Hugh ordered the most sumptuous and recherche of luncheons, with wine to match, on a millionaire scale, and they sat down together at the luxurious tables of that lordly restaurant. While they waited for their red mullet, Hugh pulled out a stray handful of notes and gold and began to count up the extent of his winnings. He trembled himself when he saw to how very large a sum the total amounted. He had pocketed no less in that short time than fourteen hundred louis! Fools that plod and toil and moil in London for a long, long year upon half that pittance! How he pitied and despised them! In three brief hours, by the aid of his system, he had won off-hand fourteen hundred louis!

  He mentioned the sum of his winnings with bated breath to the unsympathetic Russian. Raffalevsky bit his lip with undisguised jealousy. “And I,” he said curtly, in a cold voice, “have dropped sixteen hundred.”

  “It’s wonderful with what placid depths of heroism the winners can endure the losses of the losers. “Never mind, my friend,” Hugh answered back cheerily. “Fortune always takes a turn in the long run. Her wheel will alter. You’ll win soon. And besides, you know, you have an infallible system.”

  “It’s the cursed system that seems to have betrayed me,” the Russian blurted back with a savage outburst of unchecked temper. “It worked out so well on paper, somehow; but on these precious tables, with their turns and their evolutions, something unexpected is always bobbing up to spoil and prevent my legitimate triumph. Would you believe it, now, last turn but one, and the turn before it, I had calculated seven hundred and twenty-two distinct chances all in my favor to a miserable solitary one against me: and not one of the seven hundred and twenty -two good combinations ever turned up at all, but just the one beastly unlucky conjunction that made against me and ruined my speculations. You might play for seven hundred and twenty-two turns on an average again without that ever happening a second time to confound you.”

  At the table behind them, a philosophically minded Frenchman of the doctrinaire type a close-shaven old gentleman with an official face, white hair, and an unimpeachable necktie was discoursing aloud to a friend beside him of the folly of gambling. “I’m not going to moralize,” he remarked aloud, in that very clear and audible tone which the doctrinaire Frenchman generally adopts when he desires to air his own private opinions; “for Monte Carlo’s hardly the place, let us admit, for a deliberate conference. But on the whole, viewed merely as betting, it’s a peculiarly bad way of risking your money. Imagine, for example, that you want to gamble; there are many other much better and fairer methods of gambling than this. Figure to yourself, first, that you and I play rouge et noir by a turn of the cards at a louis a cut: eh bien, we stand to lose or win on an absolute equality one with the other. That is just, so. We back our luck at no special disadvantage. But figure to yourself, on the contrary, that we play against a bank which gives itself one extra chance in its own favor out of every thirty-seven, and, understand well, W T C are backing our luck against unequal odds, so that in the long run the bank must win from us. You have only to play so many times running on an average in order to contribute with almost unerring certainty one napoleon toward the private income of the Prince of Monaco. For me, I do not care for his Serenity: I prefer to spend my napoleon on a good dinner, and to let the fools who frequent the Casino keep up the music and the gardens and the theater for my private amusement.”

  From his seat in front, Hugh thoroughly despised that close-shaven Frenchman to the bottom of his soul. Mean wretch, who could thus coldly calculate the chances of loss, when he himself had just won at one glorious sitting fourteen hundred gold louis! He turned round in his chair, flushed red with success, and flung the fact, as it were, full in front of the Frenchman’s doctrinaire folding eye-glasses.

  The philosopher smiled. “Monsieur,” he answered with perfect good-humor, and an olive poised on the tip of his fork, “you are one of the few whose special good fortune, occasionally realized, alone attracts the thousands of unfortunate pigeons. Every now and then, in effect, one hears at Monte Carlo of people who at a few strokes of the wheel have won for themselves prodigious fortunes. But then, one must remember that the chances are always rather against you than for you, and above all that the longest purse has always the advantage. A few people win very large sums; a few more win moderate sums; a good many win a little; and by far the most part say two out of three lose, and often lose heavily. Voila tout! We have there the Iliad of gambling in a nutshell. You have been lucky enough yourself to win; that is well. And Monsieur your friend there pray, what has he done also?”

  “Lost sixteen hundred,” the Russian burst out with a sulky nod.

  The close-shaven gentleman smiled pleasantly. So the bank gains two hundred on the pair, it seems,” he murmured with a faint shrug. “Thank you, Monsieur: you prove my point. If ever I should be seized with a desire for gambling, which Heaven forbid, I shall gamble where the chances that make for me are at least as good as the chances that tell against me. I dislike a game where I must lose if I keep on long enough. I have no desire to increase the revenues of that amiable crowned head, the Prince of Monaco.”

  Hugh’s contempt for that man knew no bounds. A mere wretched purblind political economist, no doubt, reasoning and calculating on a matter like that, when he, Hugh, with his successful boldness, had a thousand pounds, neatly tucked away in gold and notes in his own trousers’ pockets! Thus do fools fling away fortunes! He laughed to scorn those London lawyers and money-lenders. Here was the true Eldorado indeed; here a genuine Pactolus flowed full and free through a Tom Tiddler’s ground of unimaginable wealth, unchecked in its course by seven per cent, or by mean barriers of collateral security. He would soon be rich rich, rich, for Elsie.

  CHAPTER XLV.

  PACTOLUS INDEED!

  After a sumptuous lunch, they returned to the rooms. To the rooms! say rather to the treasure-house of Croesus! On the steps, they passed a young English lad, who looked barely twenty. “Don’t tell mamma I played,” he was saying to a companion
ruefully as they passed him. “She’d break her heart over it, if she ever knew it.” But Hugh had no time to notice in passing the pathos of the remark. Who could bother his head about trifles like that, forsooth, when he’s coining his hundreds on the turn of a roulette table?

  He meant to win hundreds thousands now. He meant to build up a colossal fortune for Elsie, for Elsie.

  These years had taught him a certain sort of selfish unselfishness. It was no longer for his own use that he wanted money; he longed to lay it all down at Elsie’s feet. She was his Queen: he would do her homage.

  The tables had filled up three files deep with players by this time. Hugh had hard work to edge his way dexterously in between them: the Russian followed with equal difficulty. But a croupier, recognizing them, motioned both with a courteous wave of his hand to two vacant chairs he had kept on purpose. Men who win or lose large sums command respect instinctively at Monte Carlo. Hugh and the Russian had each qualified, on one or other of these opposite grounds, for a seat at the table. Hugh’s turn by the system, however, had not yet come on: he had to wait, according to his self-imposed law, till one of the four middle numbers should happen to turn up before he again began staking. So he gazed around with placid interest for some minutes at his crowded fellow-players. Success excites some nervous heads; it always made Hugh Massinger placid. There they sat and stood, not less, he thought, than five hundred busy men and women, fifty or sixty jostling one another round each separate board, playing away as if for dear life, and risking fortunes giddily on the jump of the pea in that meaningless little whirligig of a spinning roulette wheel. She was a German, he conjectured, that flat-faced impassive lady opposite, gambling cautiously but very high, and laden on her neck and arms and ears with an atrocious dead-weight of vulgarly expensive jewelry. Then the bold but handsome young girl at her side, with the exquisite bonnet and well-cut mantle, and the remarkably fullblown Pennsylvanian twang, must surely by her voice be an American citizen. By her voice and by her play; for she risked her broad gold hundred-franc pieces with trueborn American recklessness of consequence. And there, a little way off, stands a newly married Englishman, with his pretty small bride nestling close up to him in wifely expostulation. Hugh could even catch snatches of their whispered colloquy: “Don’t, George, don’t.”

  “Just this once, Nellie: a napoleon on red.” Black wins: he loses. H’m, the chances there are only even. If I win next time, I get nothing but my own napoleon back again. I’ll go it one better now: a nap on a column. Then if I win, you see, I get four times my stake, Nellie.” Lost again! How fast they rake it in! “Well, then, I’ll back a number this time.”

  “Oh, but, George dear, you know you really can’t afford it.” George, unabashed by her wifely reproof, plumps down his napoleon on 32. Whirr goes the roulette. “Dix-huit,” cries the croupier, and sweeps in the gold with a careless curve of his greedy hand-rake. Poor souls! In his heart, Hugh Massinger, was genuinely sorry for them. If only they had known his infallible system! But even as he thought it, he roused himself with a start Eighteen was one of the very numbers he had j ust been waiting for. No time for otiose reflections now; no time for foolish waste of sympathy; the moment had arrived for vigorous action. With a sharp decisive air, he plunged down a hundred louis on white. Bystanders stared and whispered and nudged one another. White won, and he took up his winnings with the utmost complacency. How quickly one accustoms one’s self to these big figures! A hundred louis seemed nothing now, in pursuance of the system. Then he glanced across at George, poor luckless George, with a mute inquiry. How that smooth-faced young Englishman envied him his success; for George, poor George, had lost again. “Madame,” Hugh said, addressing himself with an apologetic smile to the pretty young wife, “allow me to venture ten louis for you.” The blushing girl shrank back timidly. Hugh laid down ten pieces of gold on a number again, backing his own luck separately by the regular rule on a column of figures. Chance seemed to favor him; he was “in the vein,” as gamblers say in their hateful dialect. The number won for poor shrinking little Mrs. Nellie, and the column also won as well for Hugh himself. He pulled in his own pile of gold carelessly, and handed the other to the pretty young Englishwoman. “It isn’t ours,” she murmured with a shy look. “You mustn’t ask me; I really couldn’t take it.”’

  Hugh laughed, and pressed it on the anxious husband, who cast a sidelong glance at the heap of gold, and finally in some vague half-hearted way decided upon accepting it. “Now go,” Hugh said with a fatherly air. “You don’t understand this sort of thing, you know. You belong to the class predestined to be cheated. The sooner you leave this place the better. Let nothing induce you ever to risk another penny as long as you live at these precius tables.” We can all be so wise and prudent for others.

  “But it’s really yours,” the young Englishman went on, glancing down at it sheepishly. “You risked your own money, you see, to win it.”

  “Not at all,” Hugh answered with his pleasantest smile; he knew how to do a gracious act graciously. “I’ve taken back my own ten louis out of it for myself. The rest is your wife’s. I staked it in her name. It was her good luck alone that won for both of us. If you compel me to keep it, you spoil my break. A burst of fortune must end somewhere. Don’t stand in my way, please, for such a mere trifle.”

  The Englishman’s hand closed, half reluctantly, over the ill-gotten money, and Hugh, undisturbed, turned back again with a nod to his own gambling. The episode warmed him up to his work. A pleasant sense of a generous action prettily performed inspired and invigorated his play from that moment. He went on with his game with an approving conscience. Some people’s consciences approve so blandly. The other players, too, observed and applauded. Gamblers overflow with petty superstitions. One of their profoundest is the rooted belief that meanness and generosity brings each its due reward: whoever gambles in a lavish, free-hearted, openhanded way is sure, they think, to become the favorite of fortune.

  The Russian, on the other hand, kept on losing steadily. Now and again, indeed, he won for awhile on some great coup, raking in his fifty or a hundred louis; but that was by exception: for the most part, he fritted away his winnings time after time, and had recourse with alarming frequency of iteration to his bundle of notes, from which he changed a thousand francs every half-hour or so with persistent ill-fortune. Turn upon turn, he saw his money ruthlessly swept in by the relentless bank with unvarying regularity. Now it was zero that turned up, to confound his reckoning, and the croupier, with his bow, made a clean sweep, offhand, of the entire table: now it was a long succession of left-hand numbers that won with a rush, while he had staked his gold with unvarying mishap upon the right-hand column. It was agonizing each time to him to see the bank carelessly ladling out large sums to Hugh, while he himself went on losing and losing. But at all hazards, he would follow his calculations to the bitter end. Luck must have a turn somewhere; and at any rate, plunging would never improve matters. Hugh pitied him from his heart, poor ignorant devil. Why couldn’t he find out with an exercise of reason that obvious flaw in his own system?

  A thousand francs on seven! The table stares, gapes, and whispers. Heavy for a number! Who puts it on? This Monsieur on the seat here pointing to Hugh. The croupier shrugs his shoulder and spins. Out jumps the pea. Fourteen wins. Monsieur was very nearly right again, voyez-vous? Fourteen, my friend, is just the precise double of seven. Monsieur’s luck is something truly miraculous. He goes a thousand francs once more, still on seven. Ceil! but he has the courage of his convictions, monami! Twenty-three wins. Wrong again! He drops on that a second thousand. But with what grace! A thousand francs is nothing to these milords. Hugh smiles imperturbably and stakes a third. On seven again! The man is wonderful. What wins this time? “Sept gagne,” cries everybody in hushed admiration; and Hugh, more sphinx-like in his smile than ever, but conscious of a dozen admiring eyes fixed full upon him, takes coolly up his thirty-five thousand. Thirty-five thousand francs is not to be sn
eezed at. Fourteen hundred pounds sterling! The biggest haul yet, but nothing when you’re accustomed to it. What a run of luck! Monsieur was in the vein, indeed. He played on and on, more elated than ever. Af this rate, he would soon earn a fortune for Elsie.

  Elsie, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie! Through the din and noise of that crowded gambling-hell, one sacred name still rang distinct and clear in his ears. It w r as all for Elsie, for Elsie, for Elsie! He must make himself rich, to marry Elsie.

  He played on still with careless eagerness till the tables closed played with a continuous run of luck, often varying, of course for who minds a few hundreds to the bad now and then when he’s winning one time with another his thousands? but on the whole a run of luck persistently favorable. Raffalevsky, meanwhile, had played and lost. At the end of the day, as the lackeys came in to bow the world out with polite smiles, they both rose and left the rooms together. Then a sudden thought flashed across his soul. Too late to return to San Remo now! Awkward as it was, he must stop the night out at Monte Carlo. Full of himself of play and of Elsie he had actually forgotten all about Winifred!

  They walked across side by side to the Hotel de Paris. Hugh was far too feverishly excited now with his day’s play to care in the least about the slight and the insult to that poor dead girl. The mere indecency of it was all that he minded. A cynical hardness possessed him at last. Nobody need know. He strolled to the telegraph office and boldly sent off a message to the pension: