Chapter 2 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 ?acus 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."

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