CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH AN OLD GAMBLER (RETIRED FROM BUSINESS) TELLS OF A TRIUMPH, AND THE YOUNGER GENERATION IN LOVE COME UNDER REVIEW

On the way back Sir Gaston told us of an incident many years ago, when he did occasionally put something on a horse--not as a habit, but if he heard anything.

He had been staying, he said, with two friends for a fortnight in Ireland, fishing at a man named Regan's. One friend was Glenister, a curious obstinate fellow, now in India; the other was Horace Bradley, the K.C. The day before their last they were driving over to Rushtown to see the races, and on the way Captain O'Driscoll overtook them in his American buggy. I reconstruct Sir Gaston's story.

"'Going to the races?' O'Driscoll asked, as he slowed down for a moment. 'So'm I. See you there.' He clicked on, and then, stopping again, turned round to call out--'Don't forget Blackadder for the College Stakes. Dead cert. Put your shirts on,' and was again off.

"'All very well,' said Glenister thoughtfully, 'but where are our shirts? Speaking personally, my shirt is a return ticket to London and about eighteen shillings, which I shall need.'

"'Yes,' said Bradley. 'And I'm no better off, confound it!'

"'You forget,' said I, 'that I have a five-pound note in my pocket intended as our joint tip to old Rice.' (Rice was Regan's butler.) 'Lucky we decided to put it aside.'

"'Yes,' said Glenister, 'but that's the butler's.'

"'Not till to-morrow,' said I.

"'No,' said Bradley, 'not till to-morrow.'

"'But hang it all,' said Glenister, who was a precisian and adored his conscience, 'where are we if we put it on this horse and the beggar loses? I know these dead certs. It won't be Rice's to-morrow, then, will it? To my mind it's his now, and we ought to respect his ownership. It was to make sure of his having it that we gave it to the Goat to keep.'

"I was the Goat. How funny to think of it now! I haven't been called the Goat for hundreds of years."

"O father," said Ann, "may I call you the Goat?"

"Certainly not," said the Knight. "I admitted that Glenister was logical," he continued, "'but all the same,' I said, 'here's a straight tip, and it's a sin not to use it. One doesn't often get them, and to start a whole menagerie of sophistries in return is the kind of ingratitude that providence doesn't soon forgive.'

"'Of course,' said Bradley. 'The Goat's right. And, after all, there's no sense in being so infernally conscientious. A gamble's a gamble, and old Rice would be almost as pleased to hear that we had put his fiver on a horse as to have it shoved into his hand.'

"Glenister laughed. 'I say no more,' he said. 'You do what you like with the fiver. Personally, I shall have ten shillings on Blackadder to win, although why on earth we all swallow that soldier man's advice so unquestioningly I shall never understand.'

"'If the Goat will lend me two pounds,' said Bradley, 'I will back Blackadder for a pound each way.'

"'The Goat won't,' said I. 'All that the Goat proposes to do is to put the butler's fiver on to win.'

"This, later, I did, having found a bookmaker who was giving 10 to 1; and, true to Captain O'Driscoll's word, Blackadder romped in an easy winner.

"I collected the eleven rustling five-pound notes and stowed them carefully away inside my coat, and in the late afternoon we drove back. Naturally we had a good deal to say about the racing, our fortunate meeting with O'Driscoll, and so forth. And then suddenly Glenister remarked, 'I wonder what the old boy will do with it? Set up as a small tobacconist in Dublin, do you think?'

"'What old boy?' I asked.

"'Why, Rice, of course.'

"'You can't set up as a small tobacconist on five pounds,' said Bradley. 'At least, if you did, you'd be so small a tobacconist that your customers would want a microscope.'

"'Don't be an idiot,' said Glenister. 'He'll have fifty-five pounds, won't he?'

"Bradley and I were silent. This was a proposition that needed thought.

"'I don't see why he should have more than the fiver,' I said at last. 'It was all we were going to give him, wasn't it? You will admit that?'

"'Certainly,' said Glenister. 'It was his fiver, and you were keeping it for him, weren't you? You won't deny that?'

"'In a way I was,' I said.

"'O law!' groaned Bradley. 'What a hair-splitter!'

"'Very well, then,' said Glenister. 'You had Rice's five pounds and you gambled with it--in itself a jolly unprincipled thing to do, as it wasn't yours: poor devils are doing time all over the place for much less; and now, when your flutter turns up trumps, you deny him--who might have been your victim--the benefit! I call it downright mean--squalid, in fact.'

"'You make it sound rotten,' I said, 'but there's a fallacy somewhere. To begin with, as I said before, it isn't the butler's own money till to-morrow. He hadn't earned it till the end of our visit. If it wasn't his it is ours, and we could do as we liked with it. We did, and the result is we have now enough to divide up into sixteen pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence each, which I shall be pleased to give you directly we get back, while Rice has his fiver intact.'

"'Not for me,' said Glenister. 'I won five pounds with my own ten bob, and that's all I make out of Blackadder. I can't take your sixteen pounds odd, because it isn't mine. I may snore, as you agree to allege, but I'm not a thief.'

"'O law!' Bradley groaned again. 'My dear Glenister, you're talking like a Herbert Spencer sort of ass. All it means is that the Goat and I will have to take twenty-five pounds each?'

"'No,' said Glenister, 'you can't do that; because a third, at any rate, of the original fiver was mine, or, as I hold, the butler's, and he must have what that share made. You and the Goat can take the sixteen pounds odd each, but the butler must have my third and the original fiver besides. But I don't envy you your explanation to him.'

"'No,' I said after a while, 'either the butler must have all or none. I can see that.'

"'Dash the whole stupid business!' exclaimed Bradley. 'Let him have it all. We'll be generous.'

"'It belongs to him,' said Glenister. 'There's no generosity in the matter. There's nothing but justice or injustice.'

"'Very well,' Bradley snapped out. 'I'm tired of it. Next time I go to a race-meeting I'll take care it's not with a blooming Socrates.'

"'Then that's settled,' I said as cheerfully as I could. 'Rice has the lot.'

"'The lot,' said Glenister. 'I'll admit it's enough, but there's no other course.'

"We rode the rest of the way in disgust and silence, and then"--here Sir Gaston began to laugh--"and then the rummest thing happened. Regan's groom met us at the stable-yard and took the mare's head. He seemed to be unusually excited, and I wondered if he had learned that he too had backed a winner.

"'I'm afraid you'll find the house a bit upset,' he said to Glenister, 'but the fact is, there's been a little trouble while you were away. The butler's bolted. It seems he's been dishonest for a long time, and to-day he thought the game was up and ran.'

"We looked at each other and then a threefold sigh rent the air.

"Bradley suddenly began to roll with laughter.

"Glenister for a while did not speak. Then, 'I'll trouble you,' he said to me, 'for sixteen pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence, and the third of a five-pound note."

I wondered what were Sir Gaston's feelings as to his prospective son-in-law's gambling propensities, and later, on the way back, he enlightened me.

"It's an odd business, this," he said, "to you and me, for I take it that you, like myself, were brought up in a middle-class way by quiet and God-fearing parents. Here we are with a lot of young people doing a thing which my father would have heartily disapproved of, and which we should have the greatest difficulty in defending if we were accused of it in public by a professional religious man or enthusiastic philanthropist. You, of course, would have a comparatively easy time. You would come out merely as a retired gentleman from abroad who was interested in social customs. But I--I am a Government servant and the father of a young girl who is going to marry this racing habitué. What sort of a case should I have?"

"Well, if it comes to that," I said, "what sort of case does one ever have while the prosecution is talking? Personally, I always agree with my own censors, although dimly I am conscious that there is another side to the case--mine--if only it could be made articulate. All the same, I too have been considering the question of young Heathcote. When are they going to marry?"

"I haven't a notion," said Sir Gaston. "All I know is that it will be later rather than sooner. My daughter is out for what she calls a good time--by which, of course, she means an irresponsible one. She has enough instinct and good feeling to realize that once she is married irresponsibility will cease. She has not enough emotional dependence to be impatient for marriage. Heathcote seems to me precisely similar in temperament. Hence I look upon them as two of the most enviable creatures living. I sit and watch them at their superficial jokes and superficial wranglings, and most of all at their frivolous plan-makings for the morrow, and consider them the heirs of the ages in the happiest sense. The best of it is that both are really exceedingly sensible, and it only needs a shock--such as standing at the altar steps in their best clothes, with a really serious person in a surplice saying really serious things--to steady them for life. Ann, who has already shown her capacity for work and routine, having learned typing thoroughly in an office, will instantly become a wife and Heathcote instantly a husband. He will adopt regular habits, come home to lunch, and very likely keep accounts. The very harmless form of wild oats that they are sowing now I don't fear in the least. I should be much more alarmed if they were always embracing and whenever they walked out he took her arm and they were both hastening the wedding: then I should fear that the flame might die down too quickly, and trouble follow. But these two--they're all right. They have a public contempt for each other which contains the best promise."

I dare say Sir Gaston is right. He seems to be shrewd. But his remarks caused me to press Naomi's hand under the rug with more than usual fondness.

Yet Ann was not really selfish, even if she shared with her father a perversity which made her willing to appear so; for when once we found ourselves in a block, and were conscious of the crying of a small child, with its mother, father, and two other children in a donkey barrow, it was Ann who saved the situation. Never have I heard such pitiful wailing. The mother was tired and cross, and in no mood to be patient with it; the father was cross too, and the other children began to whimper in sympathy. Before anyone knew what she was about, Ann had jumped out of the car, taken the child from its mother, and was giving it one of Dollie's expensive chocolate creams and saying pretty crooning things to it. The mother and other children had the rest of the box, and in a short time all were happy again.

"But although it amuses me to watch them," Sir Gaston continued, "I can't find much real satisfaction in it. My other daughter, Alison, is completely lost to me, except for letters, for her husband has taken her to Ceylon. And now Ann is going; and deprived of any society of the younger generation, which, however it may irritate us at times, helps us to keep young and in touch with the day (I can say 'topping' with the best of them, although 'wow-wow' is beyond me), I have no alternative but to become old. And old age has no kind of attractiveness. I have no patience with people who profess to enjoy growing old. They merely remind one of those lines of the American poet:

Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins.

Speaking for myself, who am nearing sixty, I would say that the only piece of satisfaction that the process of ageing has brought to me is the knowledge that the word 'unshrinkable' has no real basis in fact. But I do not call myself really old yet. Not till a young woman offers me her seat in a railway compartment will that tragedy really be mine. At that moment I shall know that all is up."