Chapter IX

The Casino

Monte Carlo, justly reputed one of the loveliest spots on earth, is most magically beautiful perhaps when seen from the sea, or from the long, low, wooded headland of Cap Martin.

Thence, on her first visit one golden afternoon, Ermengarde enjoyed a most poetic vision of it, never forgotten and never surpassed. She had left her party, and was basking on a shore thick set with rich-fruited, wind-stunted myrtle and rosemary bushes, the odours of which mingled with pine scents and sweet, sharp sea-breath, while she listened to the soft boom of waves plunging in white, azure-shadowed foam on the rocks at the point, where the sea is more intensely blue than anywhere else and the foam whiter, yet always with that faint azure tinge in shadow.

From this point landwards an enchanting prospect spreads in long-drawn splendour from the gracefully sweeping outline of Bordighera, running far out to sea on the right, to that faint and fairy headland, whence rise the Provençal mountains, so bold in outline, in substance so dim and shadowy, beyond the abrupt crags of the Tête du Chien, which hold Monte Carlo as in a cup. Between these points the great Alpine amphitheatre sweeps grandly back in lofty, soaring outline, enclosing a rich and sunny Paradise of gorge and ridge and mountain spur, running in headland after headland, with tower-crested town, village, garden, and wood, into the clear dark sea. There, beyond the Italian frontier, sits Ventimiglia throned with many towers high above the waves, and there a white pyramidal mass of houses, based on the harbour arches on a sea-fronting steep and topped by a slender church-tower that dominates all for many a mile, is Mentone, regally beautiful. Here little Roccabruna shoulders itself into the sparkling blue, and in mountain recesses far behind it is many a hill village up to the very peaks. On that afternoon the battered Roman tower of Turbia showed clear on its craggy bluffs against the sky above Monte Carlo, but the ravine beneath and Monte Carlo itself were veiled in purply shadow, mystic, dim.

The song of the breakers was lulling; the air, spiced with myrtle and sea-scent, sweet and stimulating; the fullness of colour a joy nothing could blight. Old happy rambles between cliff and sea, as a child, a bride, a young mother, came to mind, all the beauty of many lovely sea places gathered up in, and falling short of, this, which still wanted the cream and salt of all, the loves and companionships of old, young days--a thought that drew tears, not wholly sad.

Presently a silvery-grey cloud gathered over the Tête du Chien, and suddenly the whole shadowed hill-cup holding Monte Carlo, with Monaco sitting on the steep rock beneath it in the sea, flashed out, clear-cut and distinct in every detail. The broad hollow of the gorge, up to the very crags almost, seemed full of white buildings set in rich dark verdure, and crowding down to the water's edge. Fleets of tiny fishing-vessels cruised about round Monaco, and yachts, both white-sailed and steam-funnelled, flitted over the paling sea and rode at anchor in the harbour, the whole composing a picture of loveliness beyond imagining.

The thin man was in despair. He was an impressionist; and having had his painting things and himself conveyed hither and set down among the rosemary and lentisk, on purpose to record impressions, was so stunned and bewildered by the multitudes that rushed crowding in every variety of loveliness upon him, that he could only sit on his camp-stool with his easel before him, and hold his head in his hands and groan.

"Seize Monte Carlo!" Ermengarde shouted to him from her distant boulder when it flashed out, one glorious pearl, under the silvery cloud, and he seized and painted it with a trembling hand before it vanished and the great hill-cup was again a mass of purple shadow. The impression was faint, but the thin man was eternally grateful to Ermengarde for that, and for her further command to snap up Mentone, majestically enthroned above a glowing sapphire sea, and framed by wind-twisted pines, which threw ruddy stems and blue-black crowns from the low shore across it. And though another injunction to impress the long hill-spur running down to Bordighera, when it changed from indigo to warm deep violet with heliotrope shadings, plunged Mr. Welbourne back to despair, his gratitude broke out in a generous impulse.

"Let us go to Monte Carlo to-morrow," he cried. "Give me the pleasure of your company, Mrs. Allonby, since you don't care to go alone. It is not as terrible as you suppose."

"Well, why not? Only don't speak of it, or Miss Boundrish will manage to nip in again."

The thin man was really very handy on occasion; he made a respectable and entirely biddable escort, and, knowing so many people of Mrs. Allonby's acquaintance and being cousin to most of them, seemed more like an elderly relative than a chance acquaintance. He knew many things, and well knew how to talk; his old-fashioned pedantry and fulness of phrase was forgiven, as being in character with his neutral-tinted, old-bachelor personality; he impressed Ermengarde as a sort of social sofa-cushion, restful, harmless, and very useful in travelling.

"The success of any ramble, picnic, excursion, or small party," he added pensively, "depends entirely on arithmetic. No matter of what elements the party be composed, the addition or subtraction of one may spoil all," a pronouncement heartily endorsed by Ermengarde, as expressing her own feelings on the subject, though she had not guessed at what person's subtraction he was obscurely hinting as ruinous to his enjoyment. Nor did she for a moment suspect that, in arranging the Monte Carlo afternoon for two performers only, she had sadly diminished poor Mr. Welbourne's pleasure. Since the Carnival, the woman of mystery had not been asked to accompany Mrs. Allonby anywhere, nor had the two ladies once helped each other to dress or exchanged small talk from their adjoining rooms, which communicated by a door. A woman who received jewellery from one mask and letters from another, and held conversations and clandestine meetings with at least two suspicious male characters, was not a desirable acquaintance for a grass widow and a mother of unimpeachable respectability. Yet Ermengarde's heart misgave her when she met the silent question of Agatha's melancholy eyes at any approach to companionship on her part meeting with repulse. She hated herself especially the morning after the Cap Martin excursion when, with the full intention of spending the afternoon at Monte Carlo, she declined a mountain walk with Agatha on the ground that it was less tiring to bask in the sunny garden at home.

"Then I think I will run down to Mentone," Agatha said, in a confidence untouched by suspicion. "I have an invalid friend in the place who likes me to come in to luncheon sometimes."

After all, could there be anything more restful than these quiet lounges by train from spacious halls of leisure, called Gares in that country? the thin man and Ermengarde wondered, as they sauntered about the clean and airy emptiness of Mentone Station, and chanced to take seats in a train that happened to be strolling in the direction of France, and was entirely composed of first-class carriages, well-cushioned, and provided with antimacassars of spotless crochet-work. Other people as casually strolled over and rested, as if by happy chance, in the clean and comfortable carriages, and after some time, enjoyably spent with a prospect of sea and mountain and near view of palm and garden and sunny street, it seemed to occur to the person lounging upon the engine to propel the string of carriages gently in the direction of France, and they glided through the now familiar but never-lessening enchantment of rich scenery between mountain and sea, always plunging into the tunnelled darkness whenever a fairy headland ran out into blue and foam-fringed bays.

But what talk they heard on this fairy progress! The tongues were many, but the subject one alone. For example--

"You'll hardly be at the tables to-night, Ethel?"

"Why not? Easy to unpack and settle in before dinner. And only staying three weeks, a pity to lose a night."

"True, I shall put in a couple of hours before dinner as well as after."

Again, in Teutonic accents, "So Hedwig leaves next week?"

"Yes, her husband says they are thoroughly tired of Monte Carlo."

"So? I thought Hedwig had lost rather heavily of late. And Hermann's luck has evidently turned too."

Or it was, "System this, system that," and, "So many francs to the good at the end of the week," and the wonderful run of So-and-so's luck, and M. Tel-et-tel winning five hundred francs in half an hour, and the positive madness of putting anything on a number that had just turned up, and why _à travers_ meant so much, and how a cool head and an accurate memory of the winning numbers of the last six or seven turns were absolutely necessary to work any system.

"But why," Ermengarde tragically demanded, "come to the loveliest spot on earth to do this devilry? A disused coal-mine would do equally well to gamble in."

The thin man conjectured that very likely the devil likes to kill two birds with one stone. "Because," he sighed, "the moment a beautiful and pleasant spot is discovered in any corner of the earth, he incites people to build flaring hotels and villas upon it, and run railways to it; and, if there is sea, to block it from sight with ghastly buildings, and spoil its strand with sea-walls and piers and promenades; and, if there are trees, to cut them down or blast them with smoke and chemicals; and, if there are mountains, to scar and tunnel them with lines of smut and iron; and, if meadows and grassy slopes commanding lovely prospects, to destroy their beauty and make rasping noises and knock balls over them all day. He gets people to rush in herds to places made for beauty and calm, to chatter and snigger and look at fashionable clothes-shops emptied on thoughtless females from every capital in Europe, and gorge themselves upon all the luxuries and vices of towns. And the lovelier the spot the greater satisfaction the devil seems to take in getting men to practise ugly and squalid sins in it, and to corrupt and degrade simple and sane folk for miles round it."

By this time they were crammed like sardines with others in a close box, that; by some invisible and probably diabolic agency, was drawn up to a higher level, upon which they were contumeliously ejected by a morose official who had previously mulcted them of small coin. Then, passing under avenues of wondrous exotic trees, by beds blazing with cyclamens, carnations, salvias, and petunias, and passing rivulets dancing and rippling down rocks covered with maidenhair and broadening in pools half hidden by water lilies, they emerged upon a terrace fronting a vast blue splendour, firmly rimmed beneath a nearly white band of sky, and bounded by the purple of Bordighera on one side, and Monaco, running out on its rock beneath the headland of Cap d'Ail on the other. And in the foreground, dainty steam and sailing yachts, some moored, some flitting over the sunny sea, and crowds of fishing-boats dotted here and there.

"But what is that?" she asked, pointing to a sort of jetty topped with sickly green, like a worn and dirty billiard table, and dotted with rough deal boxes, that projected its squalor into the pure blue waves below.

The crack of a shot from under their feet startled her, and the simultaneous opening of a box, out of which fluttered a wounded pigeon, pursued to the edge of the billiard-table and killed there by a dog, answered her question, telling her that this sordid hideousness drawing every eye, in the very centre of the fairy-like beauty, was the world-famed _Tir aux Pigeons_.

There was no escaping from the sight except by turning from the lovely circle of bays and mountain spurs, to look upon the flaring vulgarity of the Casino, with its sprawling nudities affronting the pure sky, and flocks of tail-clipped birds flitting about the cornices and pediments, scurrying out at every shot that slaughtered one of their kindred in full sight below. Crack! Crack! Crack! the shots jarred on the nerves. Ermengarde hurried her halting escort away through the strange Arabian Nights' magnificence of the gardens that spread everywhere, flowing round hotels and shops and houses, and glowing in weird luxuriance beneath the grim grey mountain bluff and its dark wooded gorge.

Here was every variety of palm, with agaves and pepper-trees, caroubs and myrtles, geraniums in trees many feet high, or trailing over rocks, ruddy-leaved and grey-stemmed; here great cacti writhed and swelled in reptilian forms, and certain huge bushes of prickly pears, their broad fleshy leaves like goblin hands outspread, their grey, distorted stems like the fossil bones of huge extinct animals, and their dull-red, prickly fruit like oozing blood, suggested nothing so much as those trees in the Inferno, that bled at touch and were lost, living souls.

This strange exotic luxuriance has something infernal in its beauty; the darkly massed foliage, in hard contrast with the white glare of flaunting hotels and restaurants and the marble and gilding and flamboyant style of the Casino, gives the whole a violence, a crude insistence of wealth and luxury, in harmony with the spirit of the place, and much at variance with its superb natural setting and associations.

"And what people! Oh, what people!" Ermengarde murmured to the thin man, who was glad to sit down and pretend to listen to the band and watch the crowd strolling and sitting outside the Café de Paris. "What tawdriness, what dowdiness, what Parisian elegance run wild! Look at that woman; she has six purses at her belt. You can see the gold through the net. She's going into the Casino--let us go too!"

"So young, so fair, and so very business-like! Yes, beneath that Parisian hat, in that expensive Parisian raiment, is the cool and calculating brain and steady nerve of a financier. She has a system and works it, Mrs. Allonby."

How tawdry and tarnished was the vaunted splendour of the Casino, and how wearisome the formalities exacted before admittance to the gaming-hall!

"Such meddlesome impertinence. The man actually asked my age," Ermengarde complained.

"Ah! they don't ask mine," sighed the artist, whose head already showed the silver touch of time; "they are quite sure that I am of _âge majeur_."

Most places have their characteristic odour. That of Mentone is garlic, with a suspicion of sewage; that of the _Salle de Jeu_ is a fine blend of garlic, old clothes, musk, and money--especially paper money. The garlic is mostly contributed by hollow-eyed croupiers, who are in some measure responsible for the old clothes, an odour otherwise due to grave elderly persons, chiefly female, in garments of indescribable frumpishness and respectability, who form the staple of the afternoon congregation, and seem to contemplate life and its agreeable weaknesses from a standpoint of ferocious piety.

Surely they must have dropped into a prayer-meeting by mistake. Ermengarde looked round for the minister, after some seconds' contemplation of long green tables covered with coin and diagrams, and surrounded by treble and quadruple rows of staid and solemn faces, "all silent and all damned." This congregation was apparently listening with hushed reverence to spasmodic, low-muttered words of wisdom from a priestly person flavoured with garlic, who appeared to be consulting some oracle, or celebrating some religious rite, by turning a brass wheel in a basin sunk in the table, and surrounded by votive offerings in the shape of rolls and rolls of five-franc pieces and golden louis in glittering, provocative piles.

Besides these muttered spells in which, after long listening, she could only make out occasionally "ne va plus"--"rouge"--"treize"--"vingt-sept," the only sound was the perpetual clink of coins, which after every utterance began to dance from hand to hand and fly hither and thither, as if trying to evade the incessant pursuit of small wooden rakes and clutching hands sparkling with diamonds, grimed with long-established dirt, white and brown, yellow and black, red, skinny, and fat. Sometimes two hands clutched the same pile of coin, when there were hurried mutterings and looks of suppressed fury; anon a wooden rake smote an encroaching paw urgently from its golden prey, and there was silence.

On what principle the piles of gold and sheaves of fluttering notes before each worshipper by the little books of ritual they consulted so devoutly, were increased and diminished, was a mystery to the spectator, who saw nothing but a mystic and subtly woven dance of coins and notes crossing and recrossing over the morrice of the green table with rhythmic intermittance, dependent upon the dark utterance of him who turned the wheel. But little by little she gathered that coin placed in one way increased or diminished two-fold, in another five-fold, in another thirty-fold, and found herself handing louis and notes from those behind to the croupier for change, and gloating over the golden multitudes that came rolling to the calm worshippers. The thin man, easily tired and overcome by evil air, had been compassionately despatched to a café to wait for her; he had modestly owned to a weakness for staking a couple of louis now and again for pastime; this lowered him perceptibly in his companion's esteem.

But when he was gone and the glittering heaps had wrought their mesmerism, he was more leniently judged; and certain five-franc pieces in Mrs. Allonby's bag seemed to ask aloud to play a part in the morrice dance on the green; they even worked their way out, after a little, and insisted on planting themselves in certain squares, returning--she never knew how or why--with a partner apiece, and bringing a pleasant glow to their owner's cheek.

"You have never played before?" asked a genial English voice at her elbow. "Would you mind putting this across that corner for me for luck?"

She willingly placed the louis on the corner of the four spaces indicated, scarcely glancing at the player, who was sitting in the front row, with notebook and pencil, piles of coin and notes, all in most business-like array before him; but when he turned and looked up to bow his thanks, with a sudden sweet smile on his grave and anxious face, she recognized the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Carnival. She had been so intent on the morrice, and he so near below her, only the close-cropped head, bent over the pencilled calculations, visible, that she had not recognized him until he turned.

Even as he smiled, the anxious gravity returned to his white, drawn face, to study which she silently changed her position near a croupier. He turned quickly back, and once more riveted his eyes to the table, with a wolfish eagerness that destroyed the young debonnair beauty of his face, and drew lines of age and fatigue upon it. Then the wheel stopped, the brass ball clicked into a niche in the basin, and the player's face changed and his eyes glittered, as the louis came home with a whole troop rolling after them. On this he looked up with another smile and bow, that somehow made her sorry for him and wonder if he had a mother.

Just then a sickening smell of musk, and a pretty substantial push from a gorgeously clad shoulder, made her turn to find herself edged vigorously aside by the painted woman who had ridden down the ridge with him that first afternoon at Les Oliviers. Shrinking from the unholy contact, Ermengarde quickly gave place to her, and, passing behind the croupier to a gap between the heads of two short people, saw the countess bend down and accost the young man, who looked up, worried and impatient, but after some interchange of question and answer, reluctantly yielded his golden spoil to her greedy clutch, and turned again with knitted brows to his calculations and annotations, receiving in reward an unacknowledged pat on the shoulder from the diamond-covered hand, that looked like a glittering claw.

The five-franc pieces in the bag again became restive; everybody, including the woman of the bistred eyes, seemed to be winning. A vision of a gown--a plain white serge coat and skirt, simply but exquisitely cut, and only costing eighteen guineas--floated before Mrs. Allonby's mental gaze. Since seeing it in a shop in Mentone, she had sighed to think of the infrequency of guineas in a world like this, and of the desirability of white tailor-made raiment of exquisite cut for a woman like her. White was the most becoming wear, almost the only wear for this climate; and white serge, when one came to think of it, was the sole material absolutely fit for blazing sunshine and sharp air. The white serge that arrayed her at the moment would not be white much longer; it had already begun to leave off being white. Absurd to come to a place like this without proper clothes. Eighteen guineas was not very dear for such a cut as that; sheer folly to think of getting anything in a foreign winter resort at London or Paris prices. Considering the cost of carriage and customs and the profit of the Mentone shopkeeper, the thing was dirt cheap. Moreover, it was absolutely necessary. And here; threading the green mazes of the morrice-dance, were gold and silver coins in moving multitudes, only waiting to be raked in by the enterprising. Two of her five-franc pieces soon sat on the corner intersecting the four spaces so lucky to Cyrano, and with like result. Her heart began to play quick marches, and her eyes to lighten; she was undoubtedly a lucky person; she staked here and staked there, and the coins came rolling in till she felt a little dizzy, and scarcely knew that on one occasion a marauding claw clutched some of her lawful spoil.

Now she staked more and more wildly, confident in her luck, and always won. Her cheeks burnt, her pulses leapt; people looked at her with envy, hatred and malice. A gold louis rolling towards her hopped off the table, unobserved by her; a liveried attendant came behind unseen, with a lighted lantern at the end of a stick, and pushed it amongst people's feet and under the table, while a man with a vacuous face, staring aimlessly about the hall, set his foot quite casually on the coin, not seeming to observe the attendant looking for it with the lantern, and then, without appearing to make any movement, lounged carelessly on with the same vacuous look, but leaving no corn where his foot had been.

Two hundred francs in notes had jumped into Ermengarde's bag, which was stuffed to bursting with gold and silver besides. The coat and skirt was hers many times over. It would be mean to stop now; besides, it was impossible to turn from the magic of that flowing tide of gold and silver; the feeling of possession and power, and the enchantment of successfully daring that wild blind demon of chance, was too strong. People had made fortunes in a night; why not she? She placed a little pile of gold _à travers_; the wheel stopped, and the croupier pushed her pile to the bank. She bit her lip, frowned, staked again, and lost again. Cowardly to draw back now; who was going to give in? Another golden stake, and her pile came back doubled. Of course; fortune always favours the brave.

But at the end of another half-hour the croupier had been changed; many players had come and gone from the outer ranks of that table, the inner circle remaining unbroken, except that Cyrano had vanished unnoticed by Ermengarde, who saw nothing but the whirling wheel, the dancing ball, and the flying mazes of the great five-franc pieces and louis d'or over the green table. Nothing now remained in her bag but a few odd coins raked from every recess, and together making five francs, for which an obliging neighbour gave her a broad silver piece.

Her luck at that table was clearly gone; she left it, selected another, and, after a short calculation and some watching of the play, set her teeth, and placed her five-franc piece with a shaking hand on a carefully chosen square. The little demon of a ball clicked into place; the ruthless rake pushed her stake to the bank.

The game was up; Mrs. Allonby found herself three minutes later standing on the Casino steps in the pure air, feverish and faint from the reaction and the fetid atmosphere of the gambling-room, vainly trying to remember where Mr. Welbourne had promised to wait for her, and minus not only the usual contents of her purse, but also minus the note that was to have paid a week's bill at Madame Bontemps's little office before starting that afternoon, and a couple of hundred franc notes, tucked into a pocket of the bag besides. In view of attractive apparel and bric-à-brac sure to be found in the sumptuous shops, those hundred franc notes were, indeed, sadly insufficient; but without them what was to be done?

Clearly the only thing now was to get a cup of tea at the café immediately opposite, where people were sitting in the sunshine and a band was playing delightfully. Surely Mr. Welbourne had said Café de Paris, or was it Giro's? No; he could never have walked so far as to Giro's. It was important to find him, else there could be no tea. She was too tired to look for him, too tired to do anything but sit down very wearily; however, she set out to find him, knowing he could not be far away.

But the spare, slim figure with the slight halt and the grizzled hair was nowhere to be found, either in the moving crowd or among the groups at the little tables; she had not even the price of a twopenny chair, much less of a cup of tea, and where was all that fine moral indignation of the early afternoon?

The band played triumphantly to a climax, and ended on a grand crash of all instruments; the sun, hidden under a floating cloud, shone gloriously out again, and there, in the blaze among the promenaders, showed conspicuously the graceful figure of M. Isidore, gay as ever, faultlessly dressed, wearing his hat with the little rakish tilt of gilded French youth, and talking with easy and familiar vivacity to a youngish woman, arrayed in the last and most refined Parisian style, and with that unmistakable air of being in the higher social world that is the exclusive property of no nation. The handsome couple stopped, exchanged a few final words, and parted, M. Isidore turning with lifted hat to shoot a last Parthian arrow of wit that sent the lady off, after a gesture of reproval, with heaving shoulders and eyes brimming with laughter. It was then that M. Isidore perceived Mrs. Allonby, and came smiling with raised hat towards her, with "Ah, Madame, you too? Have you also tried your luck at the tables?" and would have gone by, but that she cried joyously, "What a happy chance to meet you, M. Isidore! I have lost my last centime and mislaid Mr. Welbourne, and am positively dying for a cup of tea."