"You certainly do seem to be one of our most prominent young hashers!"
gasped Sally.
"I am," said Ginger, modestly.
There was a silence.
"And what about Scrymgeour?" Sally asked.
"That was the last of the jobs," said Ginger. "Scrymgeour is a pompous old a.s.s who thinks he"s going to be Prime Minister some day. He"s a big bug at the Bar and has just got into Parliament. My cousin used to devil for him. That"s how I got mixed up with the blighter."
"Your cousin used...? I wish you would talk English."
"That was my cousin who was with me on the beach this morning."
"And what did you say he used to do for Mr. Scrymgeour?"
"Oh, it"s called devilling. My cousin"s at the Bar, too--one of our rising nibs, as a matter of fact..."
"I thought he was a lawyer of some kind."
"He"s got a long way beyond it now, but when he started he used to devil for Scrymgeour--a.s.sist him, don"t you know. His name"s Carmyle, you know. Perhaps you"ve heard of him? He"s rather a prominent johnny in his way. Bruce Carmyle, you know."
"I haven"t."
"Well, he got me this job of secretary to Scrymgeour."
"And why did Mr. Scrymgeour fire you?"
Ginger Kemp"s face darkened. He frowned. Sally, watching him, felt that she had been right when she had guessed that he had a temper. She liked him none the worse for it. Mild men did not appeal to her.
"I don"t know if you"re fond of dogs?" said Ginger.
"I used to be before this morning," said Sally. "And I suppose I shall be again in time. For the moment I"ve had what you might call rather a surfeit of dogs. But aren"t you straying from the point? I asked you why Mr. Scrymgeour dismissed you."
"I"m telling you."
"I"m glad of that. I didn"t know."
"The old brute," said Ginger, frowning again, "has a dog. A very jolly little spaniel. Great pal of mine. And Scrymgeour is the sort of fool who oughtn"t to be allowed to own a dog. He"s one of those a.s.ses who isn"t fit to own a dog. As a matter of fact, of all the blighted, pompous, bullying, shrivelled-souled old devils..."
"One moment," said Sally. "I"m getting an impression that you don"t like Mr. Scrymgeour. Am I right?"
"Yes!"
"I thought so. Womanly intuition! Go on."
"He used to insist on the poor animal doing tricks. I hate seeing a dog do tricks. Dogs loathe it, you know. They"re frightfully sensitive.
Well, Scrymgeour used to make this spaniel of his do tricks--fool-things that no self-respecting dogs would do: and eventually poor old Billy got fed up and jibbed. He was too polite to bite, but he sort of shook his head and crawled under a chair. You"d have thought anyone would have let it go at that, but would old Scrymgeour? Not a bit of it! Of all the poisonous..."
"Yes, I know. Go on."
"Well, the thing ended in the blighter hauling him out from under the chair and getting more and more shirty, until finally he laid into him with a stick. That is to say," said Ginger, coldly accurate, "he started laying into him with a stick." He brooded for a moment with knit brows.
"A spaniel, mind you! Can you imagine anyone beating a spaniel? It"s like hitting a little girl. Well, he"s a fairly oldish man, you know, and that hampered me a bit: but I got hold of the stick and broke it into about eleven pieces, and by great good luck it was a stick he happened to value rather highly. It had a gold k.n.o.b and had been presented to him by his const.i.tuents or something. I minced it up a goodish bit, and then I told him a fair amount about himself. And then--well, after that he shot me out, and I came here."
Sally did not speak for a moment.
"You were quite right," she said at last, in a sober voice that had nothing in it of her customary flippancy. She paused again. "And what are you going to do now?" she said.
"I don"t know."
"You"ll get something?"
"Oh, yes, I shall get something, I suppose. The family will be pretty sick, of course."
"For goodness" sake! Why do you bother about the family?" Sally burst out. She could not reconcile this young man"s flabby dependence on his family with the enterprise and vigour which he had shown in his dealings with the unspeakable Scrymgeour. Of course, he had been brought up to look on himself as a rich man"s son and appeared to have drifted as such young men are wont to do; but even so... "The whole trouble with you,"
she said, embarking on a subject on which she held strong views, "is that..."
Her harangue was interrupted by what--at the Normandie, at one o"clock in the morning--practically amounted to a miracle. The front door of the hotel opened, and there entered a young man in evening dress.
Such persons were sufficiently rare at the Normandie, which catered princ.i.p.ally for the staid and middle-aged, and this youth"s presence was due, if one must pause to explain it, to the fact that, in the middle of his stay at Roville, a disastrous evening at the Casino had so diminished his funds that he had been obliged to make a hurried shift from the Hotel Splendide to the humbler Normandie. His late appearance to-night was caused by the fact that he had been attending a dance at the Splendide, princ.i.p.ally in the hope of finding there some kind-hearted friend of his prosperity from whom he might borrow.
A rapid-fire dialogue having taken place between Jules and the newcomer, the keys were handed through the cage, the door opened and the lift was set once more in motion. And a few minutes later, Sally, suddenly aware of an overpowering sleepiness, had switched off her light and jumped into bed. Her last waking thought was a regret that she had not been able to speak at length to Mr. Ginger Kemp on the subject of enterprise, and resolve that the address should be delivered at the earliest opportunity.
CHAPTER III. THE DIGNIFIED MR. CARMYLE
1
By six o"clock on the following evening, however. Sally had been forced to the conclusion that Ginger would have to struggle through life as best he could without the a.s.sistance of her contemplated remarks: for she had seen nothing of him all day and in another hour she would have left Roville on the seven-fifteen express which was to take her to Paris, en route for Cherbourg and the liner whereon she had booked her pa.s.sage for New York.
It was in the faint hope of finding him even now that, at half-past six, having conveyed her baggage to the station and left it in charge of an amiable porter, she paid a last visit to the Casino Munic.i.p.ale. She disliked the thought of leaving Ginger without having uplifted him. Like so many alert and active-minded girls, she possessed in a great degree the quality of interesting herself in--or, as her brother Fillmore preferred to put it, messing about with--the private affairs of others.
Ginger had impressed her as a man to whom it was worth while to give a friendly shove on the right path; and it was with much gratification, therefore, that, having entered the Casino, she perceived a flaming head shining through the crowd which had gathered at one of the roulette-tables.
There are two Casinos at Roville-sur-Mer. The one on the Promenade goes in mostly for sea-air and a mild game called boule. It is the big Casino Munic.i.p.ale down in the Palace Ma.s.sena near the railway station which is the haunt of the earnest gambler who means business; and it was plain to Sally directly she arrived that Ginger Kemp not only meant business but was getting results. Ginger was going extremely strong. He was entrenched behind an opulent-looking mound of square counters: and, even as Sally looked, a wooden-faced croupier shoved a further instalment across the table to him at the end of his long rake.
"Epatant!" murmured a wistful man at Sally"s side, removing an elbow from her ribs in order the better to gesticulate. Sally, though no French scholar, gathered that he was startled and gratified. The entire crowd seemed to be startled and gratified. There is undoubtedly a certain altruism in the make-up of the spectators at a Continental roulette-table. They seem to derive a spiritual pleasure from seeing somebody else win.
The croupier gave his moustache a twist with his left hand and the wheel a twist with his right, and silence fell again. Sally, who had shifted to a spot where the pressure of the crowd was less acute, was now able to see Ginger"s face, and as she saw it she gave an involuntary laugh.
He looked exactly like a dog at a rat-hole. His hair seemed to bristle with excitement. One could almost fancy that his ears were p.r.i.c.ked up.
In the tense hush which had fallen on the crowd at the restarting of the wheel, Sally"s laugh rang out with an embarra.s.sing clearness. It had a marked effect on all those within hearing. There is something almost of religious ecstasy in the deportment of the spectators at a table where anyone is having a run of luck at roulette, and if she had guffawed in a cathedral she could not have caused a more pained consternation. The earnest worshippers gazed at her with shocked eyes, and Ginger, turning with a start, saw her and jumped up. As he did so, the ball fell with a rattling click into a red compartment of the wheel; and, as it ceased to revolve and it was seen that at last the big winner had picked the wrong colour, a shuddering groan ran through the congregation like that which convulses the penitents" bench at a negro revival meeting. More glances of reproach were cast at Sally. It was generally felt that her injudicious behaviour had changed Ginger"s luck.
The only person who did not appear to be concerned was Ginger himself.
He gathered up his loot, thrust it into his pocket, and elbowed his way to where Sally stood, now definitely established in the eyes of the crowd as a pariah. There was universal regret that he had decided to call it a day. It was to the spectators as though a star had suddenly walked off the stage in the middle of his big scene; and not even a loud and violent quarrel which sprang up at this moment between two excitable gamblers over a disputed five-franc counter could wholly console them.