Richard Marsh

“ He threw out his arms as if appealing to the gods of the gallery.
"Confound it; is a gentleman to be reduced to ask for the loan of a trumpery five-pound note!"
"Though he asks, he will not get it."
He looked at Lucy, as if he could not believe she was in earnest. Then he sighed, or groaned. His hat, which he had been holding in his hand, he replaced upon his head. Throwing his overcoat wide open, he began to examine his pockets, methodically, one by one, as if he searched for something. ”

“ Lord Archibald spun round like a teetotum, a decanter in one hand, a tumbler in the other.
"A woman? Reggie? You--you don't mean Miss Jardine?"
Mr. Townsend's lips curled. In some subtle way his countenance was transfigured. The ease and the carelessness vanished. He became all bitterness and gall.
"Beaupré, I am inclined to think that you are the most consummate ass of my acquaintance. Why will you perpetually harp upon a single string? You are so utterly inept that the wonder is I have borne with you so long. Might I ask you not eternally to play the fool?" ”

“ I drew a cheque on a sheet of paper.
"Now, Archie, if you please, let us see your hand."
He faced his cards.
"A straight flush!" he cried.
For a moment he took my breath away. That he could have drawn two cards for a straight flush had not entered into my philosophy. My next feeling was that the thing looked ugly. For a man with a straight flush in his hand to propose to increase the stakes was--well, not the thing. While words were coming near my lips, Pendarvon leaned towards him.
"Where is your straight flush? Show it us?" Then, with a laugh, "That's not a straight flush." ”

“ No one is talking of anything else, and some of them talk of it to me. It only wants Mr. Townsend to favour me with a few remarks, and Tommy to add a postscript, to make me begin to think that I must be dreaming.
They have found the porter who saw me into the train at Brighton, and he has declared that the corpse is me! What a sweet creature that porter man must be! And they have found the porter who saw Tommy get out of the empty, blood-stained carriage at Victoria. But how they have found Tommy himself I don't, as yet, altogether understand. I know they have not found me. ”

“ Pendarvon was restless, fidgety, fussy, continually on the watch for something to happen, not in the room, but out of it. He was like a person who has an appointment of the first importance, and who is devoured with anxiety lest the individual with whom he has the appointment should fail to keep it. Mr. Townsend's mood, on the other hand, seemed almost transcendental. His physical beauty, uncommon both in type and in degree, seemed to-night to have positively increased. ”

“ Townsend sat and stared at me as if doubting whether I spoke the truth.
"May I ask you, in my turn, what you know about this mysterious Louise O'Donnel?"
He looked down, and then up at me. He smiled, his smile striking me as being more than a little forced.
"That is the funny part of it. I, too, know nothing of Louise O'Donnel--no more than you do."
"It seems odd that you should take so great an interest in a person of whom you know nothing." ”

“ Indeed, Mr. Townsend's manner, even more than his answer, seemed to increase the general feeling of uneasiness which was beginning to dominate the room.
Suddenly there was the sound of a click. With a rapidity which, in its way, was comic, all eyes were fixed upon the dial-plate. Its mechanism had been set in motion. The familiar movements followed.
"There he is!" exclaimed a voice.
Mr. Silvester added, with a show of hilarity which was slightly forced, "Better late than never!"
Mr. Pendarvon sounded the gong, seemingly in a state of fevered agitation. ”

“ If you will give me your address, I will forward you your handkerchief. Or, if you prefer it, I will deposit with you its value."
"Sir, I am a gentleman." He drew himself up with an assumption of dignity which was so overdone as to be ludicrous. The two last words he repeated--"A gentleman!"
"I do not doubt it. It is I who may not be a gentleman."
"I, sir, can tell a gentleman when I see one." He laid a stress upon the personal pronoun, as if he wished me to infer that such clearness of vision might be a personal peculiarity. "I will give you my address in the cab." ”

“ The same thing occupied my thoughts in the cab as on the night before--my friend the gentleman. Whatever could have made him do the thing which he had done? That is, if Kate's Reginald Townsend was mine--of which, by the way, I had no doubt. A man may be all that's bad; he may be worse than a murderer, but he takes particularly good care not, if he can help it, to be the thing itself. What could it be which, in the judgment of a man in his position, had compelled him to place himself within the shadow of the gallows? ”

“ He was as nice as could be--allusive, as a real smart man can be, with a delicate, intangible directness almost equal to a woman's.
We were almost like old friends by the time that we reached town. He put me into a hansom at Victoria station. I asked him to come and see me, to have consideration for my loneliness. He promised that he would. All the way home, as the cab bore me through the streets, I kept thinking of Mr. Reginald Townsend--that was the name which he had given me--and of the woman he had left, lying by the line, amidst that clump of bushes. ”

“ Mr. Bates sat down. If Tommy had told him that I had had too much to drink he had told as big a story as was ever told.
"Call George Baxendale!"
Mr. Baxendale was the first gentlemanly-looking witness who had appeared in the box; he was also the one who seemed to be least at his ease. He was a tall, fair, slightly built man, with long, drooping moustache, the ends of which he had a nervous trick of twisting. He glanced towards the dock with what he possibly intended to be a friendly smile. The distortion of his visage, however, which actually took place, more strongly resembled a ghastly grin. ”

“ The fates alone knew where the cash was to come from if I lost--unless it came from Sir Haselton Jardine, against which possibility the odds seemed pretty strong. Pendarvon raised me five thousand more. Archie realised at last that he could not see us unless we chose to let him--and that we did not mean to let him. He threw down his cards with a curse--it being a bad habit of his to use strong language when, if he only knew it, milder words would serve him at least equally well. One can damn so effectively with a softly-uttered blessing. ”

“ If we are to go to the devil, we'll all travel the same road. But there is one thing on which I do insist. I insist on your ceasing your connection with the Jardines."
"You insist?"
"I beseech you, then."
"I don't wish to say anything which may sound at all unkind, but don't you think, my dear Archie, that you are taking rather a liberty in intruding yourself into my affairs? The accident of our both being members of the same club gives you no warrant for anything of the kind. It certainly gives you none which I am likely to recognise even in the faintest degree." ”

“ By degrees, as Silvester's sulkiness increased, the game resolved itself into a sort of triangular duel. Archie went for Pendarvon, and Pendarvon went for me. As he found, for the most part, that his assaults were unavailing, and that my mood was beatific, Pendarvon began to follow Silvester's lead and lose his temper. Not, however, on Silvester's lines. The more enraged he grew, the more he laughed. I knew the gentleman so well. ”

“ I retired; a pair of aces was not quite good enough for that. If I was to be broken, I might just as well be broken for something better. Pendarvon looked at Archie as if he would have liked to have seen right into him.
"Have you the Bank of England at your back?"
"What are you going to raise me?" inquired Archie.
"Nothing. I go. The courage is yours. I opened with a pair of jacks."
Pendarvon showed them. I doubt if he had anything more. I doubt if Archie had as much. But, still, ten thousand. The average man is not inclined to go as far as that upon a pair of jacks. ”

“ There is something about unlimited poker which appeals to one. The spirit of the gamble gets into one's veins like the breath of the battle into the nostrils of the soldier. One feels that it is a game for men, and that the manhood which is in one has a chance to score. Archie evidently meant going for the gloves. He never bet less than a hundred, and a thousand--in pencil on a scrap of paper--was as nothing to him. ”

“ So I gave him the hundred pounds which he demanded, bitterly conscious all the while of what a fool I was for giving it.
He would not take my cheque. Nothing would do for him but gold. I had to send a clerk to the bank to get it. He thrust the washleather bag in which it came, as it was, into his pocket. He was good enough to say that he would not insult me by counting it; he would treat me as one gentleman should always treat another. Then, with a triumphant grin, and an airy raising of his hat, he left me to enjoy my reflections--if I could. ”

“ He struck his hand against his chest, accentuating the second "me," as if he were an individual altogether separate and apart. "If I were to follow the promptings of my bosom, I should go at once to the police, and leave you to dangle on the gallows."
"You are under a misapprehension, sir. I give you my word of honour that you are. I may have been guilty--I have been guilty--of an error of judgment, but not of a crime."
"Do you call murder an error of judgment?" ”

“ A man of genius if ever there was one. He is, of course, respected by all of us, by his country and his Queen. He has a marvellous knowledge of the world, and a great esteem for those sacred things which are too often disregarded. And when I learn that he has a high opinion of any person I know that that person must be all right upon the moral side. I am glad, Mr. Townsend, to be able to think this of you. ”

“ Having led me into crime, you are going to tell of me. Is that sort of conduct in accordance with the Beaupré code of honour? Are you sure that you are not proposing to play Judas merely because I have conquered where you have failed?"
"No! No! I won't tell! I won't tell! You know I won't! But--that you should be going to marry Dora Jardine!"
He sank in a heap on to a chair, looking once more as pitiable an object as one would care to see.
"Come, Archie, pull yourself together. Have a drink, and play the man. Pick up the cheque, run down with me to Cockington, and wish me luck upon the road. ”

“ You know the world so much better than I do.
"Truly yours,
"Helen Carruth."
The next morning, when I woke from dreams of poker, this was the first letter which I opened. It was nicely written, in a small, round hand, as clear as copperplate--somehow it did not strike me as being the writing of a woman who did not know the world. Mrs. Carruth seemed friendly. With a background of intentions, as usual? What was the "small personal concern?" An excuse?--only that and nothing more? I wondered.
I had to go down to Cockington by the afternoon train--to Dora, and to Haselton Jardine. ”

“ I don't know how many women I have loved in my time--I hope that, as becomes a gentleman, I have loved them all! I never loved one better than, at that period of my career, I loved Louise.
True enough, later on my love grew fainter. The fault was hers. My experience, a tolerably wide one, teaches me that, when a man's love does grow less, almost invariably the woman is at fault. The days went by. The Honour of the Club remained in my pocket. ”

“ Reginald Townsend in the exercise of that very rare, and wholly indescribable gift, the gift of fascination. I should say that he would have been a favourite alike with men and women--I will stake my bottom dollar, as poor, dear Daniel would have said, that he would have been popular with every woman. To me the average "fascinating man" is a monstrosity. He so obviously bears his honours thick upon his brow. He so plainly tries his hardest to live up to them. There was nothing of that sort about Mr. Townsend. ”

“ He staggered to a chair, plumping down in it with the stiffening all gone out of him.
I laughed.
"My dear Archie, you had better have another drink. You don't seem quite the thing."
He looked me straight in the face, I giving him look for look. When he had sustained my glance for a moment or two he shut his eyes and shivered. I saw a shudder go all over him. I drank my coffee.
"You're sure that you're not joking?"
"Some men joke most when they are most in earnest. Perhaps I am one of them." ”

“ Pendarvon made a movement as if he would have done something to check the destruction of so important a witness. The Colonel checked him with a word.
"Stand still!" And Mr. Pendarvon was still. The Colonel turned to Mr. Townsend. "It is you who have most to fear. Can you suggest how you may be able to effect your escape?"
"Unless Mr. Pendarvon has romanced, he has not only provided the trap, but also the means of escape from the trap which he has baited--unless, I say, he has romanced. We shall see. Good-bye, Pendarvon." ”

“ I've seen men like you before. A few. Some of them with grit enough to dare the devil to do his level worst when he gets them down to hell. Grit's just an accident. It don't count with me neither one way nor the other. Young man, I'm going to make you an offer."
"Make it."
"There are two things I've had to live for. Just two. No more. You've robbed me of them both. My girl, and the heart which I reckoned to have one day for mine."
"If, as I presume, this time it is Mrs. Carruth to whom you are referring, I do protest with all my heart that you are welcome to her heart, Mr. Haines." ”

“ The fog was so thick that, when I had despatched the letters, it seemed absurd to take precautions.
"I'll stroll back past Tommy's. Why should I be afraid of him?"
I strolled. The fog appeared to be thicker every moment. The houses in the street, externally, were as like as two peas. I really found it difficult to find out exactly whereabouts I was. I was thinking of Tommy, and of how eagerly he was being hunted, and of what a sensation I might make by sending his address to Scotland Yard--when there he was in front of me! ”