The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
Introducing the hero of this veracious tale, also his father, his brother, and a man whose really-truly name is Preserved Higgins. A sordid note is struck.
“Yes, m'lud,” replied Tomps, the butler, with a certain quaking complacency.
“I know it's a bit rough,” continued the old Earl of Dealle out of the depths of his armchair whose upholstery had seen better days. He leaned forward a little and lowered his, voice. His keen, wrinkled, rather wicked old face was in strange contrast with his homespun Saxon name: the lips thin, the cheek bones high, the. nose hawkish, exaggerated, and with flaring, nervous nostrils, the eyes beady and black, and the complexion suffused with, a golden-brown tinge.
“Rather rougher on you than on me,” he went on. “For I have only to eat with the creature while you have to wait on him, what? But—well—the creature has money, frightful, vulgar heaps of money, and my agent writes me he's willing to plop down a stiffish lot of the ready for the proper sort o' country estate, with ancestral portraits and ancestral defective plumbing and ancestral family spook all complete.”
“I understand, m'lud.”
“You jolly well ought to, Tomps. For if the creature rents Dealle Castle, there's a corkin' chance that I'll pay you the two years' wages I owe you.”
“Thank you, m'lud.”
“Therefore, treat him as if he were the Double Duchess—God bless her!—herself, even though his name is … I say, Tomps, what is the bounder's name?”
“Preserved Higgins, m'lud!”
The earl collapsed.
“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.
And from beneath his bushy white eyebrows he stole a glance at the possessor of the extraordinary name who was playing poker with two other men, the earl's sons by every last sign of physiognomy, in a corner of the vast, funereal, threadbare Tudor hall that gave on the sweet, yellow Sussex Downs, with a distant view of the sea that sparkled like a floor of emeralds. In back of the castle, toward Lewes and the Brighton & South Coast Railway, stretched thirty odd thousand acres of mixed farm and park land—mortgaged to the last brick, the last thatch, the last Tree of Heaven, the last, moss covered all-the-year-round—which, to quote the earl, had been in the possession of his family, the Wades of Dealle, “long before the Conqueror stuck his ugly Norman nose across the Channel.”
Last night Mr. Preserved Higgins had motored down from his palatial stucco monstrosity in London's Mayfair, with a letter from Redder, his lordship's agent, to “'ave a look at the plyce. That's my w'y o' doin' business. I looks, I tykes my choice, and I p'ys my tin, wot?”
Mr. Preserved Higgins was a remarkable man in more ways than one. Of course he was a self-made man. Everybody is, these days. Of course He dropped his h’ches. Everybody does, these days.
Born not far from Oxford Street, in a particularly odorous alley, once known as Hog Lane, which had given the late Mr. Hogarth a great deal of material for his scathing drawings, his early recollections had something to do with a pimply-faced, immensely stout woman who had called him “yer bleedin' little darlin' hynger” in moments of alcoholic tenderness; to give him clouts on the side of the head when the barmaid over at the “Rose and Elephant” had put too much gin in her good-morning half pint of “swipes.” His reputed father had been a sardonic navvy who had given him his Christian name of Preserved in a riotous mood because every one of his many other children had died a week or two after they had opened their lungs to the greasy soot of Hog Lane. Fate, kindly or otherwise, had preserved him, and the name had turned out to be singularly appropriate.
For, running away from home and board school at the ripe age of twelve and sailing before the mast to the Azores, afterwards to South Africa, he had arrived at the latter place at the high tide of the De-Beers diamond boom. Promptly he had deserted, had joined the South African Argonauts who pushed north to the veldt, and, to believe certain tales that were rampant in Lombard and Threadneedle and Bishops- gate Streets, had laid the foundations of his vast for tune by the nefarious process called I. D. B., “illicit diamond buying” from thieving Kaffirs and Cape boys who worked in the Kimberley fields.
Since then he had preserved and caused to grow and multiply every farthing that had ever come his way. Everything he touched seemed to turn into gold. To-day he was a millionaire in pounds sterling, with a palace in the Mayfair, a steam yacht in the Solent, a game preserve in Scotland, a trout stream in Norway, a shiny, white, flower-bordered villa on the Riviera, a moor in Yorkshire, a flat in Paris, and with financial interests that reached from Chicago to Algiers, from Kamchatka to Timbuktu, from Spitzbergen to the Falklands. “Land Development” was the slogan on his letter head; and there was a chance that, at the next list of royal birthday honors, if the Conservatives to whose party fund he was a generous contributor continued in power, he would become Sir Preserved Higgins, Baronet.
Short he was, pudgy, bald-headed, with a full, curly, russet beard that was always spotted with crumbs, thick lips, steel-gray eyes, and a large-pored, Hebraic nose. He still dropped his h’ches; made rather a point of it—perhaps from a sense of inverted snobbery.
He was shuffling the cards with agile fingers, dealt, looked at his hand, and slapped the man at his left on the shoulder with crude familiarity.
“Come on in, cockie,” he said, “the water's fine. Ten—and ten—and a pony, wot?” registering his bet with chips and markers.
The one addressed as “cockie,” whose real name was The Honorable Hector Wade, second son of the Earl of Dealle, winked meaningly at the third man, his older brother. The Honorable Tollemache Wade who, like himself and like their father, was dark and lean, with angular jowl, high cheekbones, thin lips that subtended a quixotic nose, and keen, black eyes: altogether un-English; un-English, too, as to sulky, brooding, saturnine temper and sudden fits of withering, black taciturnity—all mental and physical characteristics which tradition was pleased to blame on a Castilian admiral whose ship had been wrecked on the chalky coast of Sussex at the time when the proud Armada had tried issues with Good Queen Bess and her duffel-jerkined yoemen.
Both brothers knew why Mr. Higgins was an honored guest at Dealle Castle and lent themselves to their share of the entertaining with good enough grace. They belonged to the same regiment, the Ninety-Second Dragoons, of which their father was the retired colonel and the history of which was intimately connected with that of Britain's Oriental dominions; and they thought that the verbal and social vagaries of the eccentric Cockney-South-African millionaire would make good telling at regimental mess, over the famous crusty port which had once reposed in the cellars of Napoleon the First.
Too, in the case of the older brother, there was a more strictly selfish reason.
For he was head over heels in debt. A three-cornered combination of race horses, cards and a chorus lady who called herself Gwendolyn de Vere, had eaten into his resources like acid, and Sam Lewis, the usurer of Lombard Street, had flatly refused to renew his last note for five thousand guineas. Bankruptcy, disgrace, cashiering from the army stared him in the face.
“Sorry, my boy,” his father had told him that very morning. “I can't help you. Everything's mortgaged except the family ghost. Play up to our Cockney visitor. If he takes our place for a season or two, I'll help you out. Once more,” he had added, dropping his negligent manner as if it were a cloak, “once more—and for the very last time!”
“Come on in and myke your bets,” said Mr. Preserved Higgins. “Ain't you got no guts?”
“I tilt that bet a pony, Mr. Higgins,” said Tollemache.
“And a monkey!” countered the irrepressible millionaire, tossing a dozen chips into the pot.
“See you!” from Hector.
And the game continued while the earl sank back into his chair and picked up a certain scandalous sporting paper, black on pink, which is much more popular with the nobility and gentry—we shall not mention the upper clergy—of Merry England than Bishop Taylor's “Lives of the Saints.”
He had dozed off over “Old Etonian's” comment on the county cricket averages when a sudden exclamation from Mr. Preserved Higgins startled him wide awake:
“Go'blyme! No wonder I'm losin' my plurry pants! S'y—these 'ere cards …”
“What is the matter with them?” Hector cut in sternly, threateningly leaning across the table, his dark, hawkish features, as they came within the radius of the low-hanging lamp, suffused with a terrible, corroding rage—the sudden, killing rage of the Wades of Dealle.
Wot's the matter with them?” sneered the millionaire. “I'll tell you wot's the bloomin' matter with them, cully! They're marked! Somebody's been cheatin'!”
“God!”
Hector was on his feet. He looked like a panther about to pounce and tear; and Higgins rose, upsetting his chair, stepped back from the table, frightened, white as a sheet, yet obstinate, resolute, repeating over and over again:
“They're marked, them cards! Blyme—they're marked!” and, just as the earl had reached the scene of the quarrel on his staggering old legs, Tollemache threw himself between his younger brother and the Londoner.
“Keep your shirts on, both of you,” he said. “You”—to Hector—“unclench that homicidal fist of yours, and you”—to the financier—“either take back what you said and see what sort of an apology you can make, or …”
“Or—prove it, that wot you mean? Well—you high-falutin', drawlin', blue-blooded jackanypes wot's got more cheek than 'orse sense, I will prove it. Bloody fine goin's-on in your 'ouse, yer lordship,” he turned to the earl; “'ere I accepts yer invitytion like one gent from another, to look at yer blarsted, ruddy, poverty-stricken estyte and tyke it off'n yer 'ands for a season-or two so's you can p'y back some o' yer debts—and—'ere—they asks me to pl'y—them precious sons o' yours—and the cards are …”
“Prove it! G d you—prove it!” Hector's face had turned a dull, coppery red. His black eyes were contracted into slits. His nostrils quivered. He looked more un-English than ever.
“Right-oh, Dook!'" said the cockney. “I'll prove it!”
And he did.
On both the packs o£ cards they had been using the Kings, Queens, and Aces had been carefully marked on the reverse side with tiny needle pricks.
Silence dropped like a shutter.
Then the earl turned to the financier.
“Would you mind stepping out of the room for a few minutes?” he asked, bowing, and speaking in a very low voice. “I wish to speak to my sons. Presently I shall endeavor to make you a suitable apology.”
Then, as the door closed on Mr. Preserved Higgins:
“Hector, you are ruined!”