“I should be loath to spoil sport,” he said, “but I advise no one to bet on my bonnes fortunes. This scratch—for it is nothing more, Mr. Carew, and I would show it to you with pleasure in reward for your flattering interest, but the surgeon has just bound it up very neatly, and it would be a pity to disturb his handiwork—is but the sixth of a series of attempts on my life, made within the last six weeks, by persons unknown, for purposes likewise unknown.”
“Dash it, Jennico, you might have let me enter the bet,” said the Baronet sulkily, while Carew, sniffing a choicer titbit of gossip than he had expected, wriggled with pleasure, and the Chevalier expressed unbounded amazement that such a state of things could exist, above all in England.
“It is even so,” resumed Basil, turning to the last speaker as if glad to give vent to some of his pent-up irritation. “I confess that when I returned to my native land I did expect to find at least a quiet life. Why, in my house at Tollendhal, where those who surrounded me were half savages, ruled by the stick and the halter, where it was deemed imprudent for the master to walk the roads without his body-guard, there was never so much as a stone thrown after me. But here, in old England, my life, I believe, would not be worth backing for a week.” He looked round with a smile in which melancholy and disdain were blended.
“Now, d—— me!” cried Sir John, struck in his easy good nature into sudden warmth and sympathy, “nay, now d—— me, Jennico! I will take any man a hundred guineas that you are alive this day month.”
“Done!” said the Chevalier, with such unexpected energy that all three turned round to look at him with surprise; perceiving which he went on, laughing to conceal an evident embarrassment: “Your betting habits here are infectious, but while I will not withdraw, I am prepared to be glad to lose rather than gain for once.” He fixed Basil across the table with his brooding eye as he spoke, and bowed to him, then turned to the Baronet. “No, Sir Beddoes, I am not going to recede from the wager.”
This, as a wager worth recording, was forthwith entered into the club book. Basil looked on, half in amusement, half in bitterness.
“‘Tis likely, after all,” he said, addressing Sir John, “that you may win and that the Chevalier may be afforded the pleasure of losing, for I seem to bear a charmed life. Perhaps,” he added with a sigh, “because I care so little for it. Though to be sure there is something galling to a man in being shot at from behind a hedge and set on in the dark; in not knowing where the murderer may be lying in wait for him, at what street corner, at what turn of the road, behind what hayrick. If I have not kept my appointment over punctually to-night, it is because a rogue has had me by the Park gateway in Piccadilly. There is more here than mere accidental villainy. The next will be that I shall see murder in my own servant’s eyes. Or, who knows, find it lying at the bottom of my cup. Pah! I am as bold as most men; I would welcome death more readily than most; but, by Heaven! it is unfair treatment, and I have had more than my share of it.”
“Why, Jennico,” said Carew, “you never spoke a word of this before. A fellow has no right to keep such doings dark. Tell us the details.”
“Ay, tell us all about it,” said Sir John, with round eyes ready to start from their orbits.