The German’s face had grown suffused with dark angry crimson; the veins of his throat and his temples began to swell.
“Double or quits,” he cried huskily. He threw and lost; doubled his stake, threw and lost again.
There was something about the scene that aroused the audience to more potent interest than the ordinary nightly repeated spectacle of loss and gain.
The extraordinary passion displayed by the foreigner, not only in his inflamed countenance, but in the very motion of his hands, in the rigid tension of his whole body, presented a strange contrast to the languor of his opponent. It was, moreover, a revelation in one who had been known hitherto as courteous and composed to formality.
“It is to be hoped some one has a lancet,” said Carew, “for I believe the gentleman will have an apoplexy unless a little blood be let soon.”
“I fear me,” answered his companion, “that there will be more blood let than you think for. Did you mark that look?”
At the same instant the Chevalier flung down his box with such violence that the dice, rebounding, flew about the room, and gazed across at Basil with open hatred, as one glad to give vent at last to long-pent-up fury.
“By Heaven, Mr. Jennico!” he cried, “were it not that I have been told how well you have qualified for this success, I should think there was more in such marvellous throwing of dice than met the eye. But your love affairs, I hear,—and I should have borne it in mind,—have been so disastrous, so more than usually disastrous,” here his voice broke into a sort of snarl, “as to afford sufficient explanation for the marvel.”
There was a cold silence. Then Jennico rose, white as death.
“If you know so much about me, sir,” he said in tones that for all the anger that vibrated in them fell harmoniously upon the ear after the Chevalier’s savage outburst, “you should know too that there is a subject upon which I never allow any one to touch. Your first insinuation I pass over with the contempt it deserves, but as regards your observation on what you are pleased to call my love affairs, I can only consider it as an intentional insult. And this is my answer.”