Of an afternoon Colonel de Gourmet’s drawing-room was generally full. Lacking many, let us say lacking all the more solid human qualities, the old East Indian sybarite had one virtue—he was universally hospitable. Nothing pleased him better than that a man he had invited to breakfast should loiter on till dinner. Nothing pleased him better than that other men whom he had not invited should drop in, at any hour they chose, make free with his rare cigars, rarer wines, and entertain each other with ideas, or with that best discovered substitute for the trivial masculine mind—cards.
In a garrison town, sea on three sides, and barely available space on the other for a polo match or a herring run, it may be believed that old Colonel de Gourmet was in no lack of callers.
Six or eight men, young enough, most of them, to be their host’s grandsons, were lounging, this July afternoon, in various attitudes of idleness about his pleasant bachelor drawing-room. The air was lightly impregnated with tobacco smoke, so good of its kind that, mingled with the wafted garden sweets, it scarcely seemed grosser than some finely distilled odour of musk flower or of tea-rose. Gaston Arbuthnot was on the point of finishing a match at écarté with little Oscar Jones—two or three of Oscar’s brother officers forming a silent and discriminative gallery.
Cards, simply as cards, Gaston Arbuthnot disliked, although he had an inborn knack of playing most things successfully. The childish intricacies of a game like Nap., beloved of all the Maltshire subalterns, were to him a weariness of spirit.
‘We can use your English Nap. as a means,’ he would tell them, frankly, ‘just as we can use blind hookey or, simpler than either, chicken hazard, if we want to transfer money from one man’s pocket to another. As a matter of amusement, I would sooner play euchre or poker for counters: in poker especially, all our natural human instincts—bluster, bluffing, intent to deceive, etc.—come agreeably to the fore.’
Whist, Gaston confessed, he played well. At écarté he was moderately good. This moderate goodness his antagonist was about to test practically.
‘Four, all!’ cried little Oscar, eager over a just-dealt, brilliant hand of trumps.
‘The king,’ said Gaston, quietly laying down his cards. ‘Some one tell de Gourmet it is his turn to cut in.’
The Colonel had now risen to his feet. He was watching an object, evidently of paramount interest, through his opera-glasses.