“You’re hard on my lord. He clasped his dear love to his bosom—no more. ’Tis an amorous way he has.”
The dyspeptic face of the soldier went dark. He recognized an allusion in the bantering words. The Viscount Dunlone, in fact (it was notorious), had outbidden him in the favour of a certain Mademoiselle Carminelle, a figurante at Vauxhall in the suit of Mr. “Tom Restless”; and, popularly, he was supposed to have aged under the disappointment.
“Come!” cried the baronet. “Give us the privilege of driving to the devil our own way. You mustn’t criticize the actions of dying men. We writhe with wounds, sir, while you are sound.”—He turned to Mr. Ladislaw, who sat staring, apprehensive. “I stake my all,” he said; and named a sum sufficiently desperate.
There were a few late habitués in the room. One of these, a dry, long man, with a face like a puckered medlar and a short-sighted contraction of the eyelids, had been . for some time a stealthily intent observer of the quartette. Now this individual, humouring a habit of his by drawing in his breath with a wincing sound, gave his chair a shift, and seemed to be awaiting results, at a distance, with some secret interest.
“Stake, and have done with it!” cried Sir Robert boisterously to the young lord.
The latter turned an insolent, languid glance on Major Dalrymple. They were a contrast. The soldier set, spare, bilious, with a great hooked nose and cracked heavy lips; the other a ruffled petit-maître of the first folly, pearl-powdered, cherry-mouthed, a model of sartorial elegance from his choking cravat—so amplified as that his face looked like a peach stuck in a napkin—to his full pantaloons of apricot-coloured velvet.
“I stake,” lisped this exquisite—“I stake your reversion, sir.”
There were influences of wine and ill-fortune fermenting in the fool’s empty head. Otherwise he would have hardly dared such perilous banter.
“I fail to gather your lordship,” said the soldier, going red.
“The adorable Carminelle,” began the Viscount drawlingly, when the other jumped up with a furious face, upsetting his chair in the act, and clapped his left hand instinctively upon his thigh.