“God bless my soul!” cried the Colonel, wheeling suddenly round. “Dead? My noble relative dead? Pooh, I don’t believe a word of it. It’s some lie of that infernal Radical paper of yours. Why, it was only the other day that—Let’s look.”
He took the paper out of Mr. Newbolt’s unresisting hand.
“Expired at nine o’clock this morning at his residence in Prince’s Gate,” he read. “Yes, Number Seventeen, that’s quite right. Seems to be true. Very shocking, indeed. Poor Avesham, poor fellow. Family all there—I must send a wire. No, I’ll send it after our whist, or to-morrow morning first thing. Dear me, dear, dear me! Waiter, am I going to wait all night for that whisky and soda? Bring it to the card-room, and look sharp.”
“He seems to have been ill some time,” said Mr. Newbolt, in quiet, precise tones. “I suppose you expected it, Colonel?”
“No, sir, I did not,” he replied. “The report of his illness was greatly exaggerated. It’s a blow to me, a blow.”
And the Colonel strutted out of the room, followed by the three others, as if Lord Avesham’s death had brought him within a life or two of the title.
Colonel Raymond’s whist was as explosive as his manner among his old cronies, and was conducted on principles founded crookedly on Cavendish. The rule there inculcated to retain command of a suit, he interpreted by readings of his own, and thus it not infrequently happened that a perfect spate of kings and aces would burst from his hand after his adversaries had begun to rough the suit. His unhappy partner had to cower beneath the rain of winning cards and censure when this happened.
“You should have drawn the trumps, sir,” the Colonel would say; “a baby in arms would have drawn the trumps. You could see I was keeping command of the ordinary suits, and if you had only had the sense to draw the trumps they would all have made. My deal, I think; cut again, please, I hate a slovenly cut. Let’s see, that’s a treble. We pay dear for your mistake. Honours? Two against us by honours. One of the instances, as Cavendish says, where a weak hand could have been turned into a winning hand by a little judgment and forethought.”
His partner, if discreet, would not reply, but sometimes, goaded to frenzy, if the same sort of thing had happened before that evening, he would point out with perfect justice that he had positively had no opportunity of taking a trick, as the Colonel held all the winning cards, and that being the case he might have played one of them, and opened trumps for himself.
That was what Colonel Raymond was waiting for.