But when play had gone on for some time, and while he was being steadily eased of his money, Gerard heard a soft rustling sound behind him, and turning quickly saw that old Mrs. Van Santen was standing at his elbow, with a look of indescribable terror and distress upon her face. It seemed to him that she was watching Cecil Jones as if he had been, not the innocent idiot he looked, or the confederate which Gerard had till that day believed him to be of her sons, but some harbinger of evil, some messenger of adverse fate.
And in a moment the last rag of suspicion that Jones could be a decoy and a partner in the Van Santen operations fled from Gerard’s mind.
The game went on, meanwhile, although it seemed to him that the old lady would fain have stopped it. She even made an attempt to catch Denver’s eye, and partially succeeded at last. But he only made her an abrupt sign to withdraw, and went on with the congenial task of winning from the placid Jones the money which he had so openly boasted of having brought with him.
At a sign from her son, Mrs. Van Santen suddenly disappeared, and Gerard saw her no more for some time, and wondered whether she had retired to “have a good cry” over her son’s gambling propensities, and the troubles which she perhaps foresaw for him in consequence.
Gerard, who was quite sure in his own mind that Cecil Jones was being robbed, and that he was aware of the fact, found himself growing more and more excited, as he waited, in a state of extreme nerve-tension, for the crisis which he felt must be approaching.
The sounds of voices, of movements, became dull and confused in his mind; the figures of the players became blurred, and a sort of singing in his ears warned him that he had better find relief to his intense excitement in the open air, when suddenly, just as he was turning to go towards the French window of the middle room, there was a sound like the hissing of a serpent, followed immediately by the overthrow of half a dozen chairs, and turning, he saw that, as he had foreseen, the crisis had come.
Cecil Jones, leaning across the card-table, had seized Denver’s arm, and dragged out from the sleeve of the American a card, which he flung down, face upwards, upon the table.
Leaning across the table, and looking up steadily into the face of the baffled Denver, who had sprung up from his chair, and was standing, still in the grip of Jones, pale with rage and discomfiture, Jones said, in a quiet voice that carried clearly to every corner of the room and into that beyond—
“I thought so. You are a card-sharper!”
In an instant there was an uproar in the room.