A Bitter Heritage: A Modern Story of Love and Adventure

by John Bloundelle-Burton

"All of which," he said to himself, "I ought to have thought of before and decided upon. However, it doesn't matter! A week hence will do just as well as now, and, meanwhile, I shall have had a look at the place which must undoubtedly belong to me."

As he arrived at this conclusion, the mustang emerged from the forest-like copse they had been passing through, and ahead of him he saw, upon the flat plain, a little settlement or village.

"Which," thought Julian, "must be All Pines. Especially as over there are the queer-shaped mountains called the 'Cockscomb,' of which the negro told me."

Then he began to consider the advisability of finding accommodation at this place for a day or so while he made that inspection of the estate and residence of Desolada which he had on his ride decided upon.

All Pines, to which he now drew very near, presented but a bare and straggling appearance, and that not a particularly flourishing one either. A factory fallen quite into disuse was passed by Julian as he approached the village; while although his eyes were able to see that, on its outskirts, there was more than one large sugar estate, the place itself was a poor one. Yet there was here that which the traveller finds everywhere, no matter to what part of the world he directs his footsteps and no matter how small the place he arrives at may be--an inn. An inn, outside which there were standing four or five saddled mules and mustangs, and one fairly good-looking horse in excellent condition. A horse, however, that a person used to such animals might consider as showing rather more of the hinder white of its eye than was desirable, and which twitched its small, delicate ears in a manner equally suspicious.

There seemed very little sign of life about this inn in spite of these animals, however, as Julian made his way into it, after tying up his own mustang to a nail in a tree--since a dog asleep outside in the sun and a negro asleep inside in what might be, and probably was, termed the entrance hall, scarcely furnished such signs. All the same, he heard voices, and pretty loud ones too, in some room close at hand, as well as something else, also--a sound which seemed familiar enough to his ears; a sound that he--who had been all over the world more than once as a sailor--had heard in diverse places. In Port Said to wit, in Shanghai, San Francisco, Lisbon, and Monte Carlo. The hum of a wheel, the click and rattle of a ball against brass, and then a soft voice--surely it was a woman's!--murmuring a number, a colour, a chance!

"So, so!" said Julian to himself, "Madame la Roulette, and here, too. Ah! well, madame is everywhere; why shouldn't she favour this place as well as all others that she can force her way into?"

Then he pushed open a swing door to his right, a door covered with cocoanut matting nailed on to it, perhaps to keep the place cool, perhaps to deaden sound--the sound of Madame la Roulette's clicking jaws--though surely this was scarcely necessary in such an out-of-the-way spot, and entered the room whence the noise proceeded.

The place was darkened by matting and Persians; again, perhaps, to exclude the heat or deaden sound; and was, indeed, so dark that, until his eyes became accustomed to the dull gloom of the room--vast and sparsely furnished--he could scarcely discern what was in it. He was, however, able to perceive the forms of four or five men seated round a table, to see coins glittering on it; and a girl at the head of the table (so dark that, doubtless, she was of usual mixed Spanish and Indian blood common to the colony) who was acting as croupier--a girl in whose hair was an oleander flower that gleamed like a star in the general duskiness of her surroundings. While, as he gazed, she twirled the wheel, murmuring softly: "Plank it down before it is too late," as well as, "Make your game," and spun the ball; while, a moment later, she flung out pieces of gold and silver to right and left of her and raked in similar pieces, also from right and left of her.

But the sordid, dusty room, across which the motes glanced in the single ray of sunshine that stole in and streamed across the table, was not--it need scarcely be said--a prototype of the gilded palace that smiles over the blue waters of the Mediterranean, nor of the great gambling chambers in the ancient streets behind the Cathedral in Lisbon, nor of the white and airy saloons of San Francisco--instead, it was mean, dusty, and dirty, while over it there was the fœtid, sickly, tropical atmosphere that pervades places to which neither light nor constant air is often admitted.