“All right,” answered the other, as Tom Hartshorne hailed a hansom, and was quickly whirled off to his destination in Bruton Street, where the Miss Inskips, two pretty and fast young ladies of the period, dwelt with their mamma, a widowed dame.
Allynne Markworth was not so much a type, as a specimen, of a curious class of men constantly to be met with in London society, and of whom society knows next to nothing. No one knew where he came from, who were his progenitors, or what he did; and yet he suffered in no respect from this self-same ignorance of the world around him, in which he lived and moved and had his being, as any other of its more regular units.
He always dressed well, lived well, and seemed to have a fair share of the loaves and fishes which Providence often so unequally bestows. Having the entrée of good houses, he knew “everybody,” and everybody knew him; but if you asked any of the men who knew him, and were constantly meeting him about, who Markworth was, the general answer you would get would be, “’Pon my soul, I don’t know.” Perhaps Tom Hartshorne knew more about him and was more intimate with him than anyone else, but even he had long ceased to puzzle his budding brains over any analysis of his friend: he was a “good fellow,” and “a clever fellow, by Jove,” and that was enough for him. Tom, however, never dreamt of calling Markworth by his Christian name, and no one else could have approached that phase of intimacy.
To tell the truth Allynne Markworth lived by his wits. He was a Chevalier d’Industrie in a certain sense of the term, although in a slightly more moral degree; and ran the race set before him by preying on the weaknesses, follies, and ignorances of human nature in the abstract, as evinced amongst his fellows in the concrete.
He was a good billiard player, and knew as well when to hide his play as “any other man.” Many a stray sovereign did he pick up in lives after pool at Phillipps’, even when he could not get a bet on, which he was never loth to take. The Hanover Square Club acknowledged his supremacy at whist, and happy was he who was his partner when guinea points were the rule. Being a good judge of horseflesh, he of course kept a book on the principal events of the year: rare in “hedging” he was seldom known to come out a loser.
With all these little strings to his bow, it is no wonder that Markworth managed to get along pretty comfortably; and although he toiled not nor yet did he spin, I much question whether King Solomon if clad en règle to the nineteenth century would have been better dressed, taking Poole as a criterion. Add to this that Allynne Markworth was a well-bred, handsome man of thirty to thirty-five—although his right age would have been rather hard to discover—and had a certain plausibility of manner which prevented one at first from noticing the somewhat sinister expression about his eyes and mouth; and the surprising thing would have been that he did not get on. Generally he had plenty of money; and when he had not he absented himself from society until his coffers were replenished in some secret way or other.
At this time, however, he had been for some months undergoing a run of ill-luck. The year had opened badly by the failure of a bubble company in which he was deeply interested; then, again, men were fighting shy of him at billiards, and it cost him more work for a sovereign than it was worth, and guinea points at whist were becoming rare events even amongst the most reckless habitués of the club; to climax his misfortunes, he had made a very losing book on the Derby, and although he paid it up—for to be a defaulter would have ruined him in his set—he had to leave London early in the season in consequence of not having the wherewithal to prosecute the war.
When he had gone away at the end of May he told Tom Hartshorne that he would be detained away on the continent on business for months; and yet here he was back again before the end of July. The fact was he came back money-hunting, and was so pressed now that he hardly knew where to turn. He had made up his mind that unless he married a fortune, discovered a gold mine, or tumbled into some wonderful luck, that his “little game,” as he expressed it, would be “all up.” He was glad to meet Tom Hartshorne so very opportunely at the present juncture, for he thought that he might be put in the way of some plan for changing events—and at the worst a little good card playing in the evening might place him in the position of being able “to look about him.”
Punctually at seven o’clock he showed himself up at Lane’s Hotel, where some half-a-dozen men of Tom’s regiment were assembled in a cosy little room up-stairs, well lighted, and with snow-white-cloth-covered-table, all duly prepared and laid out for the contemplated feast.
Dragoon officers or “Plungers”—indeed, all cavalry men—are pretty much alike, and unlike the remainder of the Army List. The mild, “gushing” comet, dashing “sub,” and massive captain, full-fledged and silky as to hair and drooping moustache—not forgetting general apathy of expression—of one troop, or regiment, resemble those of another, even as the proverbial “two peas,” and it would sorely tax one’s powers of diagnosis to discriminate between the members of a party like those assembled for the present “quiet little dinner, you know.”