During the next half-dozen games neither spoke. With deep absorption, Asshlin followed the run of the cards. Once or twice an exclamation escaped him; once or twice he paused to replenish Milbanke's glass or his own; but in every other respect he had eyes and thoughts for nothing but the business in hand. Milbanke, on the contrary—gambler neither by instinct nor training—was infinitely more interested in his opponent than in the play.
As he watched Asshlin, a score of recollections rose to his mind—recollections that time and advancing age had all but effaced. He recalled the numberless occasions upon which the Irishman, in the exuberance of youth, had sat over a gaming-table until the daylight had streamed in across the scattered cards, the heaped-up cigar-ashes and the emptied glasses; he reviewed the rare occasions on which his cajoleries had drawn him from his own mild pursuits to be a sharer in these prolonged revels; and with the memory came the thought of the headache, the sick sense of weariness that had invariably lain in wait for him the following morning. A wondering admiration for Asshlin had always held a place in these jaded after-sensations—a species of hero-worship for one who could turn into bed at four in the morning and emerge at nine with all the vigour and vitality of the most virtuous sleeper. He had never fully realised that to men of Asshlin's stamp dissipation, excitement, and action are potent stimulants, calling forth all the superfluous nervous energy that by nature they possess. While the tide of life runs high about such men, they are borne forward, buoyed up by their own capacity for living and enjoying. To them, existence at high pressure is a glorious, exalted state, exempt from satiety or fatigue; it is the quieter phases of existence—the phases that to ordinary men mean rest, peace, domestic tranquillity and domestic interests—that these exuberant, ardent human beings have cause to dread.
An hour went by, and still the idea of a past, curiously reflected and curiously contradicted, absorbed Milbanke's perceptions. Then gradually but decisively it was borne in upon his mind that his absorption was blunting his common sense. He was playing execrably.
It has been said that he was no gambler; but neither was he a fool. With something of a shock he realised that he stood a loser to the extent of seven or eight pounds. With the realisation he sat straighter in his chair. It was not that he grudged the money. He was generous—and could afford generosity. It was rather that that admirable quality which urges the Englishman to play a losing game was stirred within him.
"By Jove, Denis!" he said. "I must look to my laurels! I used to play a better game than this."
Asshlin's only answer was a laugh—a laugh from which all the bitterness had dropped away, leaving a buoyant ring of absorption and delight. Under the stimulus of excitement, he had altered. He was exalted, lifted above the petty discontent, the pessimism, the despondency that tainted his empty days.
And so for nearly two hours they played steadily; then Milbanke paused and drew out his watch.
"I don't know what sort of hours you keep in Ireland," he hazarded; "but it's nearly twelve o'clock."
Asshlin had paused to snuff one of the candles that had begun to gutter. At the other's words, he glanced up in undisguised surprise.
"Hours?" he repeated. "Why, any—or none at all. You don't know the glory of having something to sit up for." He paused for a second in a sort of ecstasy. "You don't know it; you can't know it! You have never felt the abomination of desolation."