II: THE ACE OF CADS
I
THEY tell a tale of high romance and desperate villainy, how one night the dæmon of wickedness arose from the depths and faced his master Capel Maturin, the pretty gentleman whose exploits have made him known to all London by the engaging title of Beau Maturin, the ace of cads. The tale begins in bitter darkness and its direction is Piccadilly, not the shopkeeper’s nor the wanton’s Piccadilly but the sweet sulky side where the pavement trips arm-in-arm with the trees of the Green Park and men are wont to walk alone with the air of thinking upon their debts and horses and women. There and thus, they say, George Brummel walked, to the doom that awaits all single-hearted men, and Scrope Davies, that pleasant wit, Lord Alvanley, the gross, D’Orsay, the beautiful and damned, and latterly Beau Maturin, who was a very St. George for looks and as lost to grace as the wickedest imp in hell.
But here was no night for your beau to be abroad in, and a man had been tipsy indeed to have braved those inclement elements unless he must. Yet one there was, walking the Green Park side. Ever and often the east wind lashed the rain into piercing darts, as though intent to inflict with ultimate wretchedness the sodden bundles of humanity that may any night be seen lying one against the other beneath the railings of the Green Park. But the deuce was in it if the gentleman in question appeared to be in the least discommoded. His flimsy overcoat flung wide open and ever wider in paroxysms of outraged elegance by the crass wind, and showing an expanse of white shirt-front of that criss-cross piqué kind which is one of the happiest discoveries of this century, and his silk hat rammed over his right eyebrow as though to dare a tornado to embarrass it, he strode up from Hyde Park Corner at a pace which, while not actually leisurely, seemed to be the outward manifestation of an entire absence of interest in time, place, destination, man, God and the devil. Nor was there anything about this gentleman’s face to deny this superlative indifference to interests temporal and divine; for, although that of a man still young enough, and possessed of attractions of a striking order, it showed only too plainly the haggard blasé marks of a wanton and dissipated life.
It was with such epithets, indeed, that the more austere among his friends had some time before finally disembarrassed themselves of the acquaintance of Capel Maturin. A penniless cadet of good family, Mr. Maturin, after a youth devoted to prophecy as to the relative swiftness of horses and to experiments into the real nature of wines, had in his middle thirties been left a fortune by an affectionate uncle who, poor man, had liked his looks; and Mr. Maturin was now engaged in considering whether three parts of a decade had been well spent in reducing that fortune, with no tangible results, to as invisible an item as, so Mr. Maturin vulgarly put it to himself, a pony on a profiteer. It was a question, thought Mr. Maturin, which could demand neither deep thought nor careful answering, insomuch as the answer was only too decidedly a lemon.
At a certain point on Piccadilly Mr. Maturin suddenly stayed his walk. What it was that made him do this we shall, maybe, never know, but stop he did. There were witnesses to the event: the same lying at Mr. Maturin’s feet, huddled against the railings of the Green Park, a heap of sodden bundles with hidden faces; and it had wanted the attention of a physician or the like to decide which of the five or six was of the male or the female of the species.
“It’s a cold night,” said a husky voice.
Mr. Maturin, towering high into the night above the husky voice, agreed that it was a cold night.
“Ay, that it is!” said a woman’s cracked voice. “Cold as Christian charity!”
Whereupon Mr. Maturin exhorted her to thank her stars that he was a pagan and, withdrawing his hand from an inner pocket, scattered some bank-notes over the bewildered wretches.