CHAPTER SIX
A SLAVE OF THE WHEEL
1.
LOOKING in the direction in which Mr. Gimp’s finger pointed Hugh saw a tall, slim man sauntering across the hall. He had fair hair, brushed smoothly back, and features of the conventional English regularity.
“He’s like you and yet he ain’t,” commented Mr. Gimp. “You’re fresh and he’s a bit used up. He’s just what you’d be like in ten years’ time if you went the pace something fierce. A gay dog! He’s got a villa up on the hill. They say there are strange goings on at that same villa. He’s got a swell car, too. He owes all over the place, but he always seems to have heaps of cash to spend. That’s Mrs. Emslie speaking to him. A terrible woman, she is. I expect she’s trying to borrow from him. She’d do anything for money, that woman. She’s getting so desperate.”
“Pity for the daughter!”
“Yep, poor kid. Say, I saw her on the terrace early this morning, all alone in the corner beside the baths. So I went up and I says: ‘Well, Honey, how goes it?’ She turned round, and blamed if she wasn’t crying. ‘Couldn’t be worse,’ she says. ‘We’ve lost everything. Mother won’t stop. She’s borrowing from all sorts of horrid people. I think she’s mad. I don’t know what’s going to become of us.’”
“What will become of them?”
To this Mr. Gimp replied only by an eloquent shrug of his shoulders.
Hugh watched Paul Vulning with a curious fascination. As Vulning stared superciliously at the crowd Mrs. Emslie talked to him feverishly, trying to hold his attention. Then they sauntered away together.
“You see that big jolly man,” Mr. Gimp observed, “the one with the black skull cap. Well, that’s the slickest player ever hit this skin-game joint. That man never loses. They call him ‘Cheero,’ because every time the zero comes up he calls out: ‘Cheero.’ That man’s always smiling. He goes about his business quietly, but believe me, he’s just salting away the dough. He claims he can hypnotize the croupiers and make them throw where he wants.”