The rest is briefly told. A dozen extra cards were found in the packs that had been correct before play commenced; the counters in Biscoe’s possession were not redeemed by the club, and the “acceptance” was as far from redemption as ever.
Next morning, as the gardeners were sweeping the grounds, a dead body with a gun-shot wound in the head was found in a shrubbery.
Within a few yards lay the tideless Mediterranean, calm and sparkling as the morning sun played upon its waters; whilst here lay an upturned face, cold and rigid and ghastly white save for a clotted disfigurement on the brow, and the same sun, in all the irony of its grandeur, was lighting up all that was left of blighted hopes, fallen greatness, and a tragedy never to be forgotten. Later on, the mangled remains were buried at the expense of the Municipality.
A week or two later a paragraph appeared in a Dublin paper, and there the matter ended.
This is the usual procedure in these fashionable resorts. If you’ve lost your last penny you are provided with railway fare and seen off the premises; if you blow out your brains, you’re buried out of sight. Decency must be maintained! Faites vos jeux, messieurs!
A convenient custom obtained at Le Cercle de la Méditerranée whereby a player temporarily cleaned out was permitted to deposit a pencil on the table to represent a stake, it being understood that he immediately proceeded to the bureau to purchase counters to redeem his symbolical investment. This was known as “au crayon.”
It was on one occasion that Bob Villiers, who was usually limited as regards capital, was seen to place his pencil on the table and address the courteous dealer with, “Cent louis au crayon.”
“By Gad,” whispered George Payne, who stood near me, “Bob Villiers has put up a hundred louis ‘au crayon,’” and it was in breathless anxiety, and with an eventual sigh of relief, that we saw him rake up his winnings.
It was some years later, whilst once standing on the steps of the Hôtel des Anglais at Nice, at a time when the one topic of conversation was the terrible scandal that had lately taken place in Le Cercle de la Méditerranée, that George Payne expounded the irrefutable axiom that there were only two offences that might not be indulged in with impunity, and yet how extraordinary it was that men of wealth with every enjoyment capable of gratification should yet founder on one or other of these two unspeakable rocks, and instanced the recent H— affair, where the brother of a peer and major of a crack regiment had resorted to one of the unpardonable offences. And then he quoted George Russell, who had married a duke’s daughter, and Lord de Ros and Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, another ducal branch, all of whom, in a species of insanity, had fallen from their high estates.
Many will recall the weird rumours that floated around the Clinton case; how the culprit had died and been duly buried; how weeks later an old gun-room companion had recognised his former ship-mate in a railway compartment, and how subsequent inquiry revealed the fact of a coffin filled with lumber.