He’d game till he lost the coat from his shoulder.
I don’t think he cared much for cards or dice; but the game that he delighted in was played with a red and white checkered square of cloth, and with round pieces like draughtsmen. Whenever the advent of a friend and opportunity served, down the two squatted with this board between their legs, and a pile of copper pieces of money by their sides; and so intent would they be on their play, that nothing short of a gentle kick, or tap on the head, would arouse them to master’s wants and needings.
My readers will naturally inquire why, with all these delinquencies, Sam so long remained my henchman. Well, first, had I discharged him, another and probably greater robber would have stepped into his shoes, and bazaar accounts and inroads on alcohol and tobacco would have remained undiminished. ‘They all do it;’ so better the de’il I knew, than the de’il whose acquaintance I would have to make. Again, Sam had his redeeming points; he was, as I have said before, clean, handy, and deft at the creature comforts, which, having appetisingly compounded, he could serve up with taste and elegance. Then he was a good nurse; and during a serious illness that befell me at one of the vilest stations in Madras, he tended me closely and carefully, keeping a watchful eye and a ready stick on punkah-pullers and wetters of kus-kus tatties (scented grass mats), without the cooling aid of which the heat of that grilling July would have been my death on that fever-bed. Once more, on those military inspections which fell to my lot, and which had to be undertaken partly over the Nizam’s very sandy and rough highways, and in those close comfortless bone-breaking vehicles called byle-nibbs (bullock-carts), my man became invaluable. Seated on the narrow perch alongside the almost garmentless and highly odoriferous native driver, he urged him on by promises of ‘backsheesh’ and cheroots; he helped to whip and tail-twist the slow-footed oxen; he roused up lazy byle-wallahs (bullock-men) sleeping in their hovels, and assisted them in driving from the fields and in yoking to the cart refractory and kicking cattle. He stirred up with the long pole the peons (keepers) in charge of the road-side travellers’ bungalows at which we halted, aiding these officials in chasing, slaughtering, and ‘spatch-cocking’ the ever-waiting-to-be-killed-and-cooked gaunt and fleshless morghee (fowl); he saw that the chatties for the bath were not filled with the very dirtiest of tank water; that the numerous and hard-biting insects, out and taking the air from their thickly populated homes in the crevices of cane-bottomed chair and bedstead, met with sudden and violent death; and lastly, that no man’s hand but his own should be put into master’s money-bag and stores.
But as all things come to an end more or less, so did Sam’s career with me actually terminate. My wife and family came ‘out’ from England. The ‘Mem Saab,’ sometimes even the ‘Missee Saab,’ took bazaar ’count; the current bachelor rates for chillies, cocoa-nuts, first and second sorts wrice, gram, and such-like necessaries underwent a fall. Sam’s occupation and gain were gone. He quitted my homestead under this new and unprofitable régime. ‘I discharge you, sar!’ said he; and away he went, I know not where.
HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.
CHAPTER XI.—AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.
The De Vere Arms at Pebworth, fourth-rate hotel though it necessarily was in a place where any hotel of the first or even of the second magnitude would have been as an oak in a flower-pot, was well and neatly kept. There was the commercial connection, and there was the county connection, both dear to the landlord, but on grounds wholly dissimilar. Biggles had been butler to the present, under-butler and knife-boy to the late Earl of Wolverhampton; and had he but had his own way, the De Vere Arms would have been strictly the family hotel which its address-cards proclaimed it, and the obnoxious word ‘commercial’ would have found no place there.
Mr Biggles, however, was in the position of one of those unfortunate managers of English country theatres who tell their friends, perhaps truly, that they would play nothing, save the legitimate drama, if they could help it. They cannot help it, and scared by the dismal spectre of Insolvency, they shelve Shakspeare in favour of newer idols of the public. So did Biggles and worthy Mrs B. to boot lay themselves out in practice to secure the lucrative custom of the ready-money, constantly moving, commercial gentlemen, while in theory devoting all their loyalty to those of their patrons who came in their own carriages, with armorial bearings on their panels and liveried servants on the driving-seat.
To this hostelry was borne, in Sir Gruntley Pigbury’s carriage, the insensible form of Jasper Denzil, supported by the sturdy arm of Captain Prodgers, while little Dr Aulfus, on the opposite seat, kept the patient’s nerveless wrist between his own thin fingers all the way from the race-course to the inn. Then Jasper, amidst spasmodic gaspings from the landlady and sympathetic exclamations from the chambermaids, was carried into the De Vere Arms and established in one of the best rooms, whence were summarily dislodged the effects of some well-to-do customer who had had a horse in the race, but who was unlikely under the circumstances to resent the invasion of his apartment. Jack Prodgers and the doctor seemed to have taken joint possession of the invalid; the former as prochain ami (and it is to the credit of such ne’er-do-wells as Captain Prodgers that the very wildest of them never do leave a friend untended in a scrape), and the other professionally.