I must just mention, however, that, after my sad interview with her in Kensington Gardens, I at once wrote to Mr. Thatcher and told him exactly what had occurred, informing him of my intention to come down at Christmas and try and settle matters with his daughter. At the same time I begged him to send me up the clothes and portmanteaus I had left behind me at “The French Horn.” They arrived, accompanied by a scrawl from Mr. Thatcher, urging me to be a man and bear up and all would come right, and enclosing a rather larger bill than I fancied I owed, but which I thought it politic to pay without protest of any kind.
Even the old lady, his mother, sent me a line, in a very upright fist, kindly informing me “brighter days were in store.” A simple prophecy, that long has ceased to interest me; since I have invariably had it from the innumerable fortunetellers, by cards and tea-leaves and the crystal, whom for years past I have rather foolishly been in the habit of consulting, but never derived any real benefit from.
As for my great idea to sack Monte Carlo, it came to me one morning (quite unexpectedly, as I have said) when I was lying in bed, trying to summon up resolution to rise for another dull and irksome day. It was still a long time off Christmas, and life was lying on me with extreme heaviness; for, as I think I have explained, I am in the militia, and when once my month’s training is over have nothing to do with myself except live on my eight hundred a year and amuse myself as best I can; and my idleness was rendered further indigestible at this period by the unhappy state of my relations with dear Lucy, whom I could neither see nor write to.
But the idea that I should get a small, resolute party together, and raid the tables at Monte Carlo, brought a new interest into my life; and after making a few quiet and judicious inquiries (for I had never been there), I determined to set about the affair in earnest and see if I could get any one to join me.
My first efforts in that direction, as is generally the case with anything new and startling, were not at all successful; but the more opposition and ridicule I met with, the more obstinate and determined I became. As for the morality of the affair, that, as I have said, has never troubled me from first to last. Does any one think of calling the police immoral when they go and raid a silver gambling-hell in Soho? For the life of me I have never been able to see the difference between us, except that in our case there was needed a greater nerve and address.
Now my sister, Mrs. Rivers, the wife of the publisher, lives in Medworth Square, S. W., and, on considering her intimates, I made up my mind to approach the Honorable Edgar Fanshawe first. He has a brother in the Foreign Office, and relations scattered about everywhere in government employ, so I decided he would be a good man to have with us in case the affair proved a fiasco and we all got into trouble, a chance that naturally had to be provided for.
Fanshawe, I should explain, was at one time in the Guards, but now writes the most dreadfully dull historical novels, which my brother-in-law publishes, and no one that I have ever met reads. Every autumn, sure as fate, among the firm’s list of new books you see announced, Something or Other, a Tale of the Young Pretender; or, Something or Other Else, an Episode of the Reign of Terror; with quotations from the Scots Herald, “this enthralling story”; or, from the Dissenters’ Times, “no more powerful and picturesque romance has at present issued,” etc. Or The Leeds Commercial Gazette would declare it “the best historical novel since Scott,” which I seem to have heard before of many other dull works.
Fanshawe is a purring, mild, genteel, rather elderly person, who listens to everything you are good enough to say most attentively and politely, with his head on one side, and never will be parted from his opera-hat. When I attacked him one night after dinner in Medworth Square he was in his usual autumnal condition of beatitude at the excellence of the reviews of his latest historical composition (which, as usual, scarcely sold), and beamed on me with delighted condescension, stuffing quantities of raisins.
“What shall you be doing in January?” I cautiously began. “Would you be free for a little run over to Monte Carlo?”
Unfortunately, the Honorable Edgar is the sort of person who, half an hour after dinner, will undertake to do anything with anybody, and then write and get out of it immediately after breakfast next morning, when he’s cold; so I quite expected the reply that Monte Carlo in January would suit him exactly, and what hotel did I propose to stay at?