Fanshawe’s only reply was that if I got into trouble he would thank me not to apply to him to bail me out; so we mutually promised.

I don’t know that, on the whole, I very much regretted him; he is, after all, a very muddle-headed, nervous old creature; but my hopes were for a time a good deal dashed by the refusal of the Reverend Percy Blyth to join us (much as he approved of the scheme), though I did my best to tempt him with the offer of new stops for his organ out of the boodle. He is the clergyman of St. Blaise’s, Medworth Square, and intimate with all the theatrical set, for whom he holds services at all sorts of odd hours; the natural result of which is he is on the free list of nearly every theatre, and has given me many a box.

Now every school-boy knows how priceless the presence of a parson is to all human undertakings—on a race-course, for instance, for thimble-rigging, the three-card trick, and other devices. They call him the bonnet, and if you have any trifling dispute about there being no pea, or the corner of the card being turned down, you are likely to be very much astonished to find the clergyman (who, of course, is only a cove dressed up) take the proprietor’s part and, at a pinch, offer to fight you, or any other dissatisfied bystander.

So I naturally thought it would be a good thing for us if we had a real parson in the party, if only as a most superior bonnet, to avert suspicion; though, if I had only thought a little, I might have known the idea wouldn’t work, since Blyth couldn’t very well have gone into the Casino rooms in parson’s rig, and I didn’t really want him for anything else.

There was only one other of my sister’s friends I approached on the subject before I had recourse to my own—Parker White, a bouncing sort of young man who had just got into the House of Commons, and who, I thought, might possibly be useful. But, as I cautiously felt my way with him, he looked so frightened, and talked such balderdash about his position and filibustering and European complications (complications with Monaco, if you please, with an army of seventy men!) that I pretended it was all a joke and turned the conversation.

To tell the truth, I was not much disappointed in Parker White, since I know very well how most of those younger men in the House are all gas and no performance; but, all the same, he was pretty cunning; for, to put it vulgarly, he lay low and waited, and when talk began to get about of what we had done, and the Casino Company’s shares fell immediately in consequence of our success, he bought them up like ripe cherries; and then, when it was all contradicted by a subsidized press (which made me wild and drove me to writing this work in self-defence), and the shares jumped up again, he promptly sold and made a good thing out of it.

But he has never had the grace to thank me for putting the opportunity in his way; which is so like those men in the House who speculate on their information on the sly and then blush to find it fame.

CHAPTER VII

I INTERVIEW MR. BRENTIN—HIS SYMPATHY AND INTEREST—SIR ANTHONY HIPKINS AND THE YACHT AMARANTH—WE DETERMINE TO LOOK OVER IT

I soon began to see that, out of so conventional an atmosphere as Medworth Square, I was not likely to gather any great profit to my scheme; that, if my idea were ever to bear fruit, I must set to work among my own particular friends in my own way.