To the right we went again into the next room, in the same irreproachable order, with the same sublime results. Arthur Masters, in all the energetic glory of battle, was waving his revolver, trying to crack it, beating it against his thigh, as though it were a whip, cheering on his men like hounds. He is master, as I have mentioned, of a pack of harriers in Hertfordshire, and all the time he was at work in the last two rooms he was musically crying, “Melody! Harmony! Trixie! Hie over, lass, hie over!” And once, as one of his sailors bent on the floor over a few scattered louis, he roared at him, “ ’Ware trash!” When safe in England, I told him of it afterwards. He laughed and declared he hadn’t the slightest recollection of doing anything of the sort.
Now will it be believed that, so universal was the panic, at one of the tables only, at the bottom one in the room before the last, was there anybody found to receive us! And that not so much, I fancy, in the spirit of opposition as of curiosity, or perhaps inability to move.
For there we found an English lady tranquilly seated—elderly, perhaps sixty, with a shrewd, not unpleasant face. To this day I don’t know her name, but I know her quite well by sight, having often seen her driving in Piccadilly and Bond Street. At the back of her chair her husband was standing, eye-glass in eye; a tall man with a large head, rather of the empty House of Commons air of importance, coolly watching us.
“You will be good enough not to touch this lady’s money,” he said, as our men pounced on the table. Then, as a sort of after-thought, he added, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Write to the Times,” chuckled Brentin, impudently.
The old lady looked hard at me, as much as to say, “I’ve seen you somewhere before, more respectably engaged than this.”
And, before I forget, it is an odd thing that, only a week or so ago, I again met her driving in Piccadilly; I was in a cab with Lucy, and we met her victoria face to face. We stood side by side for quite three minutes in a block, and she recognized and stared at me in astonishment. I returned her stare, not rudely, I hope, and then positively couldn’t help beginning to laugh; she didn’t laugh back, but I could see quite well she was very near it.
There still remained the end room of all and our exit through the doors. Now was the time for all our nerve, all our resource.
Breathlessly, I glanced up at the clock, and saw it was just over the twenty-five minutes to eleven. We had taken only some six or seven minutes to clear eleven tables; there still remained the two last and our rush for the yacht.
Our friends on the left hurried up to us, we having been slightly quicker on the right; and then, strangely enough, there was a moment’s dead silence, at any rate, in the rooms. In the pause we could hear the dull, frightened roar from the hall outside, and then, suddenly and faintly, the short, sharp, defiant call of a bugle.