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Probably it was another dinner. Little by little, at this rate, the time would soon come when Mr. Hayne would be asked everywhere and he and his correspondingly dropped. He turned miserably away, and went back to the billiard-rooms at the store. When Mrs. Rayner rang her bell for tea that evening he had not reappeared, and she sent a messenger for him. It was a brilliant moonlit evening.
Nevertheless, the town has its amusements; in the first place, the daylong and perennial one of donkey-riding along the sands, large parties of men and girls pottering along together; the Flying Dutchman trundles hither and thither when there is breeze enough; an arch cry-man sets up his targets on the beach; the bathing-houses stand by scores and fifties along the shore, and likewise on the banks of the Ribble, a mile seaward; the hotels have their billiard-rooms; there is a theatre every evening; from morning till night comes a succession of organ-grinders, playing interminably under your window; and a man with a bassoon and a monkey, who takes your pennies and pulls off his cap in acknowledgment; and wandering minstrels, with guitar and voice; and a Highland bagpipe, squealing out a tangled skein of discord, together with a Highland maid, who dances a hornpipe; and Punch and Judy, in a word, we have specimens of all manner of vagrancy that infests England.
My time for exercise was generally in the evening, when I would find myself almost alone, while the clicking of balls from the billiard-rooms and bowling-alleys down-stairs announced that a busy crowd if amusement may be called a business were there assembled. Naturally indolent, it was not without a severe struggle that I overcame a besetting propensity to confine myself to sedentary pursuits.
This stopped his remaining resource borrowing: so he got more and more out at elbows, till at last he came down to hanging about billiard-rooms, and making a little money by concealing his game; from that, however, he rose to be a marker. Having culminated to that, he wrote and proposed marriage to Miss Dale, in a charming letter: she showed it to her father with pride.
Lady Clavering was in such a good humour, that Sir Francis even benefited by it, and such a reconciliation was effected between this pair, that Sir Francis came to London, sate at the head of his own table once more, and appeared tolerably flush of money at his billiard-rooms and gambling-houses again.
As you know, he mixed himself up to some extent with smugglers, he spent his evenings frequently in billiard-rooms, and altogether, though there was nothing absolutely against him, it was clear that he was doing himself no good." "He had given up the billiard-table," Frank said. "He promised me that he would not go there any more, and I am sure he wouldn't."
Tatham hoped so but the father, Tatham knew personally a man of the worst character, a wine-bibber and an idler in taverns and billiard-rooms, and a notorious insolvent. "I can understand the reason, Major," he said, "why the fellow would not come to my office to ascertain the truth of the statements which you made him.
He had not, however, shone in a very brilliant way. He had gone to parties for a year or two, and during those years had essayed the life of a young man about town, frequenting theatres and billiard-rooms, and doing a few things which he should have left undone, and leaving undone a few things which should not have been so left. But, as I have said, he was weak in body as well as weak in mind.
"Don't it distress you," said the Boston maiden, "to have Mr. Clay gamble?" "Oh! dear, no!" composedly replied the statesman's wife, "he 'most always wins." There were only a few billiard-rooms, mostly patronized by the members of the foreign legations or visiting young men from the Northern cities.
Fortunately for him the young fellows with whom he was in the habit of playing were all townsmen, clerks, the sons of the richer tradesmen, or of men who owned fishing-boats or trading vessels, and others of that class not, indeed, as Frank had said, the sort of men whom Colonel Wyatt would have cared for his son to have associated with but harmless young fellows who frequented the billiard-rooms as a source of amusement and not of profit, and who therefore had no motive for urging Julian to play.
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