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Updated: June 26, 2025
Has she abandoned herself to some fatal passion, of which the result has been pregnancy? She is doubtless perplexed, and must have been pleased to see me. I will not deceive her expectations; I will do all in my power to convince her that I am worthy of her." Lost in thought I did not notice I had arrived at the fountain, round which stood the whole host of gamesters.
Near him stands "French Charlie," one of the deadliest gamesters of the plaza. Equally quick with card, knife, or trigger, the Creole gambler is a man to be avoided. He is as dangerous as the crouching panther in its fearful leap. Hardin, betting on black, seems to win steadily. "French Charlie" sets his store of ready gold on the red.
But away from Paulina he was tortured by the recollection of that scene at the Phoenix Club; tormented by the thought that, let him make what sacrifice he might, he could never wipe out the stain which those midnight assemblies of gamesters had left on his future wife's reputation. "We will leave England for ever after the marriage," he said to himself sometimes.
Whatever the cause, certain it was that the change in the boy's view of life was as instantaneous as it was radical. And this was quite possible when his blood is considered. There had been, it is true, dominating tyrants way back in his ancestry, as well as spend-thrifts, drunkards, roysterers, and gamesters, but so far as the records showed there had never been a coward.
And thus played on this desperate band of gamesters till morning light, which, now stealing through the shutters of their darkened room, came and joined its voiceless monitions with those which their consciences had long since given them, in warning them to break up and return to their families, made wretched by their absence.
But for the most reckless among the reckless, for the spendthrift among spendthrifts, for the gamester above all gamesters, and for a gay man outstripping the gay by these characteristics did the world know Lord Mount Severn. It was said his faults were those of his head; that a better heart or a more generous spirit never beat in human form; and there was much truth in this.
Dire disgrace and infamy, if my Lord Protector's spies once more came upon the gamesters in her house unawares. Utter social ruin and worse! Yet she risked it all, in order to help him.
Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse from personal experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; spies of strong governments that eternally quake with weakness and miserable fear, broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate.
The rank and file then were not swayed simply by blind passion or duped by the representations of political gamesters. Nor did the lump need the leavening of the large percentage of men of the upper classes who served as privates, some of them from the beginning to the end of the war.
Two or three of the inmates were veteran gamesters. You could see THAT in their business-like nonchalance their rigid muscles the manner at once demure and familiar. They were evidently "habitues del l'enfer" men to whom cards and dice were as absolutely necessary now, as brandy and tobacco to the drunkard. These men were always at play.
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