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Men of red blood and indomitable courage these, who pursued war for the very love of the game, and who tasted blood in every clime, and under the flag of every nation. Hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-fighting cavaliers, upon whose deeds and adventures the staid, circumspect Carmodys looked aghast.
Port: who had betaken himself to what the conductor had told him was the smoking-room, and who, finding himself in a bar-room, surrounded by a throng of hard-drinking, foul-mouthed men, had sacrificed his much-loved cigar in order to free himself from such distinctly offensive surroundings.
But his playing seemed to her to have lost its fire and sweep; to be stale, and as if disillusioned. It was all as though he had said to himself: "What's the use?" In his face, too, there was a change. She knew she was certain that he was drinking secretly. Was it his failure with her? Was it the girl? Was it simply heredity from a hard-drinking ancestry? Gyp never faced these questions.
A hard-drinking officer will scarcely be tolerated in a regiment now, simply because excessive drinking is a low, mean vice, being the indulgence of self for unworthy motives, and beneath the character of a gentleman.
The fact was that this prosaic middle-aged gentleman, who had passed the greater part of his life immersed in day-books and ledgers and the details of a busy city man's life, found time hang heavy on his hands in these prosperous days of his retirement, and in this condition he had had his mind inflamed by pictures of the life that was led in The Beeches by his forerunners, easy-going, hard-riding, hard-drinking country gentlemen, with whom, if the truth were known, he had nothing in common.
He had been a homeless wandering range rider, a hard-drinking reckless fellow with few friends, and those only for the hour of the length of a job. The success of this venture, if it turned out so, meant that Blinky would do the one big act of his life. He would take the girl Louise from her surroundings, give her a name that was honest and a love that was great, and rise or fall with her.
How he managed to cope with his humor; whether he pledged himself in raw rum and blazing punch, and "clinked the can" with him as they made their bargains, does not appear upon record; we must infer, however, from his general observations on the absolute sway of this hard-drinking potentate, that he had to conform to the customs of his court, and that their business transactions presented a maudlin mixture of punch and peltry.
Headlong, noisy, debauched, but brave, kind-hearted and generous, he was a fitting representative of his ancestors, the hard-fighting, hard-drinking, crusading, free-booting sovereigns of Holland and Friesland, and would himself have been more at home and more useful in the eleventh century than in the sixteenth.
He might work upon the superstition of Sir John Lanison at Aylingford, might play upon the heartstrings of a woman, but these hard-drinking, hard-swearing men were not likely to fall victims to his fooleries. Even if he discovered where his mistress was lodged, he would not be able to come near her. "I have played the trump card and taken the trick," laughed Rosmore.
And every one spends his money to make every other one, if possible, a hard-drinking and a wasted man. You, Sir. Reader, have seen all these types and many others, have you not? WHY did you see them? What REASON had you for seeing them? The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way.
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