all his faults Volney had the sportsman’s love of fair play.
The son of a plain country gentleman, he had come to be by reason of his handsome face, his reckless courage, his unfailing impudence, and his gift of savoir-vivre, the most notorious and fortunate of the adventurers who swarmed at the court of St. James. By dint of these and kindred qualities he had become an intimate companion of the Prince of Wales. The man had a wide observation of life; indeed, he was an interested and whimsical observer rather than an actor, and a scoffer always. A libertine from the head to the heel of him, yet gossip marked him as the future husband of the beautiful young heiress Antoinette Westerleigh. For the rest, he carried an itching sword and the smoothest tongue that ever graced a villain. I had been proud that such a man had picked me for his friend, entirely won by the charm of manner that made his more evil faults sit gracefully on him.
Volney declined for the present the quarrel that Balmerino’s impulsive loyalty to me would have fixed on him. He feared no living man, but he was no hothead to be drawn from his purpose. If Lord Balmerino wanted to measure swords with him he would accommodate the old Scotch peer with the greatest pleasure on earth, but not till the time fitted him. He answered easily:
“I know no talisman but this, my Lord; in luck and out of luck to bear a smiling front, content with the goods the gods may send.”
It was a fair hit, for Balmerino was well known as an open malcontent and suspected of being a Jacobite.
“Ah! The goods sent by the gods! A pigeon for the plucking—the lad you have called friend!” retorted the other.
“Take care, my Lord,” warningly.
“But there are birds it is not safe to pluck,” continued Balmerino, heedless of his growing anger.
“Indeed!”
“As even Sir Robert Volney may find out. An eaglet is not wisely chosen for such purpose.”
It irritated me that they should thrust and parry over my shoulder, as if I had been but a boy instead of full three months past my legal majority. Besides, I had no mind to have them letting each other’s blood on my account.
“Rat it, ’tis your play, Volney. You keep us waiting,” I cried.
“You’re in a devilish hurry to be quit of your shekels,” laughed the Irishman O’Sullivan, who sat across the table from me. “Isn’t there a proverb, Mr. Montagu, about a—a careless gentleman and his money going different ways, begad? Don’t keep him waiting any longer than need be, Volney.”
There is this to be said for the Macaronis, that they plucked their pigeon with the most graceful negligence in the world. They might live by their wits, but they knew how to wear always the jauntiest indifference of manner. Out came the feathers with a sure hand, the while they exchanged choice bon mots and racy scandal. Hazard was the game we played and I, Kenneth Montagu, was cast for the rôle of the pigeon. Against these old gamesters I had no chance even if the play had been fair, and my head on it more than one of them rooked me from start to finish. I was with a vast deal of good company, half of whom were rogues and blacklegs.
“Heard George Selwyn’s latest?”1 inquired Lord Chesterfield languidly.
“Not I. Threes, devil take it!” cried O’Sullivan in a pet.
“Tell it, Horry. It’s your story,” drawled the fourth Earl of Chesterfield.
“Faith, and that’s soon done,” answered Walpole. “George and I were taking the air down the Mall arm in arm yesterday just after the fellow Fox was hanged for cutting purses, and up comes our Fox to quiz George. Says he, knowing Selwyn’s penchant for horrors, ‘George, were you at the execution of my namesake?’ Selwyn looks him over in his droll way from head to foot and says, ‘Lard, no! I never attend rehearsals, Fox.’”
“’Tis the first he has missed for years then. Selwyn is as regular as Jack Ketch himself. Your throw, Montagu,” put in O’Sullivan.
“Seven’s the main, and by the glove of Helen I crab. Saw ever man such cursed luck?” I cried.
“’Tis vile. Luck’s mauling you fearfully to-night,” agreed Volney languidly. Then, apropos of the hanging, “Ketch turned off that fellow Dr. Dodd too. There was a shower, and the prison chaplain held an umbrella over Dodd’s head. Gilly Williams said it wasn’t necessary, as the Doctor was going to a place where he might be easily dried.”
“Egad, ’tis his greatest interest in life,” chuckled Walpole, harking back to Selwyn. “When George has a tooth pulled he drops his kerchief as a signal for the dentist to begin the execution.”
Old Lord Pam’s toothless gums grinned appreciation of the jest as he tottered from the room to take a chair for a rout at which he was due.
“Faith, and it’s a wonder how that old Methuselah hangs on year after year,” said O’Sullivan bluntly, before the door had even closed on the octogenarian. “He must be a thousand if he’s a day.”
“The fact is,” explained Chesterfield confidentially, “that old Pam has been dead for several years, but he doesn’t choose to have it known. Pardon me, am I delaying the game?”
He was not, and he knew it; but my Lord Chesterfield was far too polite to more than hint to Topham Beauclerc that he had fallen asleep over his throw. Selwyn and Lord March lounged into the coffee house arm in arm. On their heels came Sir James Craven, the choicest blackleg in England.
“How d’ye do, everybody? Whom are you and O’Sully rooking to-night, Volney? Oh, I see—Montagu. Beg pardon,” said Craven coolly.
Volney looked past the man with a wooden face that did not even recognize the fellow as a blot on the landscape. There was bad blood between the two men, destined to end in a tragedy. Sir James had been in the high graces of Frederick Prince of Wales until the younger and more polished Volney had ousted him. On the part of the coarse and burly Craven, there was enduring hatred toward his easy and elegant rival, who paid back his malice with a serene contempt. Noted duellist as Craven was, Sir Robert did not give a pinch of snuff for his rage.
The talk veered to the new fashion of spangled skirts, and Walpole vowed that Lady Coventry’s new dress was covered with spangles big as a shilling.
“’Twill be convenient for Coventry. She’ll be change for a guinea,” suggested Selwyn gloomily, his solemn face unlighted by the vestige of a smile.
So they jested, even when the play was deepest and while long-inherited family manors passed out of the hands of their owners. The recent French victory at Fontenoy still rankled in the heart of every Englishman. Within, the country seethed with an undercurrent of unrest and dissatisfaction. It was said that there were those who boasted quietly among themselves over their wine that the sun would yet rise some day on a Stuart England, that there were desperate men still willing to risk their lives in blind loyalty or in the gambler’s spirit for the race of Kings that had been discarded for its unworthiness. But the cut of his Mechlin lace ruffles was more to the Macaroni than his country’s future. He made his jest with the same aplomb at births and weddings and deaths.
Each fresh minute of play found me parted from some heirloom treasured by Montagus long since dust. In another half hour Montagu Grange was stripped of timber bare as the Row itself. Once, between games, I strolled uneasily down the room, and passing the long looking
