THE SACK OF MONTE CARLO

An Adventure of To-day

As narrated by Vincent Blacker, Esq.

Lieutenant H.M.’s East ——shire Militia

BY

WALTER FRITH

AUTHOR OF “IN SEARCH OF QUIET”

Quo timoris minus est, eo minus est Periculi

Livy, xii., 5

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1898

By WALTER FRITH.

IN SEARCH OF QUIET. A Country Journal, May

to July. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1.25.

A very entertaining book, written in a very entertaining

style.—Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette.

A book which will enchain the attention of the reader

from beginning to end.—Boston Advertiser.

NEW YORK AND LONDON:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO

Mrs. F. W. SHARON

IN RECOLLECTION OF MANY HAPPY HOURS IN

NEW YORK, ÉTRETAT, AND PARIS

London, October, 1897

CHAPTER I

The idea occurred to me, quite unexpectedly and unsought for, early one morning in bed; and, as ideas of such magnitude are valuable and scarce (at any rate, with me), it was not long before I determined to try and realize it.

The expedition was so successful, and we got, on the whole, so clear and clean away with the swag, or, as Mr. Julius C. Brentin, our esteemed American collaborateur, called it, “the boodle,” that, for my part, there I should have been perfectly content to let the affair rest; but, the fact is, so many of my friends have taken upon themselves to doubt whether we really did it at all, and the Monte Carlo authorities from the very first so cunningly managed to suppress all details (with their subsidized press), that I feel it due to us all to try and write the adventure out; since I know very well how, with most, seeing in print is believing.

Briefly, then, my idea was to sack or raid the gambling-tables at Monte Carlo, that highly notorious cloaca maxima for all the scum of Europe, which there gutters and gushes forth into the sapphire and tideless Mediterranean. I had worked details out for myself, and believed that, what with the money on the tables and the reserve in the vaults, there could not be much short of £200,000 on the Casino premises, a sum as much worth making a dash for, it seemed to me, as Spanish plate-ships to Drake or Raleigh. Nor did it seem likely we should have to do much fighting to secure it; for all the authorities I consulted assured me the place was by no means a Gibraltar, and, in fact, that half a dozen resolute gentlemen with revolvers and a swift steam-yacht waiting in the harbor would be more than enough to do the trick and clean the place out; which was pretty much what we found.

As for the morality of the affair, I confess that never in the least troubled me—never once. One puts morality on one side when dealing with a gaming-establishment, and to raid the place seemed to me just as reasonable and fair as to go there with a system, besides being likely to be a good deal more profitable. And since the objects to which we destined the money were in the main charitable, I soon came to regard the expedition strictly in pios usus (as lawyers say), and hope and believe the public will regard it in that light too.

Let me say right here—to quote Mr. Brentin again—that not one of us touched one single red cent of the large amount we so fortunately secured, but that it was all expended for the purposes (in the main, as I say, charitable) for which we had always intended it—with the single exception of a necklet of napoleons I had made for the fat little neck of my enchanting niece Mollie, which she always wears at parties, and keeps to this day in an old French plum-box, along with her beads and bangles and a small holy ring I once brought her from Rome; being amazingly fond of all sorts of bedizenments, as most female children are.

Mollie, therefore, was the only person who really had any of the swag, or boodle; though, of course, she doesn’t know it, and thinks it was properly won at play. For as for Bob Hines, who had some for the new gymnasium and swimming-bath at his boys’ school at Folkestone; and Mr. Thatcher (my dear wife Lucy’s father), who got his old family estate, Wharton Park, back; and the hospitals, convalescent homes, and sanatoriums, which all shared alike; and Teddy Parsons, of my militia, who had the bill paid off that was worrying him—that was all in the original scheme, and all went to form the well-understood reasons for our undertaking the expedition; without which inducements, indeed, it would never even have started.

So if, after this clear denial in print, the public still choose to fancy anything has stuck to my fingers, all I can ask them in fairness to do is to come to our flat in Victoria Street any morning between twelve and two, when they can see the accounts and receipts for themselves, all in order and properly audited by Messrs. Fitch & Black, the eminent accountants of Lothbury, E. C....

Now, they say love is at the bottom of most of the affairs and enterprises of the world, and so I believe it mostly is. At all events, I don’t fancy I should have undertaken, or, at any rate, been so prominent in this Monte Carlo affair, if I hadn’t at the time been so deeply in love with Lucy, and correspondingly anxious to get her father’s property back for them at Wharton Park. It is situate near Nesshaven, on the Essex coast; which, though to many it may not be a particularly attractive part of the country, is to me forever sacred as the spot where I first met the dear girl who is now my wife, coming back so rosily from her morning bath, through the whin and the sand, from the long, flat shore and the idle sea, carrying her own damp towel back to her father’s inn, “The French Horn.”

I can see her now as I saw her then, on that warm September morning eighteen months ago; sea and sky and monotonous Essex land all bathed in hazy sunshine, the whins still glistening with the morning mist, which at that time of the year lies heavily till the sun at mid-day warms them dry and sets the seed-cases exploding like Prince-Rupert drops—I can see her, I say, come towards me along the coast-guard path, round the pole that sticks up to mark it, and towards the wooden bridge that crosses one of the dikes.

If any line of that sweet face were faint in my memory, I have only to look across at her now, as she sits sewing under the lamp as I write, for all its charm and perfection to be present as first I saw it. I have only to put a straw-hat on the pretty, rough, dark hair, which in sunshine gleams with the bronze of chestnut, give her a freckle or two on the low, white forehead, color her round cheek a little more delicately rose-leaf, and there she is—not forgetting to take away the wedding-ring!—as she passed me on the Nesshaven golf-links that hazy September morning eighteen months ago. There is the straight nose, the short upper lip, the pure, fresh mouth, the plump and rounded chin, and the soft, pink lips that part so readily with a smile and show the beautiful white teeth, white as the youngest hazel-nuts....

Lucy felt my eyes were upon her, and looked up at me and smiled, with something of a blush, for she blushes very readily. She saw me still looking longingly, the invitation in my eyes, and after a moment’s hesitation (for, though we have been married nearly six months, she still is shy) she put down her sewing and came to me at my writing-table. She bent over me and put her arms round my neck, her warm cheek against mine. Her soft lips kissed me; I felt the tender, loving palpitation of her bosom as I bent my head back. Our sitting-room seemed full of silence, happy and melodious silence, while from outside in Victoria Street I head the jingle of a passing cab....

CHAPTER II

Though the idea to sack Monte Carlo did not occur to me till late in the year (in the September of which I first met Lucy Thatcher), I must first say something of my going down to Nesshaven in June, and the events which led to my being in a position to undertake an affair of such nerve and magnitude.

Lucy thought I should take readers straight to Monte Carlo, confining myself to that part of the work only; but, after talking it over, she agrees with me now that the adventure must be led up to in the natural way it really was or the public won’t believe in it, after all, and I shall have all my pains for nothing. So that’s what I shall do, in the shortest and best way I can; promising, like the esteemed old circus-rider Ducrow, as soon as possible to “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.”

Well, then, it was towards the middle of June when I joined the golf club at Nesshaven, just after my militia training month was over. I was introduced by Harold Forsyth (one of our Monte Carlo band later, and one of the stanchest of them), who had the golf fever very badly, and, I must say, was beginning to make himself rather a bore with it.

He and I went down from Liverpool Street and stayed at “The French Horn,” the inn kept by Mr. Thatcher, Lucy’s father; and after Forsyth had introduced me to the club and shown me round the links, he went back to his regiment, the “Devon Borderers,” then stationed at Colchester, very angry and complaining, as soldiers mostly are when obliged to do any work. I remained behind, not that I had yet seen Lucy, but rather to keep out of Mabel Harker’s way—the young lady to whom (as Lucy knows) I happened, much against my will, to be at that time unfortunately engaged to be married.

My first visit to “The French Horn” lasted three weeks, during which time I manfully held my ground, though heavily bombarded by Mabel’s letters, regularly discharged thrice a week from her aunt’s house in Clifton Gardens at Folkestone. At last, as Mabel came to stay at her sister’s in the Regent’s Park (on purpose, I believe), I was obliged to go up to town for ten days, and there passed a sad time with her at the University match, Henley, and the Eton and Harrow; at which noted places of amusement and relaxation I cannot help thinking I was the most unhappy visitor, though, to be sure, I tried hard not to show it.

But it was dreadful when I got back to my rooms in Little St. James’s Street and attempted sleep; for I really think that not being in love with the person you have bound yourself to marry keeps more men awake more miserably than any of the so-called torments of love, which, with scarcely an exception, I have never found otherwise than agreeable.

At last Mabel went back to Folkestone, and I was free to return to “The French Horn,” and I never saw her again (thank goodness!) till the momentous interview between us in October, from which I emerged a free man; she having discovered in a boarding-house at Lucerne an architect named Byles, whom she’d the sense to see was a more determined wooer than I had ever been, and likely to make her a far better husband.

“The French Horn” is not an old house, having been built in about the year 1830, from designs made by Mr. Thatcher’s father, who had copied it from an inn he had once stayed in in Spain. For a country gentleman of old family, the father seems to have been a somewhat remarkable person. He had, for instance, been an intimate friend of the celebrated Lord Byron, and was the only man in England (so Mr. Thatcher always said) who knew the real story of the quarrel between the poet and his wife. Byron confided it to him at Pisa as the closest of secrets; but, as he had always told it to everybody when alive, and his son, my father-in-law, invariably did and still does the same, there must be a good many people in England by now who know all about it.

In fact, there was scarcely a golfer or bicyclist came to the house but Mr. Thatcher didn’t fix him sooner or later in the bar and ask him if he knew the real reason why Byron quarrelled with his wife and left England. And as it was a hundred to one chance that they didn’t, Mr. Thatcher always informed them in a loud, husky whisper, and shouted after them as they left, “But you mustn’t publish it, because it’s a family secret!”

And the reason was, according to Mr. Thatcher, that Lord Byron had killed a country girl when a young man (somebody he’d got into trouble, I suppose) and flung her body in the pond at Newstead; and that having, in a moment of loving expansion, bragged of it to his wife, Lady Byron had, very properly, promptly kicked him out of the house in Piccadilly; which, also according to Mr. Thatcher, was the origin of those touching lines:

“They tell me ’tis decided you depart:

’Tis wise, ’tis well, but not the less a pain,”

invariably quoted by him on the departure of a guest.

It was this same father of Mr. Thatcher’s who had parted with Wharton Park, their ancestral home. He had been a great gambler in his youth, and lost enormous sums at Crockford’s and on the turf, so that when he died, in 1850, he had nothing to leave his only son, my Lucy’s father, but three or four thousand pounds, very soon muddled away in unfortunate business speculations.

At last, about twenty years ago, it occurred to Mr. Thatcher to come down to Nesshaven and take “The French Horn,” close to the Park gates of his old home, where, until the golf mania set in, beyond gaining a bare livelihood, he did no particular good; having to depend on natural-history lunatics, who came there in winter and prowled the shore with shot-guns after rare birds, and, in summer, on families from Colchester—tradespeople and bank-clerks and so on—who spent their holidays lying about in the warm sand among the whins and complaining of the food. Betweenwhiles there was scarcely a soul about except the coast-guards, who came up to fill their whiskey-bottles, and a few bicyclists who ate enormous teas and never would pay more than ninepence.

But when a Colchester builder erected the club-house down on the links, Mr. Thatcher’s business looked up wonderfully, and he really began to make money, and even sometimes to turn it away, for the house was small. Harold Forsyth discovered it, being quartered so near, and it was he who introduced me, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.

It was a curious place, as most amateur buildings are. Forsyth had not told me anything about it, and I was indeed astonished when we first drove up; for, with its colored bricks, veranda, high-pitched roof, and odd carved wood-work, it reminded me somehow of an illustration to Don Quixote, and I quite expected to see a team of belled mules and hear the gay castanet click of the fandango. Instead of which, out came Mr. Thatcher in a dirty old cricket blazer.

It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was decorated in the Moorish fashion (rather like the old London Crystal Palace; where, by-the-way, I have eaten pop-corn many a time as a boy, but cannot honestly say I ever enjoyed it), and would hold, I dare say, a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts or a printer’s wayz-goose.

The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.

What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can’t conceive—possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever there’s a links and they can get permission to perform.

Mr. Thatcher’s wife, a doctor’s daughter, had long been dead; but his old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die. Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn’t in the least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way, if she wasn’t watched, she would cheat outrageously.

She came of a good old Norfolk family, and actually remembered the jubilee of George III. in 1810; but when asked for details of that touching and patriotic event, all she could say was, “Well, I remember the blacksmith’s children dressed in white.”

Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the church to visit her husband’s grave and see the tablet inside was kept clean.

So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained, by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the misfortunes of his life.

Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently, since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square, he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.

Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in 1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man, who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged in hand-to-hand fighting.

When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed, slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.