Free The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope Page A

don’t think I’ve paid for any of mine I’ve bought this season. There was somebody here yesterday –’
    â€˜What! here at the club?’
    â€˜Yes, followed me here to say he wanted to be paid for something! It was horses, I think, because of the fellow’s trousers.’
    â€˜What did you say?’
    â€˜Me! Oh, I didn’t say anything.’
    â€˜And how did it end?’
    â€˜When he’d done talking I offered him a cigar, and while he was biting off the end I went upstairs. I suppose he went away when he was tired of waiting.’
    â€˜I’ll tell you what, Dolly; I wish you’d let me ride two of yours for a couple of days – that is, of course, if you don’t want them yourself. You ain’t tight now, at any rate.’
    â€˜No; I ain’t tight,’ said Dolly, with melancholy acquiescence.
    â€˜I mean that I wouldn’t like to borrow your horses without your remembering all about it. Nobody knows as well as you do how awfully done up I am. I shall pull through at last, but it’s an awful squeeze in the meantime. There’s nobody I’d ask such a favour of except you.’
    â€˜Well, you may have them; – that is, for two days. I don’t know whether that fellow of mine will believe you. He wouldn’t believe Grasslough, and told him so. But Grasslough took them out of the stables. That’s what somebody told me.’
    â€˜You could write a line to your groom.’
    â€˜Oh, my dear fellow, that is such a bore; I don’t think I could do that. My fellow will believe you, because you and I have been pals. I think I’ll have a little drop of Curaçao before dinner. Come along and try it. It’ll give us an appetite.’
    It was then nearly seven o’clock. Nine hours afterwards the same two men, with two others – of whom young Lord Grasslough, Dolly Longestaffe’s peculiar aversion, was one – were just rising from a card-table in one of the upstair rooms of the club. For it was understood that, though the Beargarden was not to be open before three o’clock in the afternoon, the accommodation denied during the day was to be given freely during the night No man could get a breakfast at the Beargarden, but suppers at three o’clock in the morning were quite within the rule.Such a supper, or rather succession of suppering, there had been tonight, various devils and broils and hot toasts having been brought up from time to time, first for one and then for another. But there had been no cessation of gambling since the cards had first been opened about ten o’clock. At four in the morning Dolly Longestaffe was certainly in a condition to lend his horses and to remember nothing about it He was quite affectionate with Lord Grasslough, as he was also with his other companions – affection being the normal state of his mind when in that condition. He was by no means helplessly drunk, and was, perhaps, hardly more silly than when he was sober, but he was willing to play at any game whether he understood it or not, and for any stakes. When Sir Felix got up and said he would play no more, Dolly also got up, apparently quite contented. When Lord Grasslough, with a dark scowl on his face, expressed his opinion that it was not just the thing for men to break up like that when so much money had been lost, Dolly as willingly sat down again. But Dolly’s sitting down was not sufficient. ‘I’m going to hunt to-morrow,’ said Sir Felix – meaning that day – ‘and I shall play no more. A man must go to bed at some time.’
    â€˜I don’t see it at all,’ said Lord Grasslough. ‘It’s an understood thing that when a man has won as much as you have he should stay.’
    â€˜Stay how long?’ said Sir Felix, with an angry look. ‘That’s nonsense; there must be an end of everything, and there’s an end of this for me