Castle Orchard Read Online Free

hazard, no games of chance. It is, no doubt, why he prefers the Travellers’, because there they play only whist and ecarté, with no cards before dinner. As you are a member yourself, I hardly need tell you this.’
    ‘Indeed, I am a member, but I don’t go.’
    ‘Allington will play piquet, chess, backgammon draughts, but chess is his game.’
    ‘It would be difficult to cheat at that.’
    ‘He’s clever – he forgets nothing. I myself give him a game if it is unwise to leave my rooms. There are times when I just can’t get out. Suppose the bailiffs took my snuffboxes? It is my belief Allington makes so much money he can live off it. He has enough to keep a pretty actress.’
    Rampton could not help wondering how Arthur could afford to play with this person. After all, if such debts occurred, they were debts of honour: one was required to pay them immediately.
    ‘It can’t be his sole source of income,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, he is a half-pay officer but that doesn’t amount to anything. I dare say he got a meagre allowance from his father or his stepfather or whatever he was.’
    ‘And who was he?’
    ‘Lord Tregorn.’
    ‘And he was his stepfather?’
    ‘So it is said.’ Arthur rolled his blue eyes and smiled. ‘They all say that, don’t they? Except Allington. He says nothing. When I find it judicious to stay at home, I send my servant to ask if he will step down and give me a game. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. From time to time he’s downright rude, which I feel a man in his position has no right to be. If I have a couple of friends in to dine, we ask Allington to join us later in a few rubbers of whist. He won’t always come even then.’ Arthur paused to reflect. He then said, ‘Debts of honour between gentlemen?’ He laid peculiar emphasis on the word ‘gentlemen’. ‘What makes a man a gentleman?’
    Rampton had no doubt he was himself a gentleman, but then there was no irregularity attached to his birth.
    Arthur continued, ‘But I have not told you the half of his peculiarities. It is, anyway, unfortunate to be in the same lodgings as a military man. I sometimes wish I might change them for that very reason, but I have a good understanding with my landlord, whom I always make sure I pay the moment I get my rents in. Some other might oblige me less.’
    ‘What’s wrong with a military man?’ Rampton enquired.
    ‘They are so superior, they have the attitude of one who has seen all. They forget that the rest of us don’t want to see what they have seen, or even to have been to all those foreign places. Think of the blood, the violence, the severed limbs, the floggings, the hardship. We don’t want our sensibilities blunted by fields of corpses.’
    ‘Perhaps their sensibilities were not very strong in the first place.’
    ‘How can one tell? Today is the eighteenth day of the sixth month. Had you not considered how we should be celebrating the death of all the young brothers of our friends and acquaintances? I had no younger brother myself, which was a blessing. My father had no one too immediate with whom to compare me. To think a man pays a fortune to buy a commission, say £3,000 for a captain in a respectable cavalry regiment, for a son, solely for the purpose of having the boy’s sensibilities totally deadened before he is butchered. Is it not odd?’
    Rampton, who had never before given the matter a moment’s thought, agreed. They were interrupted by Arthur’s servant entering the room with a rose-pink figured-silk waistcoat on his arm.
    ‘To think,’ Arthur said, ‘when on campaign, they are often unable to change their clothes or wash for weeks. What must that
do
to a man?’
    ‘It must make him unbearable, but I suppose they are all in it together, a stable full of brute beasts.’ Rampton was casting envious eyes at the waistcoat as he spoke.
    ‘Not for you, my friend,’ Arthur said, laughing. ‘You are more full in the figure than me and will do best to