certainly had no place in them. As to the ape—well, everybody knew what an ape was. It had no morals. Nothing could be more hopeless.
Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid aside to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented by a gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure. Facing him, Ricardo blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether, with the placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug. In another moment he opened them very wide, and seemed surprised to see Schomberg there.
'You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?' he observed. 'But then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've never faced such a slack party at a table before. Come eleven o'clock, they begin to talk of breaking up. What's the matter with them? Want to go to bed so early, or what?'
'I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed,' said Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.
'No,' admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth from ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth. 'Only, you see, when I once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas, for any rubbish. I would play them for their souls. But these Dutchmen aren't any good. They never seem to get warmed up properly, win or lose. I've tried them both ways, too. Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of animated cucumbers!'
'And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just as cool in locking you and your gentleman up,' Schomberg snarled unpleasantly.
'Indeed!' said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his eyes. 'And what about you?'
'You talk mighty big,' burst out the hotel-keeper. 'You talk of ranging all over the world, and doing great things, and taking fortune by the scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!'
'It isn't much of a lay—that's a fact,' admitted Ricardo unexpectedly.
Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.
'I call it paltry,' he spluttered.
'That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else.' Ricardo seemed to be in an accommodating mood. 'I should be ashamed of it myself, only you see the governor is subject to fits—'
'Fits!' Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. 'You don't say so!' He exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way diminished the difficulty of the situation. 'Fits! That's a serious thing, isn't it? You ought to take him to the civil hospital—a lovely place.'
Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.
'Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and then he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If you think I like it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I can talk him over. I know how to deal with a gentleman. I am no daily-bread slave. But when he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then look out! There's nothing to do but to shut up, confound it!'
Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.
'What's the cause of it?' he asked. 'Why is he like this? I don't understand.'
'I think I do,' said Ricardo. 'A gentleman, you know, is not such a simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If only I had something to lever him out with!'
'What do you mean, to lever him out with?' muttered Schomberg hopelessly.
Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.
'Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end of days—could I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the fits are on him. He's bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good enough, that's mere sense. But if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would soon manage to shift that billiard table of yours a good many inches. And that's all there is to it.'
He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of his thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the direction of the door, and finally leaned back against the table, folding his arms on his breast comfortably, in a completely human attitude.
'That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by—his freakishness. A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on the roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this once in a one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from everywhere. He lay all day long in a dark room—'
'Drunk?' This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he became frightened. But the devoted secretary seemed to find it natural.
'No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit. He just lay there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that he had picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two oleanders near the open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and singing tristes to him from morning to night. You know tristes—twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo! Chroo, yah!'
Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to flatter Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.
'Like that—enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well, there was a cook there who loved me—an old fat, Negro woman with spectacles. I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make me dulces—sweet things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar—to pass the time away. I am like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way, why don't you ever have a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg? Nothing but fruit, morning, noon, and night. Sickening! What do you think a fellow is—a wasp?'
Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.
'And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?' he asked anxiously.
'Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me,' returned Mr. Ricardo with feeling. 'Of an evening the governor would stroll out into the sala and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez of the place—a little Dago with a pair of black whiskers—ekarty, you know, a quick French game, for small change. And the comandante, a one-eyed, half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we had to stand around and bet on their hands. It was awful!'
'Awful,' echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair. 'Look here, I need your rooms.'
