It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up
on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two
dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green
cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker,
faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier.
By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty
and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely
artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their innocent watch for the
small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for
them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray
with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk
on its hind legs.
As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself
to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and
resignation. Directly the party had broken up, (he could see dark
shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the gate of the
compound), he would withdraw out of sight behind a door not quit closed,
in order to avoid meeting his two extraordinary guests; but he would
watch through the crack their contrasted forms pass through the
billiard-room and disappear on their way to bed.
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