Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/100

 have economised his villanous gains. His senior partner in that firm retired into the country with a fine fortune--no doubt the very owner of those mulberry plantations which were now on sale! But Jasper scattered napoleons faster than any croupier could rake them away. And Jasper's natural talent for converting solid gold into thin air had been assisted by a lady who, in the course of her amiable life, had assisted many richer men than Jasper to lodgings in _St. Pelagie_, or cells in the _Maison des Fous_. With that lady he had become acquainted during the lifetime of his wife, and it was supposed that Matilda's discovery of this liaison had contributed perhaps to the illness which closed in her decease; the name of that lady was Gabrielle Desinarets. She might still be seen daily at the Bois de Boulogne, nightly at opera-house or theatre; she had apartments in the Chaussee d'Antin far from inaccessible to Mr. Gotobed, if he coveted the honour of her acquaintance. But Jasper was less before an admiring world. He was supposed now to be connected with another gambling-house of lower grade than the last, in which he had contrived to break his own bank and plunder his own till. It was supposed also that he remained good friends with Mademoiselle Desmarets; but if he visited her at her house, he was never to be seen there. In fact, his temper was so uncertain, his courage so dauntless, his strength so prodigious, that gentlemen who did not wish to be thrown out of the window, or hurled down a staircase, shunned any salon or boudoir in which they had a chance to encounter him. Mademoiselle Desmarets had thus been condemned to the painful choice between his society and that of nobody else, or that of anybody else with the rigid privation of his. Not being a turtle-dove, she had chosen the latter alternative. It was believed, nevertheless, that if Gabrielle Desmarets had known the weakness of a kind sentiment, it was for this turbulent lady-killer; and that, with a liberality she had never exhibited in any other instance, when she could no longer help him to squander, she would still, at a pinch, help him to live; though, of course, in such a reverse of the normal laws of her being, Mademoiselle Desmarets set those bounds on her own generosity which she would not have imposed upon his, and had said with a sigh: "I could forgive him if he beat me and beggared my friends! but to beat my friends and to beggar me,--that