Short Fiction

The Grand Duke’s Rubies1

There is in New York a club called the Balmoral, which has two peculiarities—no one ever goes there much before midnight, and it is the only place in town where you can get anything fit to eat at four o’clock in the morning. The members are politicians of the higher grade, men about town, and a sprinkle of nondescripts. In the unhallowed inspiration of a moment, Alphabet Jones, the novelist—in polite society Mr. A. B. Fenwick Chisholm-Jones—baptized it the Smallpox, a name which has stuck tenaciously, the before-mentioned members being usually pitted—against each other. Of the many rooms of the club, one, it should be explained, is the most enticing. It is situated on an upper floor, and the siren that presides therein is a long table dressed in green. Her name is Baccarat.

One night last February, Alphabet Jones rattled up to the door in a vagabond hansom. He was thirsty, impecunious, and a trifle tired. He had been to a cotillon, where he had partaken of champagne, and he wanted to get the taste of it out of his throat. He needed five hundred dollars, and in his card-case there were only two hundred and fifty. The bar of the Athenaeum Club he knew at that hour was closed, possible moneylenders were in bed, and it was with the idea of killing the two birds of the legend that he sought the Balmoral.

He encountered there no difficulty in slaking his thirst; and when, in one draught, which brought to his tonsils a suggestion of art, science, and Wagner combined, he swallowed a brandy-and-soda, he felt better, and looked about to see who might be present. The room which he had entered was on what is called the parlor floor. It was long, high-ceiled, comfortably furnished, and somewhat dim. At the furthermost end three men were seated, two of whom he recognized, the one as Sumpter Leigh, the other as Colonel Barker; but the third he did not remember to have seen before. Some Westerner, he thought; for Jones prided himself on knowing everyone worth knowing in New York, and, it may be added, in several other cities as well.

He took out his card-case and thumbed the roll of bills reflectively. If he went upstairs, he told himself, he might double the amount in two minutes. But then, again, he might lose it. Yet, if he did, might not five hundred be as easily borrowed as two hundred and fifty?

“It’s brutal to be so hard up,” he mused. “Literature doesn’t pay. I might better set up as publisher, open a drug-shop, turn grocer, do anything, in fact, which is brainless and remunerative, than attempt to earn a living by the sweat of my pen. There’s that Interstate Magazine: the editor sent me a note by a messenger this morning, asking for a story, adding that the messenger would wait while I wrote it. Evidently he thinks me three parts stenographer and the rest kaleidoscope. What is a good synonym for an editor, anyway?”

And as Jones asked himself this question he glared fiercely in a mirror that extended from cornice to floor. Then, mollified, possibly, by his own appearance, for he was a handsome man, tall, fair, and clear of skin, he threw himself on a sofa, and fell to thinking about the incidents of the ball.

For some time past he had been as discreetly attentive as circumstances permitted to a young girl, the only child of a potent financier, and on that particular evening he had sat out the cotillon with her at an assembly. She was very pretty and, unusual as it may seem in a debutante, rather coy. But when, a half-hour before, he had wished her sweet dreams in that seductive manner for which he was famous, she had allowed the tips of her fingers to rest in his own just one fleeting second longer than was necessary, and, what is more to the point, had looked into his eyes something which now, under the influence of the brandy-and-soda, seemed almost a promise. “Dear little soul!” he muttered; “if she marries me I will refuse her nothing. It will be the devil’s own job, though, to get her any sort of an engagement ring. Tiffany, perhaps, might give me one on credit, but it will have to be something very handsome, something new; not that tiresome solitaire. Those stones I saw the other day—H’m! I wonder what that fellow is staring at me for?”

He lounged forward to where the men were seated, and, being asked to draw a chair, graciously accepted the invitation and another brandy-and-soda as well.

“It was this way,” the stranger exclaimed, excitedly, when he and Jones had been introduced. “I was telling these gentlemen when you came in that you looked like the Grand Duke Sergius—”

“Thank you,” the novelist answered, affably. “The same to you.”

“I never saw him though,” the stranger continued.

“No more have I.”

“Only his picture.”

“Your remark, then, was doubly flattering.”

“But the picture to which I allude was that of a chimerical grand duke.”

“Really, sir, really you are overwhelming.”

“But wait a minute, do wait a minute. Mr. Jones, I don’t know whether you caught my name: it is Fairbanks—David Fairbanks.”

“Delighted! I remember it perfectly. My old friend, Nicholas Manhattan, bought a ruby of you once, and a beauty it was. I heard at the time that you made a specialty of them.”

“So did the grand duke. He came here, you know, on that man-of-war.”

“Yes, I know. Mrs. Wainwaring gave him a reception. It was just my luck: I was down with the measles at the time.”

“Oh, you were, were you? You were down with the measles, eh? Well, I wish I had been. Gentlemen, listen to this; you must listen. I was in my office in Maiden Lane one day, when a young man came in. He wore the most magnificent fur coat I have ever seen in my life. No, that coat was something that only Russia could have produced. He handed me a card on which was engraved

P^ce. Michel Zaraguine,
Aide-de-camp de S.A.I. le grand-duc Serge de Russie.

And then, of all things in the world, he offered me a pinch of snuff, and when I refused he helped himself out of a beautiful box and flicked the grains which had fallen on his lapel with a nimbleness of finger such as it was a pleasure to behold. I ought to tell you that he spoke English with great precision, though his accent was not pleasant—sort of grizzled, as it were. Well, gentlemen, he said that his prince, as he called him, the grand duke, wanted some rubies; they were intended for a present; and, though my visitor did not imply anything either by word or gesture, I suspected at once that they were for a lady. The grand duke at that time had been here a fortnight, and it was said—However, there is no use in going into that. So I showed him a few; but, if you will believe me, he wanted enough to make a tiara. I told him that a tiara of stones of that quality would come anywhere from sixty to eighty thousand dollars. If I had said a peck of groats he could not have appeared more indifferent. ‘It is a great deal of money,’ I said. He smiled a little at that, as though he were thinking, ‘Poor devil of an American, it may seem a great deal of money to you, but to a grand duke—!’ Then I brought out all I had. He looked them over with the pincers very carefully, and asked how much I valued them at. I told him a hundred and ten thousand dollars. He didn’t turn a hair.”

“Was he bald?” Jones asked.

“No, sir, he was not; and your jest is ill-timed. Gentlemen, I appeal to you. I insist on Mr. Jones’s attention—”

“Why, the man is crazy,” Jones mused. “What does he mean by saying that my jest is ill-timed? But why does he insist on my attention? He’s drunk—that’s what he is; he’s drunk and quarrelsome. Well, let him be. What do I care?” And Alphabet Jones looked complacently at his white waistcoat and then over at his excitable vis-à-vis. Mr. Fairbanks was a little man of the Cruikshank pattern, very red and rotund, and as he talked he gesticulated.

“So I said to him, ‘There’s been a corner in rubies, but it broke, and that is the reason why I can give them at that price.’ He didn’t know what a corner was, and when I explained he took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote something in it. ‘I am making a collection of Americanisms for the Czarina,’ he said. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘what is a Sam Ward?’ I told him. He laughed, and put it down—”

“His throat?”

Mr. Fairbanks glanced at Jones with unconcealed irritation: “Dr. Hammond, sir, says that punning is a form of paresis.”

“Be careful about that epsilon; it’s short.”

“Well, Mr. Jones, you ought to know how to pronounce the word better than I, for you have the disease and I haven’t. Gentlemen, I insist—”

But Jones had begun to muse again. “That fat little brute is a type,” he told himself. “I must work him in somewhere. I wonder, though, if I had not better leave him and go up to the baccarat. It might be more remunerative. It would be amusing,” and Alphabet smiled at the fantasy of his own thought, “it would be amusing indeed if he tried to prevent me.” He put his hand over his eyes and let Mr. Fairbanks ramble on.