“It is an accident that might happen to any one,” I said gently.  “You were nervous.  You looked at the cards, you mistook the nine for a ten, in which case you were right to call for another card.”

“It is not that,” he wailed.  “It is the spoiling of my combination, on which I have wasted sleepless nights.  A curse on my mad folly.  Do you know who the banker was?”

“No,” said I.

“He was Captain Vauvenarde, the husband of Madame Brandt.”

CHAPTER XIII

You could have knocked me down with a feather.  It is a trite metaphor, I know; but it is none the less excellent.  I repeat, therefore, unblushingly—­you could have knocked me down with a feather.  I gasped.  The little man wiped his eyes.  He was the tearfullest adult I have ever met, and I once knew an Italian prima donna with a temperament.

“Captain Vauvenarde?  The man with the shoebrush hair and the rolls of fat at the back of his neck?  Are you sure?”

The dwarf nodded.  “I set out from England to find him.  I swore to the carissima signora that I would do so.  I have done it,” he added, with a faint return of his self-confidence.

“Well, I’m damned!” said I, in my native tongue.

I don’t often use strong language; but the occasion warranted it.  I was flabbergasted, bewildered, out-raged, humiliated, delighted, incredulous, and generally turned topsy-turvy.  In conversation one has no time for so minute an analysis of one’s feelings.  I therefore summed them up in the only word.  Captain Vauvenarde!  The wild goose of my absurd chase!  Found by this Flibbertigibbet of a fellow, while I, Simon de Gex, erstwhile M.P., was fooling about War Offices and regiments!  It was grotesque.  It was monstrous.  It ought not to have been allowed.  And yet it saved me a vast amount of trouble.

“I’m damned!” said I.

Anastasius had just enough English to understand.  I suppose, such is mortal unregeneracy, that it is the most widely understood word in the universe.

“And I,” said he, “am eternally beaten.  I am trampled under foot and shall never be able to hold up my head again.”

Whereupon he renewed his lamentations.  For some time I listened patiently, and from his disconnected remarks I gathered that he had gone to the Cercle Africain in view of his gigantic combinations, but that the demon of gambling taking possession of him had almost driven them from his mind.  Eventually he had lost control of his nerves, a cloud had spread over his brain, and he had committed the unspeakable blunder which led to disaster.

“To think that I should have tracked him down—­for this!” he exclaimed tragically.

“What beats me,” I cried, “is how the deuce you managed to track him down.  Your magnificent intellect, I suppose”—­I spoke gently and not in open sarcasm—­“enabled you to get on the trail.”