When Mr. Julius Ricardo spoke of a gentleman--and the word was perhaps a
thought too frequent upon his tongue--he meant a man who added to other
fastidious qualities a sound knowledge of red wine. He could not
eliminate that item from his definition. No! A gentleman must have the
great vintage years and the seven growths tabled in their order upon his
mind as legibly as Calais was tabled on the heart of the Tudor Queen. He
must be able to explain by a glance at the soil why a vineyard upon this
side of the road produces a more desirable beverage than the vineyard
fifty yards away upon the other. He must be able to distinguish at a
first sip the virility of a Chateau Latour from the feminine fragrance of
a Chateau Lafite. And even then he must reckon that he had only learnt a
Child's First Steps. He could not consider himself properly equipped
until he was competent to challenge upon any particular occasion the
justice of the accepted classification. Even a tradesman might contend
that a Mouton Rothschild was unfairly graded amongst the second growths.
But the being Mr. Ricardo had in mind must be qualified to go much
farther than that. It is probable indeed that if Mr. Ricardo were
suddenly called upon to define a gentleman briefly, he would answer: "A
gentleman is one who has a palate delicate enough and a social position
sufficiently assured to justify him in declaring that a bottle of a good
bourgeois growth may possibly transcend a bottle of the first cru."

Now Julius Ricardo was a man of iron conscience. The obligations which he
imposed upon others in his thoughts, he imposed in his life upon himself.
He made it a point of honour to keep thoroughly up to date in the matter
of red wine; and he mapped out his summers to that end. Thus, on the
Saturday of Goodwood week he travelled by the train to Aix-les-Bains.
There he found his handsome motor-car which had preceded him, and there
for five or six weeks he took his absurd cure. Absurd, for the only
malady from which he suffered was that he was a bad shot. He shot so
deplorably that his presence on a grouse-moor invariably provoked
ridicule and sometimes, if his host wanted a big bag, contumely and
indignation. Aix-les-Bains was consequently the only place for him
during the month of August. His cure ended, he journeyed with a leisurely
magnificence across France to Bordeaux, planning his arrival at that town
for the end of the second week of September. At Bordeaux he refitted and
reposed; and after a few days, on the eve of the vintage, he set out on a
tour through the hospitable country of the Gironde; moving by short
stages from chateau to chateau; enjoying a good deal of fresh air and
agreeable company; drinking a good deal of quite unobtainable claret from
the private cuvees of his hosts; and reaching early in October the
pleasant town of Arcachon with a feeling that he had been superintending
the viniculture of France. This was the curriculum. But as he was once
dipped amongst agitations and excitements at Aix, so on another occasion
he was shaken to the foundations of his being during his pilgrimage
through the vineyards. He was even spurred by the touch of the macabre in
these events to a rare poetic flight.

"The affair gave me quite a new vision of the world," he would declare
complacently. "I saw it as a vast opal inside which I stood. An opal
luminously opaque, so that I was dimly aware of another world outside
mine, terrible and alarming to the prisoner in the opal. It was what is
called a fire opal, for every now and then a streak of crimson, bright as
the flash of a rifle on a dark night, shot through the twilight which
enclosed me. And all the while I felt that the ground underneath my feet
was dangerously brittle just as an opal is brittle . . ." and so on and
so on. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, embroidered and developed and expounded his
image of an opal to a degree of tediousness which even in him was
phenomenal. However, the crime did make a stir far beyond the placid
country in which it ran its course. The records of the trial do stand
wherein may be read the doings of Mr. Ricardo and his friend Hanaud, the
big French detective, and all the other people who skated and slipped and
stumbled and shivered in as black a business as Hanaud could remember.

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