Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of theirs betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long forgotten how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake.
A young Italian, olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck that dictate a gambler's
"Yes" or
"No." The glow of fire and gold was on that southern face.
Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the headsman in the Place de Greve.
A tall, thin man, in a threadbare coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to mark the numbers of Red or Black.
He seemed a modern Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles himself in his misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.
One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart at once with the expected gains, on which they lived.
Two elderly waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to time into the garden from the windows, as if to show their insignificant faces as a sign to passers-by.
The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the punters, and cried, in a sharp voice,
"Make your game!" as the young man came in.
The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously towards the new arrival.
Who would have thought it?
The jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and despair is decorous?
Such thoughts as these produced a new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered.
Were not executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?
The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face. His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes.
The dull apathy of the suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandonment about him that was painful to see.
Some sort of demon sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with pleasure.
Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low?
Any doctor seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.
But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed.
When a notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape, experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince among them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined wretchedness of his garb.
The frock-coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect him of underlinen.
His hands, shapely as a woman's were not perfectly clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear gloves.
If the very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because some traces of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.
He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice in his face seemed to be there by accident.
A young constitution still resisted the inroads of lubricity.
Darkness and light, annihilation and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty and terror.
There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.
The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there, flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can, he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless subterfuges in scorn.
The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters laid nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's enthusiasm, smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of coin against the stranger's stake.
The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have reduced to an inarticulate cry—"Make your game....
The game is made....
Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures.
Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young man, they could discover not the least sign of feeling on his cool but restless face.
"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially.
A dumb sort of rattle came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that the banker showered upon him, one after another.
The young man only understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to sweep away his last napoleon.
The ivory touched the coin with a little click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold before the bank.
The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut his eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color returned as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the bystanders.
How much can happen in a second's space; how many things depend on a throw of the die!
"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between his finger and thumb and held it up. "He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players, who all knew each other.
"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
"If we had but followed his example," said an old gamester to the others, as he pointed out the Italian.
Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted his bank-notes.
"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said.
"The luck is sure to go against that young man's despair."
"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his money into three parts to give himself more chance."