Bohemian Days Part 2

That was patriarchal life; what was this? Freckle thought this much finer and higher. He had not asked himself if it was better. He was rather ashamed of his father now, and anxious to be a dashing gentleman, like Plade or Pisgah.

Why did he play whist so badly? How chanced it that, having dwelt eighteen months in Paris, he could speak no French? His only _grisette_ had both robbed him and been false to him. He knew that the Colony tolerated him, merely. Was he indeed verdant, as they had said--obtuse, stupid, lacking wit?

After all, he repeated to himself, what had the Colony done for him? He had not now twenty francs to his name, and was a thousand francs in debt; he had essayed to study medicine, but balked at the first lesson.

Yet, though these suggestions, rather than convictions, occurred to him, they stirred no latent ambition. If he had ever known one high resolution, the Southern Colony had pulled it up, and sown the place with salt.

So he reached Master Lees' tenement; it was a long ascent, and toward the last stages perilous; the stairs had a fashion of curving round unexpectedly and bending against jambs and blank walls. He was quite out of breath when he staggered against Lees' door and burst it open.

The light fell almost glaringly upon the bare, contracted chamber; for this was next to the sky and close up to the clouds, and the window looked toward the west, where the sun, sinking majestically, was throwing its brightest smiles upon Paris, as it bade adieu.

And there, upon his tossed, neglected bed, in the full blaze of the sunset, his sharp, sallow jaws dropped upon his neck, his cheeks colorless and concave, his great eyes open wide and his hair unsmoothed, Master Lees lay dead, with the roulette table upon his breast!

When Freckle had raised himself from the platform at the base of the first flight of stairs, down which he had fallen in his fright, he hastened to his own chamber and gave the Colony notice of the depletion of its number.

A deep gloom, as may be surmised, fell upon all. Lees had been no great favorite of late, and it had been the trite remark for a year that he was looking like death; but at this juncture the tidings came ominously enough. One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never share the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he had prophesied the failure of "the system."

His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had known him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy.

Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it; but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and think.

They shuddered, though they were hardened young men, so unfeeling, even after this reprimand, that they would have left the corpse of their companion to go unhonored to its grave; separately they wished to do so--in community they were ashamed; and Pisgah had half a hope that somebody would demur when he said, awkwardly:

"The Colony must attend the funeral, I suppose. G.o.d knows which of us will take the next turn."

Freckle cried out, however, that he should go, if he were to be buried alive in the same tomb, and on this occasion only he appeared in the light of an influential spirit.

IV.

THE DESPERATE CHANCE.

During all this time Mr. Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France, thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the "off" horse, as he had done for the better part of his life.

Risque's uncle had been a great Mississippi jobber; he took U. S. postal contracts for all the unknown world; route of the first cla.s.s, six horses and daily; route of the second cla.s.s, semi-weekly and four horses; third cla.s.s, two horses and weekly; fourth cla.s.s, one horse, one saddle, and one small boy.

The young Auburn had been born in the stable, and had taken at once to the road. His uncle found it convenient to put him to work. He can never be faithfully said to have learned to _walk_; and recalls, as the first incident of his life, a man who carried a baby and two bowie knives, teaching him to play old sledge on the cushions of a Was.h.i.ta stage.

Thenceforward he was a man of one idea. He held it to be one of the decrees, that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and the planter in the house-porch took off his hat to bow--here, there, always, everywhere, with his cold, hard, pock-marked face, thin lips and spotted eye, Auburn Risque sat brooding behind the reins, computing, calculating, overreaching, waiting for his destiny to wrestle with Chance and bind it down while its pockets were picked.

His whole life might have been called a game of cards. He carried a deck forever next his heart. Sometimes he gambled with other vehicles--stocks, shares, currency--but the cards were still his mainstay, and he was well acquainted with every known or obsolete game.

There was no trick, nor fraud, nor waggery which he had not at his fingers-ends.

It was his favorite theory that there was method in what seemed chance; principles underlying luck; measures for infinity; clues to all combinations.

Given one pack of cards, one man to shuffle, one to cut, one to deal, and fair play, and it was yet possible to know just how many times in a given number of games each card would fall to each man.

Given a roulette circle of one hundred numbered s.p.a.ces and a blindfolded man to spin the ball; it could be counted just how many times in one thousand said ball would come to rest upon any one number.

No searcher for perpetual motion, no blind believer in alchemy, clung to his one idea closer than Auburn Risque. He had shut all themes, affections, interests, from his mind. He neither loved nor hated any living being. He was penurious in his expenditures--never in his wagers.

He would stake upon anything in nature--a trot, an election, a battle, a murder.

"Will you play picquet for one sou the game, one hundred and fifty points?" says a soldier near by.

He accepts at once; the afternoon pa.s.ses to night, and the lamps in the roof are lighted. The cards flicker upon the seat; the boors gather round to watch; they pa.s.s the French frontier, and see from their windows the forges of Belgium, throwing fire upon the river Meuse.

Still, hour after hour, though their eyes are weary, and all the folks are gone or sleeping, the cards fall, fall, fall, till there comes a jar and a stop, and the guard cries, "Cologne!"

"You have won," says the soldier, laying down his money. "Good-night."

The Rhine is a fine stream, though our German friends will build mock-castles upon it, and insist that it is the only real river in the world.

Auburn Risque pays no more regard to it than though he were treading the cedars and sands of New Jersey or North Carolina. He speaks with a Franco-Russian, who has lost in play ten thousand francs a month for three successive years, and while they discuss chances, expedients and experiences, the Siebern-gebierge drifts by, they pa.s.s St. Goar and Bingen, and the wonderful Rhine has been only a time, nothing of a scene, as they stop abreast Biberich, and, rowed ash.o.r.e in a flagboat, make at once for the railway.

At noon, on the third day, Mr. Risque having engaged a frugal bed at a little distance from Wisbaden, enters the grand saloon of the Kursaal, and turning to the right, sees before him a perspective, to which not all the marvels of art or nature afford comparison: a snug little room, with a table of green baize in the centre of the floor, and about the table sundry folks of various ages and degrees, before each a heap of glittering coins, and in the midst of all a something which moves forever, with a hurtle and a hum--the roulette.

Mark them! the weak, the profligate, the daring. There is old age, watching the play, with its voice like a baby's cry; and the paper whereon it keeps tremulous tally swimming upon eyes of perpetual twilight.

The boy ventures his first gold piece with the resolve that, win or lose, he will stake no more. He wins, and lies. At his side stands beautiful Sin, forgetting its guilt and coquetry for its avarice. The pale defaulter from over the sea hazards like one whose treasure is a burden upon his neck, and the _roue_--blank, emotionless, remorseless--doubling at every loss, walks penniless away to dinner with a better appet.i.te than he who saves a nation or dies for a truth.

The daintily dressed _coupeurs_ are in their chairs, eyeless, but omniscient; the ball goes heedlessly, slaying or anointing where it stays, and the gold as it is raked up clinks and glistens, as if it struck men's hearts and found them as hard and sounding.

Mr. Risque advanced to the end of the table, and stood motionless a little while, drinking it all into his pa.s.sionless eyes, which, like sponges, absorbed whatever they saw, but nothing revealed. At last his right hand dropped softly to his vest pocket, as though it had some interest in deceiving his left hand.

Apparently unconscious of the act, the right hand next slid over the table edge, and silently deposited a five-franc piece upon the black compartment.

"Whiz-z-z-z" started the ball from the fingers of the coupeurs--"click"

dropped the ball into a black department of the board; "clink! tingle!"

cried the money, changing hands; but not a word said Auburn Risque, standing like a stalagmite with his eyes upon ten francs.

"Whiz-z-z!"--"click!" "click!" "tingle!"

Did he see the fifteen francs at all, half trance-like, half corpse-like, as he stood, waiting for the third revolution, and waiting again, and again, and again?

His five francs have grown to be a hundred; his cold hand falls freezingly upon them; five francs replace the hundred he took away--"Whizz!" goes the ball; "click!" stops the ball; the coupeur seizes Mr. Risque's five francs, and Mr. Risque walks away like a somnambulist.

V.

BURIED IN THE COMMON DITCH.

It would have been a strange scene for an American public, the street corridor of the lofty house near the church of Saint Sulpice, on the funeral afternoon.