The Magic Skin | Page 5

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