“What, then, is this lottery?” he asked.
Bonito threw up his hands in mock-incredulity.
“You have been in Turin this month, and have not discovered its distraction of distractions! Alas! what a comment on your own! The lottery? I can explain it in a word—the very grandeur of simplicity; the art which conceals all art. Imagine, Monsieur, a wheel which contains numbers up to ninety and a single zero within its hollow circumference. Of these numbers, five are withdrawn weekly (in Turin or Genoa, turn-about), recorded and replaced. Well, you or I select five numbers—any, after our fancy—register them at a bureau, and receive a counter-check in exchange. Now, supposing two out of those our numbers shall occur in any one drawing, we score an ambo, and receive two hundred and seventy times the amount of our stake: if three, or a tern, we receive it multiplied five thousand five hundred times: if four, or a quatern, sixty-thousand times. On the other hand, if no such combination occurs, we forfeit our stake, to renew it, if we please, week by week, month by month, year by year. There is no end and no limit. Enfin, the zero occurring in any drawing forfeits all stakes of that week to the Government. There are complications, such as distributing one’s chances over the five numbers; but the principle is what I say. I throw for a quatern, and I shall gain it. Its sum will be, relatively, the sum which you shall be good enough to advance me. Join with me, if you will, and foreclose on Fortune. You will be rich, presently, beyond the dreams of parsimony. Wealth attracts wealth. You will lose nothing thereby, if I may say it, as a suitor.”
Wise men are often ready to listen to empirics who cite the occult with an air of finality. Louis-Marie was not very wise, and was thereby the nearer superstition. His faith had told him to discredit soothsayers: but for the time he had lost his faith. Like all good men thrown from their self-respect, he greatly exaggerated his own potentialities for wickedness. This man, he thought, had rightly foretold a misfortune. Might he not with equal certainty predict a fortune? There was some material balm in that. If he was to lose his soul, would not to gain the world better compensate the interval than a life of inglorious brooding? As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb: he called the words to memory with a new sense of daring. What a folly was piety—a hair-shirt on a heathen preordained to damnation. It was no God, no Father, who could set snares for the feet of his children. There was no God, unless a Prince of evil. Let him serve the chance. Live the world and the lottery!
The spirit he had drunk revelled in his starved unaccustomed brain. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drawing out all it contained, offered the sum to Bonito, with a half-maudlin laugh.
“Half for myself and half for you, then,” he said. “I make you my broker with Fate.”
The sum was large enough to awaken a glitter in the Rosicrucian’s cold eyes. Something, the nearest approach to warmth which his heart was capable of feeling, tickled in his breast. He showed, for the moment, quite genial, quite impulsive.
“Always understand, Monsieur,” he said, “that I am actuated by the most earnest desire to serve you. We have a point of sympathy in our common wronging by one who shall be nameless. Let me here suggest, with only the lightest touch on a sensitive place, that women generally are not attracted by extreme ethical correctness, nor won by diffidence so much as overbearance. Believe my sincerity when I assure you that nothing would gratify me more than to see the ultimate accomplishment of a union, to which no bar but that of sentiment can ever—”
Something, some shadow of reawakening terror in the face opposite him, warned him that it would be present wisdom to pursue the subject no further. He “doubled” instantly.
“But I will say no more there,” he interrupted himself. “It is enough for the moment that I undertake to prove myself” (he touched the pocket of his coat) “your efficient friend and steward.”