It was a recurrently mad time, whose agitation was transmitted to remotest parishes all over the country—only with this distinction: the Piémontais, watching the central game, was held hostage to its excitement; the poor Savoyard, ruined out of sight, cursed himself for a blockhead victim to fraud, and, with the common inconsistency, vowed hatred against a Government which could thus rob him of his mite.
That was inevitable. Gambling in cold blood can only breed usurers where it succeeds, and desperadoes where it fails. The Turinois possessed the glitter of the table. It was not he who was to fail the Monarchy in the dark days to come.
He was as fevered, as voluble, as gesticulatory, as seething in his numbers on this particular occasion of the drawing, as he had been any time since M. D’Aubonne first brought his damnable invention of the lottery-wheel from France some fifty years earlier. His cheek was as glowing, his heart as fluttering with a sense of novelty, as if he had never before seen a hundred or two of butterflies broken on the wheel. Even Dr Bonito, standing amidst the pack with a young friend, felt the infection of the occasion, and bit his blue lips with that sort of agonised transport which makes men under the lash set their teeth in whatsoever they encounter.
He had had that vanity of his qualities, the old grey rat, to hold by an independence even to the last capacity of the gutter for yielding him one. The stars, the cards (a greasy pack), the astrolabe and divining rod, had procured him thence, latterly, an obscene living. In taking it, he had had at least the justification of his own superstition. If he sold immortal truths at a halfpenny apiece, it was only because necessity obliged him. They had all the value of genuineness in his eyes, and to “fake” antiques would only discredit him with the gods, upon whom was his ultimate reliance. What he had borrowed from Louis-Marie had been a loan to conviction—a last ounce of metal needed to insure his winged feet to the Perseus of his destiny. That he fully believed. Beyond it—it was a fact—he had not asked, nor accepted, a farthing from the young man.
But superstition, as a one-devil possession, prevails only through its plausibility. Let its dupe once be disillusioned, and all the moral obliquities, out of which it had shaped its pretence, confess themselves the owners of the mansion. The maggots which devour a dead faith were bred in it living. Superstition, cast down, becomes the prey of what it had entertained. Dr Bonito, a Rosicrucian by conviction, had never perhaps been really dangerous until the stars came to prove themselves impostors. And then he delivered himself wholly to corruption.
In the meanwhile, bond-slave to his faith, foreseeing nothing so little as the imminent disruption of that faith’s particles, or articles, he cherished for the moment no particular thought of rascality towards anyone. He may even have felt a little cold thaw of emotion towards the human souls about him, as towards beings predestined to witness in him alone, conversant with the hieroglyphics of fate, that apotheosis which they all desired vainly for themselves. Smugly self-conscious of his frowsy coat and broken shoes, he likened himself to Elijah, on the banks of the Jordan, awaiting, an unconsidered prophet, the descent of the fiery chariot. His eyes travelled incessantly, feverishly, from his companion—poor Louis-Marie, the dull, apathetic soul—to the steps of the Town-hall, on which was displayed—under guard, but for all to see—the wheel of Fortune.
Suddenly a sound went over the vast throng, like a sweep of wind over a bed of rushes, bowing all heads in a single direction. It wailed, and passed, and died, and was succeeded by an intense hush. The wheel was seen to turn—and stop. Bonito clutched his voucher, holding it under his nose for identification.
The number, large and white, cynosure of a thousand eyes, went up on a black board—61.
A thin wheeze, such as strains itself from lungs winded by a blow, came from him. Then he gasped, and, twitching in all his features, nudged his companion, and set his finger on the card—61, sure enough. The sigh, the wail, rose again over the throng, and died down—11. Bonito, for all his faith, was shaking as if palsied as his finger travelled to the number. Even Louis-Marie, standing staring in his place, felt in his veins a sluggish thrill of excitement. Again the wheel turned, and again the card duplicated its record—81; and then once more it revolved and disgorged a single number—9, and the quatern was accomplished.
Bonito looked up. His forehead was wet; his lips were dribbling and smiling in one.