"Oh, I've not been for a fortnight."
"A long time, I declare! What a good Christian you are, my friend. For my own part, I've never been at all. My conscience is as clear and unsullied as a mirror. Now there," said he, pointing to the pasty-faced student, whose hair was so white that it looked as though it had been powdered, "there is one who had better confess without delay; he is knocking now at the door of eternity."
Sure enough, only a few days later the student was removed to the infirmary, and at the end of March he died.
Bellini, the man whose mistress was dying of the same disease, asked after him anxiously every day, and when he died cried for hours in a weak, childish fashion. It was not from any grief he felt at parting from the sick man, but at the thought of what might happen to his mistress. His grief subsided at length, and then, as he no longer had the reminder of the student before his eyes, he gradually came to think less and less about his own sorrow.
The death of the student had a totally different effect upon the King of Spades; he became quite melancholy, took to philosophising about life and death, and would engage in lengthy discussions with the Delegate, who rolled his eyes about and expounded his views in a deep bass voice.
When talking with Costantino, the ex-marshal was apt to drop into rather homesick reminiscences about the distant land of their birth.
"Yes," said he one day, "I was once quite close to your home, or its neighbourhood. I can't tell you precisely, but I know there was a wood, all arbute, and cork-trees, and rock-roses; it looked as though there had been a rain of blood all over them. And there was a smell—oh! the queerest kind of smell, it was something like tobacco. Then there was a cross on a stone, and you could see the water far away in the distance."
"Why, of course!" cried Costantino. "That was the forest of Cherbomine (Stagman). I should say I did know it. Once a hunter saw a stag there with golden horns. He fired, and shot it dead, but as the stag fell it gave a cry like a human being, and said: 'The penance is completed!' They say it was some human soul that had been forced to expiate a terrible sin of some sort. The cross was erected afterwards."
"And how about the horns?"
"They say that as the hunter drew near the horns turned black."