There was, of course, an immediate uproar. In an instant every one was on his feet; Mr. Ambrose was surrounded. Men were shaking their fists in his face, screaming at him excitedly, calling him ugly names. He gazed at them placidly, vaguely. It was clear he did not grasp the situation.
Somebody must needs intervene.
“I saw what Monsieur did. I am sure it was with no ill intention. He made no effort at concealment. It was done in a fit of absence of mind. Look at him. He is a very old man. You can see he is bewildered. He does not even yet understand what has happened. He should never have come here, at his age. He should never have been allowed to take the bank. Let the croupier pay both sides. Then I will take Monsieur away.”
Somehow I got him out of the Casino, and led him to his hotel, a small hotel in the least favoured quarter of the town, the name of which I had a good deal of difficulty in extracting from him. On the way thither scarcely a word passed between us. I forbore to tell him who I was; of course, he did not recognise me. But all the while a pertinacious little voice within me insisted: “He did it deliberately. He deliberately tried to cheat. With his gaze concentrated on his vision, he could see nothing else; he could see no harm in trying to cheat at cards. He needed money—it didn’t matter how he obtained it. The other players were phantasms—where’s the harm in cheating phantasms? Only he forgot—or, rather, he never realised—that the phantasms had eyes, that they could see. That’s why he made no effort at concealment.”—Was the voice right or wrong?
I parted with him at the door of his hotel; but the next day a feeling grew within me that I ought to call upon him, that I ought at least to call and take his news. They told me that he had left by an early train for Paris.
As I have been writing these last pages, a line of Browning’s has kept thrumming through my head. “This high man, with a great thing to pursue... This high man, with a great thing to pursue...” How does it apply to Mr. Ambrose? I don’t know—unless, indeed, a high man, with a great thing to pursue, is to be excused, is to be pitied, rather than blamed, if he loses his sense, his conscience, of other things, of small things. After all, wasn’t it because he lost his conscience of small things, that he missed his great thing?
TIRALA-TIRALA...
I wonder what the secret of it is—why that little fragment of a musical phrase has always had this instant, irresistible power to move me. The tune of which it formed a part I have never heard; whether it was a merry tune or a sad tune, a pretty tune or a stupid one, I have no means of guessing. A sequence of six notes, like six words taken from the middle of a sentence, it stands quite by itself, detached, fortuitous. If I were to pick it out for you on the piano, you would scoff at it; you would tell me that it is altogether pointless and unsuggestive, that any six notes, struck at haphazard, would signify as much. And I certainly could not, with the least show of reason, maintain the contrary. I could only wonder the more why it has always had, for me, this very singular charm. As when I was a child, so now, after all these years, it is a sort of talisman in my hands, a thing to conjure with. I have but to breathe it never so softly to myself, and (if I choose) the actual world melts away, and I am journeying on wings in dreamland. Whether I choose or not, it always thrills my heart with responsive echoes, it always wakes a sad, sweet emotion.