CHAPTER XLVIII.
SUDDEN NEWS.
What is luck? Is there such an influence? What type of mind rejects altogether, and consistently, this law or power? Call it by what name you will, fate or fortune, did not Napoleon, the man of death and of action, and did not Swedenborg, the man of quietude and visions, acknowledge it? Where is the successful gamester who does not “back his luck,” when once it has declared itself, and bow before the storms of fortune when they in turn have set in? I take Napoleon and Swedenborg—the man of this visible world, and the man of the invisible world—as the representatives of extreme types of mind. People who have looked into Swedenborg's works will remember curious passages on the subject, and find more dogmatical, and less metaphysical admissions in Napoleon's conversations everywhere.
In corroboration of this theory, that luck is an element, with its floods and ebbs, against which it is fatuity to contend, was the result of Richard Arden's play.
Before half-past two, he had lost every guinea of his treasure. He had been drinking champagne. He was flushed, dismal, profoundly angry. Hot and headachy, he was ready to choke with gall. There was a big, red-headed, vulgar fellow beside him, with a broad-brimmed white hat, who was stuffing his pockets and piling the table before him, as though he had found the secret of an “open sesame,” and was helping himself from the sacks of the Forty Thieves.
When Richard had lost his last pound, he would have liked to smash the gas-lamps and windows, and the white hat and the red head in it, and roar the blasphemy that rose to his lips. But men can't afford to make themselves ridiculous, and as he turned about to make his unnoticed exit, he saw the little Jew, munching a sandwich, with a glass of champagne beside him.
“I say,” said Richard Arden, walking up to the little man, whose big mouth was full of sandwich, and whose fierce black eyes encountered his instantaneously, “you don't happen to have a little more, on the same terms, about you?”
Mr. Levi waited to bolt his sandwich, and then swallow down his champagne.