"Not exactly."
"Well, but prescience of isolated events, preceded by no _indicia,_ belongs only to omniscience. Did they not teach you that much at Oxford?"
"They taught me very little at Oxford."
"Fault of the place, eh? You taught _them_ something, though; and the present conversation reminds me of it. In your second term, when every other man is still quizzed and kept down as a freshman, you, were already a leader; a chief of misrule. You founded a whist-club in Trinity, the primmest college of all. The Dons rooted you out in college; but you did not succ.u.mb; you fulfilled the saying of Sydney Smith, that "Cribbage should be played in caverns, and sixpenny-whist in the howling wilderness." Ha! ha! how well I remember riding across Bullington Green one fine afternoon, and finding four Oxford hacks haltered in a row, and the four undergraduates that had hired them on long tick, sitting cross-legged under the hedge like Turks or tailors, round a rude table with the legs sawed down to stumps. You had two packs, and a portable inkstand, and were so hard at it that I put my mare"s nose right over the quartet before you saw either her or me. That hedge was like a drift of odoriferous snow the hawthorn bloom, and primroses sparkled on its bank like topazes. The birds chirruped, the sky smiled, the sun burned perfumes; and there sat my lord and his fellow-maniacs, snick-snack--pit-pat--cutting, dealing, playing, revoking, scoring, and exchanging I. O. U. "s not worth the paper."
"All true, but the revoking," said Severne, merrily. "Monster! by the memory of those youthful days, I demand a fair hearing." Then, gravely, "Hang it all, Vizard, I am not a fellow that is always intruding his affairs and his theories upon other men."
"No, no, no," said Vizard, hastily, and half apologetically; "go on."
"Well, then, of course I don"t pretend to foreknowledge; but I do to experience, and you know experience teaches the wise."
"Not to fling five hundred after three. There--I beg pardon. Proceed, instructor of youth."
"Do listen, then: experience teaches us that luck has its laws; and I build my system on one of them. If two opposite accidents are sure to happen equally often in a total of fifty times, people, who have not observed, expect them to happen turn about, and bet accordingly. But they don"t happen turn about; they make short runs, and sometimes long ones.
They positively avoid alternation. Have you not observed this at _trente et quarante?"_
"No."
"Then you have not watched the cards."
"Not much. The faces of the gamblers were always my study. They are instructive."
"Well, then, I"ll give you an example outside--for the principle runs through all equal chances--take the university boat-race: you have kept your eye on that?"
"Rather. Never missed one yet. Come all the way from Barfordshire to see it."
"Well, there"s an example."
"Of chance? No, thank you. That goes by strength, skill, wind, endurance, chaste living, self-denial, and judicious training. Every winning boat is manned by virtues." His eye flashed, and he was as earnest all in a moment as he had been listless. A continental cynic had dubbed this insular cynic mad.
The professor of chances smiled superior. "Those things decide each individual race, and the best men win, because it happens to be the only race that is never sold. But go further back, and you find it is chance.
It is pure chance that sends the best men up to Cambridge two or three years running, and then to Oxford. With this key, take the facts my system rests on. There are two. The first is that in thirty and odd races and matches, the university luck has come out equal on the river and at Lord"s: the second is, the luck has seldom alternated. I don"t say, never. But look at the list of events; it is published every March. You may see there the great truth that even chances shun direct alternation.
In this, properly worked, lies a fortune at Homburg, where the play is square. Red gains once; you back red next time, and stop. You are on black, and win; you double. This is the game, if you have only a few pounds. But with five hundred pounds you can double more courageously, and work the short run hard; and that is how losses are averted and gains secured. Once at Wiesbaden I caught a croupier, out on a holiday. It was Good-Friday, you know. I gave him a stunning dinner. He was close as wax, at first--that might be the salt fish; but after the _rognons "a la brochette,_ and a bottle of champagne, he let out. I remember one thing he said: Monsieur, ce que fait la fortune de la banque ce n"est pas le pet.i.t avantage qu"elle tire du refait--quoique cela y est pour quelquechose--c"est la te"me"rite" de ceux qui perdent, et la timidite"
de ceux qui gagnent.""
"And," says Vizard, "there is a French proverb founded on _experience:_
"C"est encore rouge qui perd, Et encore noir. Mais toujours blanc qui gagne.""
Severne, for the first time, looked angry and mortified; he turned his back and was silent. Vizard looked at him uneasily, hesitated a moment, then flung the remainder of his cigar away and seemed to rouse himself body and soul. He squared his shoulders, as if he were going to box the Demon of play for his friend, and he let out good sense right and left, and, indeed, was almost betrayed into eloquence. "What!" he cried, "you, who are so bright and keen and knowing in everything else, are you really so blinded by egotism and credulity as to believe that you can invent any method of betting at _rouge et noir_ that has not been tried before you were born? Do you remember the first word in La Bruy"ere"s famous work?"
"No," said Ned, sulkily. "Read nothing but newspapers."
"Good lad. Saves a deal of trouble. Well, he begins "Tout est dit"--"everything has been said;" and I say that, in your business, "Tout est fait"--"everything has been done." Every move has been tried before you existed, and the result of all is that to bet against the bank, wildly or systematically, is to gamble against a rock. _Si monumenta quoeris, circ.u.mspice._ Use your eyes, man. Look at the Kursaal, its luxuries, its gardens, its gilding, its attractions, all of them cheap, except the one that pays for all; all these delights, and the rents, and the croupiers, and the servants, and the income and liveries of an unprincipled prince, who would otherwise be a poor but honest gentleman with one _bonne,_ instead of thirty blazing lackeys, all come from the gains of the bank, which are the losses of the players, especially of those that have got a system."
Severne shot in, "A bank was broken last week."
"Was it? Then all it lost has returned to it, or will return to it to-night; for gamblers know no day of rest."
"Oh, yes, they do. It is shut on Good-Friday."
"You surprise me. Only three hundred and sixty-four days in the year!
Brainless avarice is more reasonable than I thought. Severne, yours is a very serious case. You have reduced your income, that is clear; for an English gentleman does not stay years and years abroad unless he has out run the constable; and I feel sure gambling has done it. You had the fever from a boy. Bullington Green! "As the twig"s bent the tree"s inclined." Come, come, make a stand. We are friends. Let us help one another against our besetting foibles. Let us practice antique wisdom; let us "know ourselves," and leave Homburg to-morrow, instead of Tuesday."
Severne looked sullen, but said nothing; then Vizard gave him too hastily credit for some of that sterling friendship, bordering on love, which warmed his own faithful breast: under this delusion he made an extraordinary effort; he used an argument which, with himself, would have been irresistible. "Look here," said he, "I"ll--won"t you have a cigar?--there; now I"ll tell you something: I have a mania as bad as yours; only mine is intermittent, thank Heaven! I"m told a million women are as good, or better, than a million men. It may be so. But when I, an individual, stake my heart on lovely woman, she always turns out unworthy. With me, the s.e.x avoids alternation. Therefore I rail on it wholesale. It is not philosophical; but I don"t do it to instruct mankind; it is to soothe my spleen. Well--would you believe it?--once in every three years, in spite of my experience, I am always bitten again.
After my lucid interval has expired, I fall in with some woman, who seems not like the rest, but an angel. Then I, though I"m averse to the s.e.x, fall an easy, an immediate victim to the individual."
"Love at first sight."
"Not a bit of it. If she is as beautiful as an angel, with the voice of a peac.o.c.k or a guinea-hen--and, luckily for me, that is a frequent arrangement--she is no more to me than the fire-shovel. If she has a sweet voice and pale eyes, I"m safe. Indeed, I am safe against Juno, Venus, and Minerva for two years and several months after the last; but when two events coincide, when my time is up, and the lovely, melodious female comes, then I am lost. Before I have seen her and heard her five minutes, I know my fate, and I never resist it. I never can; that is a curious part of the mania. Then commences a little drama, all the acts of which are stale copies; yet each time they take me by surprise, as if they were new. In spite of past experience, I begin all confidence and trust: by-and-by come the subtle but well-known signs of deceit; so doubt is forced on me; and then I am all suspicion, and so darkly vigilant that soon all is certainty; for "les fourberies des femmes" are diabolically subtle, but monotonous. They seem to vary only on the surface. One looks too gentle and sweet to give any creature pain; I cherish her like a tender plant; she deceives me for the coa.r.s.est fellow she can find.
Another comes the frank and candid dodge; she is so off-handed she shows me it is not worth her while to betray. She deceives me, like the other, and with as little discrimination. The next has a face of beaming innocence, and a limpid eye that looks like transparent candor; she gazes long and calmly in my face, as if her eye loved to dwell on me, gazes with the eye of a gazelle or a young hare, and the baby lips below outlie the h.o.a.riest male fox in the Old Jewry. But, to complete the delusion, all my sweethearts and wives are romantic and poetical skin-deep--or they would not attract me--and all turn out vulgar to the core. By their lovers alone can you ever know them. By the men they can"t love, and the men they do love, you find these creatures that imitate sentiment so divinely are hard, prosaic, vulgar little things, thinly gilt and double varnished."
"They are much better than we are; but you don"t know how to take them,"
said Severne, with the calm superiority of success.
"No," replied Vizard, dryly, "curse me if I do. Well, I did hope I had outgrown my mania, as I have done the toothache; for this time I had pa.s.sed the fatal period, the three years. It is nearly four years now since I went through the established process--as fixed beforehand as the dyer"s or the cotton-weaver"s--adored her, trusted her blindly, suspected her, watched her, detected her, left her. By-the-by, she was my wife, the last; but that made no difference; she was neither better nor worse than the rest, and her methods and idiotic motives of deceit identical. Well, Ned, I was mistaken. Yesterday night I met my Fate once more."
"Where? In Frankfort?"
"No: at Homburg; at the opera. You must give me your word not to tell a soul."
"I pledge you my word of honor."
"Well, the lady who sung the part of Siebel."
"Siebel?" muttered Severne.
"Yes," said Vizard, dejectedly.
Severne fixed his eyes on his friend with a strange expression of confusion and curiosity, as if he could not take it all in. But he said nothing, only looked very hard all the time.
Vizard burst out, ""O miserae hominum mentes, O pectora caeca!" There I sat, in the stalls, a happy man comparatively, because my heart, though full of scars, was at peace, and my reason, after periodical abdications, had resumed its throne, for good; so I, weak mortal, fancied. Siebel appeared; tall, easy, dignified, and walking like a wave; modest, fair, n.o.ble, great, dreamy, and, above all, divinely sad; the soul of womanhood and music poured from her honey lips; she conquered all my senses: I felt something like a bolt of ice run down my back. I ought to have jumped up and fled the theater. I wish I had. But I never do. I am incurable. The charm deepened; and when she had sung "Le Parlate d"Amor" as no mortal ever sung and looked it, she left the stage and carried my heart and soul away with her. What chance had I? Here shone all the beauties that adorn the body, all the virtues and graces that embellish the soul; they were wedded to poetry and ravishing music, and gave and took enchantment. I saw my paragon glide away, like a G.o.ddess, past the scenery, and I did not see her meet her lover at the next step--a fellow with a wash-leather face, greasy locks in a sausage roll, and his hair shaved off his forehead--and s.n.a.t.c.h a pot of porter from his hands, and drain it to the dregs, and say, "It is all right, Harry: _that_ fetched "em." But I know, by experience, she did; so _sauve qui peut._ Dear friend and fellow-lunatic, for my sake and yours, leave Frankfort with me to-morrow."
Severne hung his head, and thought hard. Here was a new and wonderful turn. He felt all manner of strange things--a pang of jealousy, for one.
He felt that, on every account, it would be wise to go, and, indeed, dangerous to stay. But a mania is a mania, and so he could not. "Look here, old fellow," he said, "if the opera were on to-morrow, I would leave my three hundred behind me and sacrifice myself to you, sooner than expose you to the fascinations of so captivating a woman as Ina Klosking."
"Ina Klosking? Is that her name? How do _you_ know?"
"I--I--fancy I heard so."
"Why, she was not announced. Ina Klosking! It is a sweet name;" and he sighed.
"But you are quite safe from her for one day," continued Severne, "so you must be reasonable. I will go with you, Tuesday, as early as you like; but do be a good fellow, and let me have the five hundred, to try my system with to-morrow."
Vizard looked sad, and made no reply.