WHEN Lucien Hem saw his last hundred-franc note gripped by the
bank-keeper's rake, and rose from the roulette-table, where he had lost
the last fragments of his little fortune, collected for this supreme
struggle, he felt giddy, and thought he was going to fall.
With dizzy head and tottering legs, he went and threw himself down upon
the broad leathern settee surrounding the play-table.
[Illustration: "HE FELT GIDDY."]
For some minutes he gazed vacantly on the clandestine gambling-house in
which he had squandered the best years of his youth; recognised the
ravaged faces of the gamblers, crudely lit by the three large shaded
lamps; listened to the light jingle of gold on the cloth-covered table;
felt that he was ruined, lost; recollected that he had at home the pair
of regulation pistols which his father, General Hem, then a simple
captain, had used so well in the attack of Zaatcha; then, overcome by
fatigue, he sank into a profound sleep.
When he arose, with a clammy mouth, he saw by the clock that he had
slept for barely half an hour, and felt an imperious need for breathing
the night air. The clock-hands marked a quarter before midnight. While
rising and stretching his arms, Lucien remembered that it was Christmas
Eve, and, by an ironic trick of memory, he saw himself a little child,
putting its shoes into the chimney before going to bed.
At that moment old Dronski--a pillar of the gaming house, the classic
Pole, wearing the threadbare hooded woollen cloak, ornamented all over
with grease stains--approached Lucien, and muttered a few words in his
grizzled beard: "Lend me a five-franc piece, monsieur. It's now two days
since I have stirred out of the club, and for two days the 'seventeen'
has never turned up. Laugh at me, if you like, but I'll suffer my hand
to be cut off if that number does not turn up on the stroke of
midnight."
Lucien Hem shrugged his shoulders. He had not even enough in his pocket
to meet this tax, which the frequenters of the place called "The Pole's
hundred sous." He passed into the antechamber, took his hat and fur
coat, and descended the stairs with feverish rapidity.
Since four o'clock, when Lucien had shut himself up in the gaming-house,
snow had fallen heavily, and the street--a street in the centre of
Paris, very narrow, and built with high houses on either side--was
completely white.
In the calm sky, blue-black, the cold stars glittered.
The ruined gambler shuddered under his furs, and walked away, his mind
still teeming with thoughts of despair, and more than ever turning to
the remembrance of the box of pistols which awaited him in one of his
drawers; but after moving forward a few steps, he stopped suddenly
before a heart-wringing sight.
On a stone bench, placed according to old custom near the monumental
door of a mansion, a little girl of six or seven years of age, dressed
in a ragged black frock, was sitting in the snow. She was sleeping, in
spite of the cruel cold, in an attitude of frightful fatigue and
exhaustion: her poor little head and tiny shoulder pressed as if they
had sunk into an angle of the wall, and reposing on the icy stone. One
of her wooden shoes had fallen from her foot, which hung helplessly and
lugubriously before her.
With a mechanical gesture, Lucien put his hand to his waistcoat pocket,
but a moment afterwards he recollected that he had not been able to find
even a forgotten piece of twenty-sous, and had been obliged to leave the
club without giving the customary "tip" to the club attendant; yet,
moved by an instinctive feeling of pity, he approached the little girl,
and might, perhaps, have taken her in his arms and given her a night's
lodging, when in the wooden shoe which had slipped from her foot he saw
something glitter.
He stooped: it was a gold coin.