The contest with Chance is one of the maddest and fiercest battles in which the human mind ever engages. Chance, which is neither more nor less than an incessant and incalculable contradiction of facts, is never tired out; we can never meet her face to face, and to defy her is folly. She is as nimble and supple as a tiger, she fells and clutches her prey, while her favours--if by a whim she bestows them--light a flame in her victim’s soul that consumes him from within. His brain reels and he raves in dreams like those of the drunkard--for a vague picture of the Gorgon with whom he is contending takes possession of him and reduces him to bestial madness. Fighting in the dark, desperately and wildly, the gambler is the victim of a hideous incubus; he finds himself started in an orbit of torturing unrest, like a stone flung off into measureless space.
“Gentlemen, it is getting late--it is time to go to bed. It is good to have a little amusement--but we must not have too much of a good thing. We must not exaggerate.”
Leon Roch having seen enough, left the house. A calm mild night invited him to walk along the terrace where there was not a living soul to be seen, and not a sound to be heard but the croaking of the toads. After pacing the avenue to the end and back for the second time, he thought he discovered a figure at one of the nearest ground-floor windows. It was in white, a woman beyond a doubt, whose arm rested on the sill, above which she was visible as a half-length. Leon went towards her and perceiving that she did not move, he went quite near. She might have been carved in marble but for her black hair and a slight motion of her hand among the leaves of a plant that grew near.
“Yes, Pepa--I have turned romantic and am gazing at the stars. To be sure, there is not a star to be seen--but it is all the same.”
“It is a very dark night; I did not recognise you,” said Leon, putting his hand on the top of the window railing. “The damp air is not good for you. Why do you not shut the window? It is of no use to wait for your father. That rascally Cimarra has got him to gamble and they are all quite happy--Go indoors.”
The night was in fact pitch dark and Leon could not see the girl’s face; but he could study the tone of her voice, for the voice is singularly treacherous. Pepa’s voice quavered. Her head, leaning on one side, rested against the window-frame. In her hand she held a flower with a long stem--Leon thought it was a rose. She kept raising it to her lips and biting off a petal which she blew off again. Leon noted the situation and understood that it was the moment to say something appropriate, but he racked his brain in vain; he could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. Both were silent; Leon quiet and motionless, both his hands resting on the cold iron railing, Pepa pulling out the rose petals and blowing them away.