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In one very popular novel the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains.
Croix, had gone to the gaming-table as soon as he had got my twenty sequins, and that he had then taken her back to the inn, where he had spent the next day in a state of despair, as he did not dare to shew himself abroad in the daytime. In the evening he put on his mask and went out, not returning till the next morning.
The one outraged public morals, the other pensioned and ennobled the betrayers of public trusts; the one naturalized the gaming-table and the keeping of mistresses as customs of Irish society; the other sold or allowed the highest offices and honours of the state from a weighership in the butter market to an earl's coronet to be put up at auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder.
It is not pleasant to go down, step after step, to the dark dungeon of vice. We will not follow Walter to the revel, nor the gaming-table. We will close our ears to the blasphemous oaths of his companions, to the imprecations on his own lips. The career of folly and of sin was destined to be closed; and rather would we draw a veil over its every scene.
The American who had spoken to him before a tall, athletic-looking man, with a fair beard round a hard Yankee face, and with a remnant of gold lace on the sleeve of his jacket had since been at the gaming-table, and had been losing one doubloon after another. "They don't play fair, my lad!" he cried in English to Salvé, to whom he seemed anxious to make up.
The rumours, indeed, were so vague as to carry with them no weight. During the middle of his career, when in the full flush of health and fortune, he had renounced the gaming-table. Of late years, as advancing age made time more heavy, he had resumed the resource, and with all his former good luck.
Besides, it was only a step from a gaming-table to a Father Confessor. The soul of old Spain still lived in the land. The click of castanettes was heard daily in her plazas and streets where the fandango and jotta were gayly danced; while at night the soft sounds of guitars and voices issued from out the deep shadow of her walls.
His passion for attending executions was notorious and unaccountable, except on the ground of that love of excitement which leads others to drinking or the gaming-table. Those sights, from which human nature shrinks, appear to have been sought for by Selwyn with an eagerness resembling enjoyment. This strange propensity was frequently laughed at by his friends. Alluding to the practice of criminals dropping a handkerchief as a signal for the executioner, says Walpole, "George never thinks, but
It is scarcely doubtful that the ennui occasioned by the waning passion of Henri IV for Madame de Verneuil at this period induced him, even more than formerly, to seek amusement and occupation at the gaming-table, where he was emulated by his profuse and licentious nobles, while even his Queen and the ladies of the Court entered with avidity into the exciting pastime.
How can it be possible? All is deceit and perfidy. Geronimo seemed the soul of virtue and loyalty; he lived with so much economy and conducted himself so honorably, that to those who knew him not he might have appeared either a poor man or a precocious miser. And this tranquil, modest, prudent young man loses at the gaming-table ten thousand crowns, the property of his benefactor!
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