It is something in the vague indistinctness of this power--something that seems to typify the agency of the Evil One himself--that at once tortures and subdues you; and you ever hurry into fresh conflict with the ever-present consciousness of fresh defeat! We might have spared our reader this discursive essay, but that it pertains to our story. Such was the precise feeling entertained by Martin towards Merl. He hated him with all the concentration of his great hatred, and yet he could not disembarrass himself of his presence. He was ashamed of the man amongst his friends; he avoided him in all public places; he shrunk from his very contact as though infected; but he could not throw off his acquaintance, and he nourished in his heart a small ember of hope that one day or other the scale of fortune would turn, and he might win back again all he had ever lost, and stand free and unembarrassed as in the first hour he had met him! Fifty times had he consulted Fortune, as it were, to ask if this moment had yet arrived; but hitherto ever unsuccessfully,--Merl won on as before. Martin, however, invariably ceased playing when he discovered that his ill-luck continued. It was an experiment,--a mere pilot balloon to Destiny; and when he saw the direction adverse, he did not adventure on the grand ascent. It was impossible that a man of Merl's temperament and training should not have detected this game. There was not a phase of the gambler's mind with which he was not thoroughly familiar.
Close intimacies, popularly called friendships, have always their secret motive, if we be but skilful enough to detect it. We see people associate together of widely different habits, and dispositions the most opposite, with nothing in common of station, rank, object, or pursuit. In such cases the riddle has always its key, could we only find it.
Mr. Martin had been some weeks in Paris with his family, when a brief note informed him that Merl had arrived there. He despatched an answer still briefer, asking him to breakfast on the following morning; and it was in the acceptance of this same invitation we have now seen him.
“Who's here just now?” said Merl, throwing down his napkin, and pushing his chair a little back from the table, while he disposed his short, fat legs into what he fancied was a most graceful attitude.