The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned
curiously towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The
jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical
Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be
very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a
shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness
looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a
new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. Were not
executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads
that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?
The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks
told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the
suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved
faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an
abandonment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of demon
sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with
pleasure. Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on
the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor
seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his
cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or
lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by
the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.
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