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who rest there are blessed, for they were lowered
into consecrated ground with hymns and prayers.
Aquilon, the gambler, who died by his own hand
at Ekeby, had to be buried outside the wall. He
who had once been so proud, so chivalrous—the
brave soldier, the fearless hunter, the gambler who
held fortune in his hand—had ended by dissipating
his children’s inheritance, all that he himself had
acquired, and every penny his wife had saved. Wife
and children he had deserted many years before to
lead the life of a cavalier. One evening, the previous
summer, he had played away the farm that gave
his family the means of subsistence, and, rather than
pay that last gambling debt, he shot himself.
Since his death, the cavaliers had been only
twelve in number. No one had come to take the
place of the thirteenth; that is to say, no one but
the arch-fiend who on Christmas Eve had crept out
of the blasting-furnace.
The cavaliers thought the gambler’s fate harder
than that of his predecessors. To be sure, they knew
that each year one of them must die. But what of it?
Cavaliers may not grow old. If their eyes are too
dim to distinguish the cards, their hands too shaky
to lift the glass, what is life to them and what are
they to life? But to lie like a dog outside the churchyard
wall where the sod is trampled by grazing
sheep, wounded by spade and plough, where the
wayfarer passes without slackening his pace, and
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