"It's worth it," cried the Irishman, "even for that one!"
Stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness and sympathy. "Dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my friend, alone—in peace and silence. That 'one' I speak of is yourself."
The doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. O'Malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke another word. He heard the door shut softly behind him. The unspoken answer in his mind was in two words—two common little adjectives: "Coward and selfish!"
But Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his breath. A sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief. For O'Malley remembered it afterwards.
"Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But, thank God, harmless—to others and—himself."
And soon afterwards O'Malley also went to his cabin. Before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood of sadness—almost as though he had heard his friend's unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable difficulties that lay before him. The world would think him "mad but harmless."
Then, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.
"I can but try…!"
XLV
And here the crowded, muddled notebooks come to an end. The rest was action—and inevitable disaster.