Perhaps, in any case, you had better never repeat the whole of this to your sister.
Not till after a considerable struggle did I pull him down to the safe deck once more. There he stood breathless.
“You were not surely going to drown yourself, Mr. Charteris?”
“I was. And I will.”
“Try,—and I shall call the police to prevent your making such an ass of yourself.”
It was no time to choose words, and in this sort of disease the best preventive one can use, next to a firm, imperative will, is ridicule. He answered nothing—but gazed at me in simple astonishment, while I took his arm and led him out of the boat and across the landing-stage.
“I beg your pardon for using such strong language, but a man must be an ass indeed, who contemplates such a thing;—here, too, of all places. To be fished up out of this dirty river like a dead rat, for the entertainment of the crowd; to make a capital case at the magistrate's court to-morrow, and a first-rate paragraph in the Liverpool Mercury,—'Attempted Suicide of a Gentleman.' Or, if you really succeeded, which I doubt, to be 'Found Drowned,'—a mere body, drifted ashore with cocoa-nut husks and cabbages at Waterloo, or brought in as I once saw at these very stairs, one of the many poor fools who do this here yearly. They had picked him up eight miles higher up the river, and so brought him down, lashed behind a rowing-boat, floating face upwards”—
“Ah!”
I felt Charteris shudder.
You will, too, my love, so I will repeat no more of what I said to him. But these ghastly pictures were the strongest arguments available with such a man. What was the use of talking to him of God, and life, and immortality? he had told me he believed in none of these things. But he believed in death—the epicurean's view of it—“to lie in cold obstruction and to rot.” I thought, and still think, that it was best to use any lawful means to keep him from repeating the attempt. Best to save the man first, and preach to him afterwards.