Just as well might he have commanded the man to get up and walk.
Had that last elusive thread that held him to mortality been broken? Hampden bent still lower. The pallid face was no more pallid than before, but before it could scarcely have been more death-like. The acutest test could not have found a trace of breath. He put together the gradual failing of the voice that little more than an hour ago had been as full and vigorous as his own, the unfinished sentence, the silence——
Suddenly he straightened himself by the bedside with a sense of guilt that struck him like a blow. What was he thinking—hoping? Who was he—Sir John Hampden, President of the Unity League? Not in that room! The man who watched by the bedside stood there even as the humblest servant of the Order of St. Martin, pledged while in that service to succour in "trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity."
It did not occur to him to debate the point. His way seemed very straight and clear. His plain duty to the dying man was to try by every means in his power to carry out his one overwhelming desire. Its successful accomplishment might aim a more formidable blow at his own ambition than almost anything else that could happen. It could not ward off the attack upon which the League was now concentrating—nothing could do that—but an intimate knowledge of the details of that scheme of retaliation might act in a hundred adverse ways. Hampden did not stop to consider what might happen on the one side and on the other. A thousand years of argument and sophistries could not alter the one great fact of his present duty. He had a very simple conscience, and he followed it.
If he could have speeded Mr Tubes's arrival he would have done so now. He went into the hall to listen. The street child was still there, sitting on the coal, as sharp-eyed and wakefully alert as ever. He had forgotten her.
"Come, little imp," he said kindly, "I ought to have packed you off long ago." It was, in point of fact, nearly eleven o'clock.
"Ain't doin' no aharm to the coal," she muttered.
"That's not the question. You ought to have been at home and in bed by this time of night."
She looked up at him sharply with a suspicion that such innocence in a grown-up man could not be unassumed.
"Ain't got no bed," she said contemptuously. "Ain't got no 'ome."