"I wish you would heat for me about a wine-glassful of pure Jamaica rum. It must be perfectly pure rum, and must be brought to a boil. You would probably do better to look after it yourself."
"Certainly, certainly," said the landlord. "It is my duty in such cases to do everything that lies in my power."
"And do you go and see that I get it at once; and you, young man, tell my driver to wait for me."
"Yes sir," said both the waiters at once, and hastened after the landlord.
"Have you any hope?" I asked.
The doctor did not answer. He gave a hurried glance at the door, then stepped again to the bed, threw back the coverlid which the dead man had drawn up over breast and arms as high as the chin, and then I saw that he took out a small phial which he had probably found under the cover in the stiffened hand of the corpse. He smelled its contents cautiously for a moment, then wrapped it in a piece of paper and put it in his waistcoat pocket.
"Unless there is some especial reason for it," he said, "your wife need not know that her father has poisoned himself."
I groaned aloud.
"Courage! courage!" said the doctor; "this is a world in which things are often desperately dark. But this cannot be helped now, and you have to think of your wife and children."
As I went home an hour later, the wind was howling as furious as ever through the rainy streets, and at the same corner I met the same hearse, now coming back in a slouching trot as before. I looked at it without the least emotion or feeling, which seemed indeed to have perished forever in my breast. Yes, yes, the doctor was right: it was often desperately dark in this world; and I do not know that it would have seemed darker to me had I known what I did not know, that in the palace of the prince, which I had to pass on my way home, behind the lowered curtains, the last of the male line of the princes of Prora-Wiek, counts of Ralow, was giving up his young life under the hands of the surgeons.