“Yes, sir.”
The steward beat a retreat, and Glyddyr tossed off another glass, poured out the remainder, and sat gazing at it vacantly for a few minutes before taking it up, his hand once more trembling violently.
“If I weren’t such a cursed coward,” he said, “I could get on. He must have had a lot before, and that’s what did it. By George, it gives me the horrors!”
He tossed off the wine.
“No,” he muttered as he set down the glass; “it wasn’t what I gave him. It wasn’t enough, and to think now that there was all that lying ready to my hand, without my having the pluck to take what I wanted. I must have been a fool. I must have been mad.”
“Curse these bottles!” he cried, after a pause. “Pint? They don’t hold half—a wretched swindle. I believe there are thousands lying there; and I might have borrowed what I wanted, and all would have been well; but I was such a fool.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he cried, as if apostrophising someone. “How could I get it with that woman coming in and out, and the feeling on me that one of the girls might open the door at any moment. They’d have thought I meant to steal the cursed stuff. Then, too, it seemed as if he might wake up at any moment. Bah! How upset I do feel. That stuff’s no better than water.”
He rose angrily, and opened a locker, from which he took out a brandy decanter, and placed it on the table. “Let’s have a nip of you. I seem to want something to steady my nerves.”
He poured out a goodly dram and tossed it off.
“Ah, that’s better! One can taste you. Seems to take off this horrible feeling of sinking.—Poor old fellow! Seemed as if he would wake up. Never wake up again.”