Augusta listened with rising hair, and realised how very trying must be the life of a private confessor.
“Oh, please stop!” she said faintly, at last. “I can’t bear it—I can’t, indeed.”
“Ah!” he said, as he sunk back exhausted. “I thought that when you understood the customs at Meeson’s you would feel for me in my present position. Think, girl, think what I must suffer, with such a past, standing face to face with an unknown future!”
Then came a silence.
“Take him away! Take him away!” suddenly shouted out Mr. Meeson, staring around him with frightened eyes.
“Who?” asked Augusta; “who?”
“Him—the tall, thin man, with the big book! I know him; he used to be Number 25—he died years ago. He was a very clever doctor; but one of his patients brought a false charge against him and ruined him, so he had to take to writing, poor devil! We made him edit a medical encyclopaedia—twelve volumes for £300, to be paid on completion; and he went mad and died at the eleventh volume. So, of course, we did not pay his widow anything. And now he’s come for me—I know he has. Listen! he’s talking! Don’t you hear him? Oh, Heavens! He says that I am going to be an author, and he is going to publish for me for a thousand years—going to publish on the quarter-profit system, with an annual account, the usual trade deductions, and no vouchers. Oh! oh! Look!—they are all coming!—they are pouring out of the Hutches! they are going to murder me!—keep them off! keep them off!” and he howled and beat the air with his hands.
Augusta, utterly overcome by this awful sight, knelt down by his side and tried to quiet him, but in vain. He continued beating his hands in the air, trying to keep off the ghostly train, till, at last, with one awful howl, he fell back dead.
And that was the end of Meeson. And the works that he published, and the money that he made, and the house that he built, and the evil that he did—are they not written in the Book of the Commercial Kings?