“What on earth do you mean?” I asked.
“I am going to die,” she said.
“You’re mad, you’re morbid,” I cried. “You mustn’t say such things. You’re not ill? What on earth do you mean?”
“I am going to die. I know it. I feel it. I am not ill? I don’t know. I think I am ill. I feel as if I were going to be ill. I am going to die—I know I am going to die.”
I did what I could to dissipate such black presentiments. I refused to talk of them. I did what I could to lend a little gaiety to her life. But Israela grew whiter and more delicate-looking day by day. I was her only visitor. I had asked if I might not bring a friend or two to see her, but she had answered, “I’m afraid he would not like it. People coming and going would disturb him. He can’t bear any noise,” So I was her only visitor—till, by-and-by, another became necessary.
I wonder whether Mr. Ambrose ever really knew that Israela was lying in her bed at the point of death, and that the man who called twice every day to see her was a doctor? True, in an absent-minded fashion, he used to inquire how she was, he used even occasionally to enter the sick-room, and look at her, and lay his hand on her brow, as if to take her temperature; but I wonder whether he ever actually realised her condition? He was terribly preoccupied just then with Volume VIII, At all events, on a certain melancholy morning in April, he allowed me to conduct him to a carriage and to help him in; and together we drove to Kensal Green. He was silent during the drive—thinking hard, I fancied, about some matter very foreign to our errand.... And as soon as the parson there had rattled through his office and concluded it, Israela’s step-father pulled out his watch, and said to me, “Ah, I must hurry off, I must hurry off. I’ve got a long day’s work before me still.”
That was something like ten years ago—the last time I had seen him.... Until now, to-night, on this sultry night of August, ten years afterwards, here he had suddenly reappeared to me, holding the bank at baccarat, at the Grand Cercle of the Casino: Augustus Ambrose, the Friend of Man, the dreamer, the visionary, holding the bank at baccarat, at the Grand Cercle of the Casino!
I looked at him, in simple astonishment at first, and then gradually I shaped a theory. “He has probably come pretty nearly to the end of Israela’s fortune; it would be like him to spend interest and principal as well. And now he finds himself in need of money. And he is just unpractical enough to fancy that he can supply his needs by play. Or—or is it possible he has a system? Perhaps he imagines he has a system.” And then I thought how old he had grown, how terribly, terribly he had decayed.
I looked at him. He was dealing. He dealt to the right, to the left, and to himself. But when he glanced at his own two cards, he made a little face. The next instant he had dropped them under the table, and helped himself to two fresh ones....
The thing was done without the faintest effort at concealment, in a room where at least forty pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.