“I’d ‘swap’—do you call it?—chances with him!” And Mr. Rawson looked quaintly rueful over his freedom of speech.
Searle sat supported there with his eyes closed and his face twitching for violent emotion, and then of a sudden had a glare of gravity. “My friend, you’re a dead failure! Be judged! Don’t talk about ‘swapping.’ Don’t talk about chances. Don’t talk about fair starts and false starts. I’m at that point myself that I’ve a right to speak. It lies neither in one’s chance nor one’s start to make one a success; nor in anything one’s brother—however bloated—can do or can undo. It lies in one’s character. You and I, sir, have had no character—that’s very plain. We’ve been weak, sir; as weak as water. Here we are for it—sitting staring in each other’s faces and reading our weakness in each other’s eyes. We’re of no importance whatever, Mr. Rawson!”
Mr. Rawson received this sally with a countenance in which abject submission to the particular affirmed truth struggled with the comparative propriety of his general rebellion against fate. In the course of a minute a due self-respect yielded to the warm comfortable sense of his being relieved of the cares of an attitude. “Go on, sir, go on,” he said. “It’s wholesome doctrine.” And he wiped his eyes with what seemed his sole remnant of linen.
“Dear, dear,” sighed Searle, “I’ve made you cry! Well, we speak as from man to man. I should be glad to think you had felt for a moment the side-light of that great undarkening of the spirit which precedes—which precedes the grand illumination of death.”
Mr. Rawson sat silent a little, his eyes fixed on the ground and his well-cut nose but the more deeply dyed by his agitation. Then at last looking up: “You’re a very good-natured man, sir, and you’ll never persuade me you don’t come of a kindly race. Say what you please about a chance; when a man’s fifty—degraded, penniless, a husband and father—a chance to get on his legs again is not to be despised. Something tells me that my luck may be in your country—which has brought luck to so many. I can come on the parish here of course, but I don’t want to come on the parish. Hang it, sir, I want to hold up my head. I see thirty years of life before me yet. If only by God’s help I could have a real change of air! It’s a fixed idea of mine. I’ve had it for the last ten years. It’s not that I’m a low radical. Oh I’ve no vulgar opinions. Old England’s good enough for me, but I’m not good enough for old England. I’m a shabby man that wants to get out of a room full of staring gentlefolk. I’m for ever put to the blush. It’s a perfect agony of spirit; everything reminds me of my younger and better self. The thing for me would be a cooling cleansing plunge into the unknowing and the unknown! I lie awake thinking of it.”
Searle closed his eyes, shivering with a long-drawn tremor which I hardly knew whether to take for an expression of physical or of mental pain. In a moment I saw it was neither. “Oh my country, my country, my country!” he murmured in a broken voice; and then sat for some time abstracted and lost. I signalled our companion that it was time we should bring our small session to a close, and he, without hesitating, possessed himself of the handle of the Bath-chair and pushed it before him. We had got halfway home before Searle spoke or moved. Suddenly in the High Street, as we passed a chop-house from whose open doors we caught a waft of old-fashioned cookery and other restorative elements, he motioned us to halt. “This is my last five pounds”—and he drew a note from his pocket-book. “Do me the favour, Mr. Rawson, to accept it. Go in there and order the best dinner they can give you. Call for a bottle of Burgundy and drink it to my eternal rest!”
Mr. Rawson stiffened himself up and received the gift with fingers momentarily irresponsive. But Mr. Rawson had the nerves of a gentleman. I measured the spasm with which his poor dispossessed hand closed upon the crisp paper, I observed his empurpled nostril convulsive under the other solicitation. He crushed the crackling note in his palm with a passionate pressure and jerked a spasmodic bow. “I shall not do you the wrong, sir, of anything but the best!” The next moment the door swung behind him.
Searle sank again into his apathy, and on reaching the hotel I helped him to get to bed. For the rest of the day he lay without motion or sound and beyond reach of any appeal. The doctor, whom I had constantly in attendance, was sure his end was near. He expressed great surprise that he should have lasted so long; he must have been living for a month on the very dregs of his strength. Toward evening, as I sat by his bedside in the deepening dusk, he roused himself with a purpose I had vaguely felt gathering beneath his stupor. “My cousin, my cousin,” he said confusedly. “Is she here?” It was the first time he had spoken of Miss Searle since our retreat from her brother’s house, and he continued to ramble. “I was to have married her. What a dream! That day was like a string of verses—rhymed hours. But the last verse is bad measure. What’s the rhyme to ‘love’? Above! Was she a simple woman, a kind sweet woman? Or have I only dreamed it? She had the healing gift; her touch would have cured my madness. I want you to do something. Write three lines, three words: ‘Good-bye; remember me; be happy.’” And then after a long pause: “It’s strange a person in my state should have a wish. Why should one eat one’s breakfast the day one’s hanged? What a creature is man! What a farce is life! Here I lie, worn down to a mere throbbing fever-point; I breathe and nothing more, and yet I desire! My desire lives. If I could see her! Help me out with it and let me die.”
Half an hour later, at a venture, I dispatched by post a note to Miss Searle: “Your cousin is rapidly sinking. He asks to see you.” I was conscious of a certain want of consideration in this act, since it would bring her great trouble and yet no power to face the trouble; but out of her distress I fondly hoped a sufficient force might be born. On the following day my friend’s exhaustion had become so great that I began to fear his intelligence altogether broken up. But toward evening he briefly rallied, to maunder about many things, confounding in a sinister jumble the memories of the past weeks and those of bygone years. “By the way,” he said suddenly, “I’ve made no will. I haven’t much to bequeath. Yet I have something.” He had been playing listlessly with a large signet-ring on his left hand, which he now tried to draw off. “I leave you this”—working it round and round vainly—“if you can get it off. What enormous knuckles! There must be such knuckles in the mummies of the Pharaohs. Well, when I’m gone—! No, I leave you something more precious than gold—the sense of a great kindness. But I’ve a little gold left. Bring me those trinkets.” I placed on the bed before him several articles of jewellery, relics of early foppery: his watch and chain, of great value, a locket and seal, some odds and ends of goldsmith’s work. He trifled with them feebly for some moments, murmuring various names and dates associated with them. At last, looking up with clearer interest, “What has become,” he asked, “of Mr. Rawson?”
“You want to see him?”