"N-nothing worth r-repeating," stammered Mark.
"He said that a desperate enterprise never lacked men to attempt it. And what allures men to almost certain death? The pay, Lord Randolph? You would be the last to affirm that. Have we not heard of many a noble fellow falling, maybe, within a few feet of the goal, seeing with dying eyes comrades triumphantly scaling the heights, knowing that the success of those comrades was rooted in the bodies over which they had passed to victory? And these—the failures—have died with a glad shout upon their lips; they have been found horribly mutilated, but with a smile on their dead faces. Shall we pity such men, Lord Randolph, or envy them?"
Mark slipped from the room before Lord Randolph replied. Outside the door he discovered that his fists were clenched.
CHAPTER XVII
SURRENDER!
On the following Tuesday, when Mark reached Amos Barger's house, he was told that the surgeon could not see him for a quarter of an hour. Mark followed a manservant into a back dining-room ponderously furnished with mahogany and horsehair. The paper on the wall was hideous in pattern and colour; the wainscoting was grained in imitation of oak; on the square table in the centre of the room lay the comic papers and some society weeklies, amongst them Kosmos and Mayfair. Under the latter was The Bistoury. Mark paced up and down, pausing now and again to look out of a window which commanded a prospect of dingy back-walls and chimney-pots. From the front of the house a charming glimpse of the trees in Cavendish Square redeemed the dull uniformity of the street. Mark had noticed how green was their foliage, recalling the fact that soot is as Mellin's food to the vegetable world. His fancy seized this fact and played with it. Soot, the most defiling of things, transmuted by some amazing process into a brilliant pigment! What a text for a sermon! Presently Mark approached the book-case—a solid, glazed affair as heavy, doubtless, as the works within. To his surprise, he found the lightest of fiction, and every volume showed signs of use. Barger, he reflected, was a wise man to laugh with Anstey and Frank Stockton, but he ought really to buy some new furniture. Then he remembered that Barger had admitted failure, more or less. Possibly, these grim Penates had been taken at a low valuation from the outgoing tenant. With these fugitive speculations he escaped from his own thoughts and fears.
When he went upstairs the surgeon, while shaking hands, eyed him keenly.
"I am the better for my holiday," said Mark.
Barger nodded, and pointed to a chair.
"You said in the train I might live to make old bones. Weakness of heart is not a bar to marriage—is it?"