“I always perspire so when I'm excited,” he explained. “Keep me out of it as much as possible.”
But the next time I saw him, which was two or three days later, the reaction had set in. He was sitting in his great library, surrounded by books he would no more have thought of disturbing than he would of strumming on the gorgeous grand piano inlaid with silver that ornamented his drawing-room. A change had passed over him. His swelling rotundity, suggestive generally of a bladder inflated to its extremest limits by excess of self-importance, appeared to be shrinking. I put the idea aside as mere fancy at the time, but it was fact; he became a mere bag of bones before he died. He was wearing an old pair of carpet slippers and smoking a short clay pipe.
“Well,” I said, “everything went off all right.”
“Everybody's gone off all right, so far,” he grunted. He was crouching over the fire, though the weather was still warm, one hand spread out towards the blaze. “Now I've got to go off, that's the only thing they're waiting for. Then everything will be in order.”
“I don't think they are wanting you to go off,” I answered, with a laugh.
“You mean,” he answered, “I'm the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ah, but you see, so many of the eggs break, and so many of them are bad.”
“Some of them hatch all right,” I replied. The simile was becoming somewhat confused: in conversation similes are apt to.
“If I were to die this week,” he said—he paused, completing mental calculations, “I should be worth, roughly speaking, a couple of million. This time next year I may be owing a million.”
I sat down opposite to him. “Why run risks?” I suggested. “Surely you have enough. Why not give it up—retire?”
He laughed. “Do you think I haven't said that to myself, lad—sworn I would a dozen times a year? I can't do it; I'm a gambler. It's the earliest thing I can recollect doing, gambling with brace buttons. There are men, Paul, now dying in the workhouse—men I once knew well; I think of them sometimes, and wish I didn't—who any time during half their life might have retired on twenty thousand a year. If I were to go to any one of them, and settle an annuity of a hundred a year upon him, the moment my back was turned he'd sell it out and totter up to Threadneedle Street with the proceeds. It's in our blood. I shall gamble on my death-bed, die with the tape in my hand.”