And to what would he set forth? What had life to give him, if, as was very unlikely, he should win back to life? His life was Ottalie's. He had consecrated his talent to her, he had devoted all his powers to her. The best of his talent had been a shadowy sentimental thing, by which no great life could be lived, no great sorrow overcome. The best of his powers had left him in the centre of a continent, helpless to do what he had set out to do. He had not made the world "nobler for her sake." Ah, but he would, he said, starting up, filled suddenly with a vision of that dead beauty. He would help the world to all that it had lost in her. He must be Ottalie's fair mind at work still, blessing the world. So would his mind possess her, creeping in about her soul, drinking more and more of her, till her strength was the strength by which he moved. She was very near him then, he felt. He felt that all this outward world of his was only an image of his mind, and that she being in his mind, was with him. His heart was a wretched heart in Africa, in which a sick man babbled to a weary man. But there in his heart, he felt, was that silent guest, beautiful as of old, waiting in the half-darkness, waiting quietly, watching him, wanting him to do the right thing, waiting till it was done, so that she might rise, and walk to him, and take his hands. He must not fail her.
He turned to the corner in which he felt her presence. "Ottalie! Ottalie!" he said in a low voice. "Ottalie, dear, help me to do this. I'm going to fail, dear. Help me not to." Lionel moaned a little, turning on his side again. A draught ruffled the fire slightly. No answer moved in his heart. He had half expected that the answer would speak within him, in three short words. No words came. Instead, he felt burningly the image of Ottalie as he had seen her once up the Craga' Burn, one summer at sunset. They had stood among the moors together, on the burn's flat grassy bank, near a little drumming fall, which guggled over a sway of rushes. Sunset had given a glory to the moors. All the great hills rose up in the visionary clearness of an Irish evening after rain. A glow like the glow of health was on them. It was ruddy on Ottalie's cheek, as she turned her grave hazel eyes upon him, smiling, to ask him if he saw the Rest House. She meant a magic rest-house, said, in popular story, to be somewhere on the hill up Craga' way. Roger had talked with men who claimed to have been beguiled there by "them" to rest for the night. Ottalie and he had narrowed down its possible whereabouts almost to the spot where they were standing; and she had turned, smiling, with the sun upon her, to ask him if he saw it. They had never seen it, though they had often looked for it at magical moments of the day. Now looking back he saw that old day with all the glow of the long-set sun. Ottalie, and himself, and the Craga' Burn, the rush sway trailing, the pleasant, faint smell of the blight on the patch beyond, the whiff of turf smoke. Ottalie. Ottalie. Ottalie in the blind grave with the dogrose on her breast.
Living alone fosters an intensity of personal life which sometimes extinguishes the social instinct, even in those who live alone by the compulsion of accident. It had become Roger's lot to look into himself for solace. Most of those things which society had given to him during his short, impressionable life were useless to him. He had to depend now upon the intensity of his own nature. He reckoned up the extent of his civilisation, as shewn by the amount retained in his memory. It amounted, when all was said, when allowance had been made for the amount absorbed unconsciously into character, to a variety of smatterings, some of them pleasant, some interesting, and all tinged by the vividness of his personal predilection. He had read, either in the original or in translation, all the masterpieces of European literature. He had seen, either in the original or in reproduction, all the masterpieces of European art. His memory for art and literature was a good general one; but general knowledge was now useless to him. What he wanted was particular knowledge, memory of precise, firm, intellectual images, in words, or colour, or bronze, to give to his mind the strength of their various order, as he brooded on them menaced by death. It was surprising to him how little remained of all that he had read and seen. The tale of Troy remained, very vividly, with many of the tragedies rising from it. Dante remained. The Morte D'Arthur remained. Much of the Bible remained. Of Shakespeare he had a little pocket volume containing eight plays. These, and the memories connected with them, were in his mind with a reality not till then known to him. Among the lesser writers he found that his memory was kinder to those whom he had learned by heart as a boy than to those whom he had read with interest as a man. He knew more Scott than Flaubert, and more Mayne Reid than Scott. From thinking over these earlier literary idols, with a fierceness of tenderness not to be understood save by those who have been forced, as he was forced, to the construction of an intense inner life, he began to realise the depth and strength of the emotion of the indulgence of memory.
Thenceforward he indulged his memory whenever his work spared his intelligence. He lived again in his past more intensely than he had ever lived. His life in Ireland, his days with Ottalie, her words and ways and looks, he realised again minutely with an exactness which was, perhaps, half imaginative. He troubled his peace with the sweetness of those visions. The more deeply true they were, the more strong their colour; the more intense the vibration of their speech, the more sharp was the knowledge of their unreality, the more bitter the longing for the reality. He was home-sick for the Irish hills which rose up in his mind so clearly, threaded by the flash of silver. He thought of them hour after hour with a yearning, brooding vision which gnawed at his heart-strings.
After a few weeks he found that he could think of them without that torment. He had perfected his imagination of them by an intensity of thought. They had become, as it were, a real country in his brain, through which his mind could walk at will, almost as he had walked in the reality. By mental effort, absorbing his now narrowed external life, he could imagine himself walking with Ottalie up the well-known waters and loanings, so poignantly, with such precision of imagined detail, that the country seen by him as he passed through it was as deeply felt as the real scene. The solemnity of his life made his imagination of Ottalie deeper and more precious. At times he felt her by him, as though an older, unearthly sister walked with him, half friend, half guide. At other times, when he was lucky, in the intense and splendid dreams which come to those of dwarfed lives, he saw her in vision. Such times were white times, which made whole days precious; but at all times he had clear, precise memories of her; and, better still, a truer knowledge of her, and, through that, a truer knowledge of life. He thought of her more than of his work. In thinking of her he was thankful that all his best work had been written in her praise. "His spirit was hers, the better part of him." If he had anything good in him, or which strained towards good, she had put it there in the beauty of her passing. If he might find this cure, helping poor suffering man, it would be only a spark of her, smouldering to sudden burning in a heap of tow.
His efforts to make a culture succeeded. With very great difficulty he obtained a vigorous culture of trypanosomes, of the small kind usually obtained by culture. He strove to make the culture virulent, by growing it at the artificial equable temperature most favourable to the growth of the germ (25° C.), and by adding to the bouillon on which the germs fed minute quantities of those chemical qualities likely to strengthen them in one way or another.
It was a slow process, and Roger could ill spare time in his race with death. He had grown calmer and less impulsive since he had left the feverish, impulsive city; but he had not yet acquired the detachment from circumstance of the doctor or soldier. The question "Shall I be in time?" was always jarring upon the precept "You must not hurry." At last, one day when Lionel had shewn less responsiveness than usual, a temporary despondency made him give up hope. He saw no chance of having his anti-toxin ready before Lionel died. He picked up a book on serum therapy, and turned the pages idly. A heading caught his eye.
"The treatment should begin soon after the disease has declared itself" ran the heading. The paragraph went on to say that the anti-toxin was little likely to be of use after the toxin had taken a strong hold upon the patient's system. The treatment was more likely to be successful if a large initial injection of the anti-toxin were given directly the disease became evident. There it was, in black and white; it was no use going on. He had tried all his ameliorative measures, with temporary success. Latterly he had tried them sparingly, fearing to immunise the germ. He had wanted to keep by him unused some strong drug which would hold off the disease at the end. Now there was nothing for it but to give the strong drug. His friend was dying. He might burn his ships and comb his hair for death. He had tried and failed.
The mood of depression had been ushered in by an attack of fever different from his other attacks. It did not pass off after following a regular course, like the recurrent malaria. It hung upon him in a constant, cutting headache, which took the strength out of him. He sat dully, weak as water, with a clanging head, repeating that Lionel was dying. Lionel was dying. One had only to think for a moment to see that it was hopeless. Lionel was going to die.
He raised his hand, thinking that something had bitten his throat. His throat glands were swollen. For a moment he thought that the swelling was only a mosquito bite; but a glance in the mirror shewed him that it was worse than that. The swollen glands were a sign that he, too, was sickening for death. His fever of the last few hours was the initial fever. Sooner or later he would drowse off to death as Lionel was drowsing. He might have only two more months of life. Two months. Ottalie had had two startling, frightened seconds before death choked her. So this was what Ottalie had felt in those two seconds, fear, a blind longing of love for half a dozen, a thought of sky and freedom, a craving, an agony, and then the fear again. He rose up. "Even if it be all useless," he said to himself, "I will fire off all my cartridges before I go." He brought out the Chamberland filter and set to work.