“For a day or two he hung in the balance. Then, after one exceedingly bad night, which left Madame Pothier blue under her fine eyes and white round her carved lips, he had his last coherent hours on earth....
“I shall never forget that morning. Pothier was away on duty. There were only the doctor, Madame Pothier, and I, and one or two frightened servants who wouldn’t come near. They thought it was yellow fever. Old Séraphine, Madame Pothier’s Auvergnat maid, hovered round in the corridors with a rosary. You could hear the click and shake of it in the still intervals. Once a ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce,’ cut across a delirious whispered oath. The pitiful part of it was that there was nothing to do. We just had to lift him through the agony and weakness as best we could until the coma should set in. There is nothing romantic about coast fever. It attacks you in the most sordid ways—deprives you first of dignity and then of life. Yet poor Paramore’s death-bed had a kind of nobility; perhaps because Madame Pothier was there. She was dressed in white and looked as wan and distant and compassionate as a nun. The straight black masses of her hair, arranged in an odd, angular way, looked like some kind of conventual cap. Paramore’s eyes followed her about....
“It was that morning he gave me the packet—told me where it was, made me get it out and take formal possession of it before him. Once, when the demon was leaving him a little quiet, he lifted his right hand. ‘I swear by—by all I hold sacred’ (his eyes were fixed on her, though he was speaking to me) ‘that I have told nothing there that is not true. All secondhand reports are in a note-book by themselves. It is labelled. Tell Beckwith especially about the Sabbath. Beckwith ought to follow it up. I sat in the hut by the sorcerer in his trance and waited for his spirit to come back. When he waked, he said he had delivered my message. He had delivered it. Three days later, the man I had sent for came running into the village. The sorcerer had told him, as he said he would, on the way to the Sabbath. I depose solemnly that the man came. His village was three days away. He had heard a voice at his door the night of the Sabbath—a voice that gave my message, that said it was in haste and could not stay. Very curious. Beckwith ought to know. It’s all there; but tell him. Of course, I never could get anything out of the sorcerer about the Sabbath. But Beckwith might put it in a foot-note, if they won’t print me.’ Then the sordid agony again.... Madame Pothier and the doctor didn’t understand English, by the way, and of course didn’t, in any case, understand the situation. They hadn’t listened to what I had listened to, all those earlier days. So when the doctor told me fussily that Paramore oughtn’t to talk and that death was only a few hours off, I paid no attention. Why shouldn’t he talk if death was so near? The only thing I could do for Paramore was to let him talk when he had strength. I sat tight and listened.”
Hoyting stopped. The lights winked out along the boulevard. Night had fallen with capricious suddenness. I ordered more drinks quietly. Hoyting was breathing hard; tired out, and, as I thought, very weary of it all, longing to slip the leash and be off. The air was cool and soft, and the crowd was thinning a little. People were dining and making ready to “go on.” I couldn’t have stirred, but that worn packet suddenly felt very heavy in my pocket.
Hoyting began sipping vermouth again. Finally he spoke. “He didn’t say a great deal more. The end was too near. But he spoke very clearly when he did speak; and whenever his eyes were open, they were fixed on Madame Pothier. Towards the last he put out his hand to me. I was holding the note-books—I shouldn’t have dared put them down so long as he was conscious. ‘There is only one woman in the world,’ he said, ‘and she belongs to Pothier. Look at her.’ I didn’t look at her, and he went on: ‘There may be other women alive, but I can’t believe it. Do you believe it?’
“He wasn’t wandering, you know. His mind had merely stripped his situation to its essentials; he was quite alone with the only facts that counted. He had summed life up, and didn’t have to keep truce any longer with mortal perspectives. He drew the real things round him like a cloak.... Absurd to talk of inconsequence; there was no inconsequence.
“I bent over him. ‘I’m not blind, Paramore.’
“‘No, but I am—blessedly blind.... And some day she’ll hate me, you think?’
“His lips were straining to ask me to see to it that she didn’t, but he controlled them. That—as much as anything—is why I’m here with you now. It was more than decent of him; it was fine. But, by the same token that he couldn’t ask, I couldn’t promise—though I saw that another crise was near and the doctor was crossing over to the bed.
“‘I don’t believe she ever will,’ I said. ‘There’s so much she’ll never know.’