"The work of the world is not arrested," he said. "See, that octogenarian, old West. He wheeled ill-oiled, squeaking barrows and hacked at the garden paths when I was a Harchester boy. He wheels the one and hacks at the other even yet—a fact nicely lowering to one's private egotism, when you come to consider it. Why, then, my good friend, perjure yourself or strive to mince matters? The work of the world will be done whether I'm here to direct the doing of it or not.—Granted I am tough and in personal knowledge of ill-health a neophyte. My luck throughout has been almost uncanny. Neither in soldiering nor in sport, from man or from beast, have I ever suffered so much as a scratch. I have borne a charmed life—established a record for invulnerability, which served me well in the East where the gods still walk in the semblance of man and miracle is still persistently prevalent. Accident has passed me by—save for being laid up once, nearly thirty years ago, with a broken ankle in the house of some friends at Poonah."
He ceased speaking, checking, as it seemed, disposition to further disclosure; while the soundless laughter in his eyes found answering expression upon his lips, curving them, to a somewhat bitter smile beneath the flowing moustache.
"In to-day's enforced idleness how persistently cancelled episodes and emotions rap, ghostly, on the door demanding and gaining entrance!" he presently said. "Must we take it, Doctor, that oblivion is a fiction, merciful forgetfulness an illusion; and that every action, every desire—whether fulfilled or not—is printed indelibly upon one's memory, merely waiting the hour of weakness and physical defeat to show up?"
"The Lord only knows!" McCabe threw off, a little hopelessly. This was the first utterance approaching complaint; and he deplored it for his patient's sake. He didn't like that word defeat.
Then, to his hearer's relief with a softened accent, Charles Verity took up his former theme.
"Save for a trifling go of fever now and again, illness has given me the go-by equally with accident. But, for all my ignorance of such afflictions I know, beyond all shadow of doubt, that a few repetitions of the experience of last night must close any man's account. Experiment is more enlightening than argument. There is no shaking the knowledge you arrive at through it."
McCabe, standing at ease by the open window, untidy, hirsute, unkempt, rammed his hands down into his gaping trouser pockets and nodded unwilling agreement.
"The attack was bad," he said. "I'm not denying it was murderously bad. And all the harder on you because, but for the one defaulting organ, your heart, you're as sound as a bell. You're a well enough man to put up a good fight; and that, you see, cuts both ways, be danged to it."
"A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.—You know as well as I do the Indian appointment will never be gazetted."
"There you have me, Sir Charles, loath though I am to admit as much. I'd be a liar if I denied it would not."