“Suffered? You? Oh Beelzebub!” And the Goblin began to elongate itself in its own peculiar and terror-striking style, “You’ve only just begun to know what it is to feel! You hard old scoundrel! You talk of suffering!—why, you have lived till over sixty years of age, caring nothing at all for the troubles of others unless you could turn such troubles to your own advantage! As a child you were selfish,—as a boy you were selfish,—as a young man you were selfish,—as an old man you are selfish! You have crushed out hundreds of human lives in your factories as if they were mere ants swarming under your iron heel! You have cut down the expenses of your business to the narrowest, meanest, most pitiful margin,—you ‘sweat’ your labourers to such an extent that you know you dare not walk through your own workshops without a revolver in your pocket and a man on either side of you for protection—you are a living curse to the majority of those you employ—and they look for your death in the hope that after you are gone they will have a kinder master! And you quote Shakespeare, do you? And the Bible! Oh hoo-roo! Come along! Time’s up, I tell you! And we’re not going far. Just a little see-saw ride to a Home Sweet Home! A last long Home! A Happy Home! Oh hoo-roo-oo-oo! One Timothy Two, and away we go!”
Again a brief spell of semi-consciousness—a kind of waking nightmare in which many confused sights and sounds were intermingled;—flying visions of pale worn faces full of sorrow and appeal; noises as of weeping, with stifled cries and sobs of pain;—and then Josiah McNason opened his eyes widely, to find himself lying flat on a narrow bed in the centre of a rather large room. His head rested on a small, very hard pillow,—and on this pillow squatted the Goblin with an air of being quite at ease.
“Here we are in a happy ‘Home,’ McNason!” it chuckled softly in his ear—“Don’t worry! Don’t agitate yourself! Keep quiet calm! You will have every possible attention!”
Josiah stared helplessly about him. He saw his clothes neatly folded and placed all together on the top of a chest of drawers,—his top-hat was also a particularly conspicuous object on a chair close by. He realised that he had been undressed and put to bed, but how this had happened he could not tell. He turned a miserable questioning gaze on the Goblin.
“What—what’s this?” he stammered—“What are you going to do to me?”
“I?” And the Goblin, with an injured air of perfect innocence, executed a diabolical French shrug of its shoulders—“I’m not going to do anything to you, my dear sir! I wouldn’t be so cruel! It is THEY!—THEY are going to do something to you,—but all for your good!—oh, hoo-roo—all for your good!”
They! Who were THEY? With painful hesitation Josiah turned his eyes round about again, and presently saw, standing near him like dim figures in a blurred photograph, two men talking confidentially together—one fairly young, the other elderly,—while with them was a smart, well-set-up, rather perky looking woman attired in the conventional grey gown, spotless apron and cap of the “professional” nurse. The elderly man’s back was turned, but he seemed to be expounding some knotty point of argument to his companions with particular emphasis and gusto.
“Something’s gone wrong with the Works, McNason!” said the Goblin, confidentially, “That’s what’s the matter?”
“Works?” And McNason’s troubled mind immediately reverted to his huge factories—“What works?”