“Your works!” and the Goblin leered at him sideways with a frightful grin—“Your internal works! And these two learned gentlemen are going to find out what it is. You’re ill, you know!—you’re very ill! The learned gentlemen don’t quite understand how or why you’re ill, but they’re going to find out! They’re going to slice you up and see what you’re like inside! It will be most interesting and instructive—to the learned gentlemen! It won’t interest YOU at all, because you’re to be put under chloroform, and you won’t know anything about it except when you ‘come to.’ Then you will die! But that won’t particularly matter! The operation is sure to be ‘most successful.’ An operation is always ‘successful,’ even if the patient never recovers! The medical profession must be safeguarded, you know!”
McNason heard, and in an instant became a prey to the most violent access of nervous horror.
“I’m not ill!” he said fiercely. “There’s nothing whatever the matter with me! How dare you say there is! It’s all a mistake—an abominable mistake! I’ve never suffered from any illness except gout and indigestion—never!—there’s no operation needed for such ailments!—what the devil do you mean by bringing me here?”
“You will talk about the devil!” And the Goblin shook its tasselled cap at him reproachfully—“Don’t say I mentioned him first! You’re ill, I tell you!—you’re more seriously ill than your old friend Willie Dove, and you’re here because you’re ill! ‘To this complexion must we come at last’! Oh Beelzebub! They don’t know whether it’s cancer or appendicitis with YOU!”
“Look here!” almost shouted Josiah, addressing himself to the two men, who, with the nurse, still stood together talking, but who appeared not to hear him—“Take me out of this place directly! I’ve been brought here on false pretences! I’m not ill! I don’t want an operation! I won’t be operated upon! I’ll—I’ll——!”
Here exhausted, he sank back on his hard pillow impotently clenching his hands in a paroxysm of rage and fear.
The Goblin grinned.
“Now, McNason, keep cool!” it said—“Don’t show temper! Doctors don’t like that sort of thing. They call it ‘nerves’ and they give you a soothing draught. Besides, these two eminent personages who are just now discussing your ‘case’ can’t hear you, and if they could they wouldn’t listen. One’s a ‘Sir.’ He’s a clever man, of course, or he wouldn’t be a ‘Sir.’ It’s a little unpleasant that the title puts him on the same rank with any provincial Mayor who has presented an address to the Sovereign! But it can’t be helped. There’s no suitable honour in this country for merely intellectual and scientific persons! Now about your case——”
“I’ve no case!” groaned the wretched millionaire—“No case at all——”
“You are a case!” declared the Goblin—“A whole case in yourself! A case of a man gone wrong! A case of a human creature who has a stone in the place where his heart ought to be!—a hard, heavy stone, without a pulse of love or kindness in it! A case? Oh Beelzebub! I should think you are a case! Sir Slasher Cut-Em-Up—that’s the broad-backed elderly gentleman over there,—thinks you’ve got something ‘malignant’ inside! Oh hoo-roo-oo-oo! I should think you had! Sir Slasher believes it’s cancer. But if it is, they’ll never find it, McNason! No!—your cancer’s on the mind!—and they’ll never cut that out! But they’re going to have a good try!”