“You have broken your promise,” he said.
Chessingham came up to him anxiously. He proposed a dozen alleviations of the pain, but Mr. Romaine would not agree to any.
“Look here, Chessingham,” he said, “the game is up. I am dying, and I might as well own it. I haven’t taken a dose of your medicine since I employed you as my doctor. I consulted Chambers on the sly, and studied up my case myself—and I have a whole pharmacopœia that you never saw or heard of. It was rather shabby of me, I acknowledge; but I liked you and thought you were a capital fellow, and I wanted your company, and the only way I could get you was to make you my doctor.”
Chessingham said nothing. He could not reproach a dying man, but his stern face spoke volumes.
“And you are one of the most honest fellows in the world. Don’t think I disbelieve in honesty. I believe in a great many good things. I even believe in a Great First Cause. I have only followed the natural law: those that have been good to me, I have been good to—and those that haven’t been good to me, I have taken the liberty of paying off in this world, for fear that by some hocus-pocus they might sneak out of punishment in the next.”
“I want to say one thing to you,” said Chessingham. “I never have considered you a bad man. But your virtues are not common virtues, and your faults are not common faults.”
“Thank you, my dear fellow. It is true, I never could strike the great vein of commonplace in anything.”
Then there was a pause. Mr. Romaine, though evidently suffering, yet continued to talk until Madame de Fonblanque whispered to Chessingham:
“I believe he actually enjoys the situation!”
She herself longed to leave, yet hesitated. She thought if she stayed that perhaps at the end Mr. Romaine might grant her some words of forgiveness. She was a superstitious woman, and Mr. Romaine knew it. So, with a white face, she seated herself a little way off, at the side of the fireplace. Bridge came in and out of the room noiselessly, his feet sinking in the thick Turkish carpet. The room was strangely quiet, but the very intensity of the silence gave Mr. Romaine’s voice and quivering breath and faint sounds of pain a fearful distinctness. And even in his extremity, the “situation,” as Madame de Fonblanque called it, was not without its diversion to him.