His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat. Slept again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized valet roused him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.
Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one, to renew correspondence with Ferlie.
The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no gift of expression." She answered him, but her own methods of expression were, as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a small gold key. "A gift for a gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was inevitable that you should shut the gates upon me. I send the sign that only you can unlock them."
He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts of self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light within him.
A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.
The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now ended lessened the incentive to live.
He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him; a Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the same light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he slaps down upon the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives; a Peter who would be decidedly happier using the knife than saving the unwary limb that might stray his way.
Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic, and his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His opinions on certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those neighbouring embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg as himself, his versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment, of the latest hospital yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set of inquisitive young ghouls more triumphant over an eminent physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's intestines than troubled with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.
"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old Gumboil's favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."