“Bring him in, let them go; they were only tools,” panted Keatcham weakly; but the brandy revived him; and his lips curled in a faint smile as Janet Smith struck a match to heat the teaspoonful of water for her hypodermic. “Make it good and strong, give me time to say something to Mercer and Winter—there he comes; good runners those boys are!”
He kept death at bay by the sheer force of his will. Page [368]
Tracy and Arnold, acting on a common unspoken impulse, had dashed after Winter and were pushing him forward between them. Keatcham was nearly spent, but he rallied to say the words in his mind. He kept death at bay by the sheer force of his will. When Winter knelt down beside him, with a poignant memory of another time in the same place when he had knelt beside a seemingly dying man, and gently touched the unmarred right hand lying on the carriage-robe, he could still form a smile with his stiff lips and mutter: “Only thing about me isn’t in tatters; of course you touched it and didn’t try to lift me where I’m all in pieces. You always understood. Listen! You, too, Mercer. Winter knows the things I’m bound to have go through. I’ve explained them to him. You’ll be my executors and trustees? A hundred thousand a year; not too big a salary for the work—you can do it. It’s a bigger job than the army one, Winter. Warnebold will look after the other end. He’s narrow but he is straight. I’ve made it worth his while. Some loose ends—it can’t be helped now. Maybe you’ll find out there are more difficulties in administering a big fortune than you fancied; and that it isn’t the easiest thing in the world helping fools who can’t ... help themselves. There are all those Tidewater idiots ... made me read about ... you’ll have to attend to them, Mercer ... old woman in the queer clothes ... chorus girl ... those old ladies who had one egg between them for breakfast ... you’ll see to them all?”
“Yes,” said Mercer, looking down on the shrunken features with a look of pain and bewilderment. “Yes, suh, I’ll do my best.”
“And—we’re even?”
“I reckon I am obliged to call it so, suh,” returned Mercer with a long, gasping sigh, “but—my Lord! you’d better have let me go!”
“Very likely,” said Keatcham dryly, “the city needs me. Well, Winter, you must look after that. I’ve been thinking why a man throws his life away as I did; he has to, unless he’s a poltroon. He can’t count whether he’s more useful than the one he saves ... he has simply got to save him ... you were a good deal right, Winter, about not doing the evil thing to get the good. No, it’s a bad time for me to be taken; but it’s an honorable discharge.... Helen will be glad ... you know I’m not a pig, Winter ... do what I tried to do ... where’s my kind nurse?” Janet was trying by almost imperceptible movements to edge a pillow under his shoulders; he was past turning his head, but his eyes moved toward her. “I’ve left you ... a wedding gift ... if I lived ... given to you; but made it safe, anyhow. Mercer?”
His voice had grown so feeble and came in such gasps from his torn and laboring chest that Mercer bent close to his lips to hear the struggling sentences. “Mercer,” he whispered, “I want ... just ... to tell you ... you didn’t convert me!”
Thus, having made amends to his own will, having also, let us humbly hope, made amends to that greater and wiser Will which is of more merciful and wider vision that our weakness can comprehend, Edwin Keatcham very willingly closed his eyes on earth.