Mr. Chewkle felt the cold clammy fingers of his antagonist loosen, and as the last words died on his lips, he saw him stagger back, and before he could catch him, he fell to the ground in a fit.
Chewkle’s first impulse was to call for help, but instantly it flashed across his mind that he should have a thousand questions to answer, besides being regarded with looks of distrust and suspicion. He had no wish, at that hour, and in the rather free style and state of his costume, to have to encounter the family, to explain that which it was so important should be left unexplained, and he proceeded to attempt himself to play the part of a medical attendant. Mr. Chewkle was stronger than he looked, and he had need of all his strength to pin Mr. Grahame to the floor, during the violent paroxysms of the fit by which he had been seized. He succeeded, by dint of tremendous exertion, in overmastering the desperate struggles of the prostrate man, and when they had ceased, he loosened his neckcloth, obtained some water from a bottle upon the table, bathed his temples and lips with it until Mr. Grahame opened his eyes, and gazed wildly around him, like one waking up out of some dreadful dream.
After a few incoherent expressions, he became once more alive to his position.
He walked up and down his library, wringing his hands, and displaying the greatest possible mental anguish.
Suddenly he paused before Chewkle, and with a stern countenance, he said—
“Through blindly following your counsel, I have placed myself in a situation of awful peril. Tell me, what must be done to avoid the dreadful degradation with which I am threatened—how is this frightful false step to be retrieved?”
“Not by going on, sir, as if you’d gone stark, staring mad!” answered Chewkle, rather brusquely. “There’s a good deal at stake, you know; and there’s only one way to make the best of a bad game—that’s by being as cool as hice, and as clear about the head-piece. You must be slow to think and decide, but prompt to hact. You are in a mess, that’s pretty certain; the only way to get out of it, is to be quite calm and easy-like, to calculate your chances carefully, to say not a word to nobody but them you must employ, and fight it out to the last, hinch for hinch.”
This advice seemed tolerably sound, but Mr. Grahame could not reflect calmly, nor calculate coldly; he could do nothing but have shifting visions of the happy time of youth, when he was free from the cares and responsibilities of life, and of the grim, shadowy, future, lying behind a curtain of black and obscure vapour; they were mingled in one picture, whirling and rioting through his aching brain, and incapacitating him from sitting down to plan a scheme, by which he might escape the consequences of the crime he had committed.
“It is useless,” he said, at length, impatiently, “to expect from me, in my present excitement, any suggestion dictated by cool reflection. My brain is in chaotic confusion; it is racked with agony. I feel that something must instantly be done, but what—what, my good Chewkle, cannot you devise something?—you are cooler than I am.”
“Well, you see, if the wust comes to the wust, sir,” responded Mr. Chewkle, calculatingly, “I shan’t be hit so hard as you; I can afford to be cooler; now my notion is, that the first thing to be done is to get hold of that jeuced dockyment, and when got hold on, to drop it quietly into the fire.”