“I would have them pass before me one by one, as I lie propped up on pillows on my death-bed, and I shall expect each one first to bend down and kiss my hand. Then a clerk will call out his name in a loud voice, and the amount of the debt, and another clerk shall weigh out to him the amount in gold.... I intend it to be a kind of triumphal lying in state. But we can discuss the exact details later. I feel a little tired. The shadows are already weighing down my eyelids....” and the poet laughed again his sad sinister laugh; though, indeed, it was true enough, as the lawyer, looking at him, could not fail to note.
“Good-night, old friend,” said the poet; “come and see me again tomorrow;” and, when the lawyer had gone, he once more stretched himself out in the bed, luxuriously murmuring the lines he had murmured nightly for so many years:
“If rest be sweet at close of day
For tired hands and tired feet,
How good at last to rest for aye—
If rest be sweet.”
The lying in state, as the poet grimly called it, was conducted exactly as he had conceived it. At first the lawyer had protested that to expect your honest English tradesman to bow the knee and kiss the hand of one of his debtors was out of the question.
“Take my word, friend,” said the poet, “when a tradesman is going to be paid a debt he had given up for lost, he will not be particular as to the manner in which he receives it. Indeed, he will be so thankful for it that it will be a natural impulse to fall upon his knees.... And if they demur,” he added, laughing his half-boyish, half-wicked, and quite creepy laugh, “tell them that it is the fancy of a dying man.”
When the noon of Wednesday came, the poet lay in his great bed awaiting his creditors. There had only been a week since his talk with his lawyer, but even that good-natured sceptic had come to admit the truth of his client’s prediction. No one could look on that weary form stretched so straight and slim under the clothes, or upon that worn ivory face, so worn and yet so strangely smiling, without reading the unmistakable signs.
“Do you believe it now?” said the poet to his lawyer. “It is only a jest—you must not take it too seriously. It is only death. Don’t be unhappy, old friend. I wish I could make you know how good it feels—to be dying.”
Then a little soft-voiced clock chimed twelve times.
“Now for the fun....” said the poet, looking up to his friend, with his eyes filled with laughter.
It had been his whim to have his room draped in purple, and over his bed hung a great wreath of laurel still in flower. At one side of the large room was a table also covered in purple, on which were arranged twelve great pyramids of gold pieces, and on two other tables close by were two large bags of orange-coloured leather overflowing with silver.