As a false merit seems still to attach to frankness, let me record that, when I met Beresford some three weeks later, I bowed to him and subsequently went up and exchanged a few words. This meeting also took place in Hyde Park, I was again making a slight détour for the sake of seeing the flowers and once more I turned in at Albert Gate and was nodding before I saw who had nodded to me. When I recognised Beresford, there was a moment's impulse to stalk away, but I am glad to say that I did not yield to it.
He was sitting in a bath-chair, out of the wind and in the sun, alternately dozing and waking with a start to look at the flowers and then close his eyes again. I have seen sick men in various parts of the world, but I doubt if I ever saw one who was still alive and yet looked nearer death. All flesh had disappeared from his face, until the bones of jaw, temple and nose threatened to cut through the waxen skin; his eye-lids were more vermilion than pink, with a permanent dusty-grey shadow darkening the hollow sockets. One hand lay exposed outside the rug, so thin that it seemed as if the bones must grate together; the other pressed painfully to his side whenever he began to cough.
"Why, how do you do?" he exclaimed in a weak whisper, bowing a second time, as his eye-lids flickered open and he found me watching him.
"You look remarkably ill," was all I could say.
"I'm better than I have been. It was really rather a close shave this time. They evidently felt it was a point of honour not to be beaten again and they kept me there just twenty-four hours longer than I could conveniently stand. I wasn't conscious of anything,—I hadn't been for some while before and I wasn't to be for some time after—but they had a bad scare. After doing their best to kill me for five days, they spent five weeks trying to keep me alive—so like war and peace, you know; wasteful, irrational and utterly, utterly purposeless. In a few weeks' time I shall be where I was when last we met; the Government will have kept me quiet for perhaps two months and will have expended a portion of a magistrate's time, ditto ditto prosecuting counsel, and six weeks' bed, board, share of prison staff and really first-rate medical attention. No one could have been better treated when once they were afraid they'd killed me."
He tried to laugh, but only succeeded in making himself cough. As he shook and rocked, growing momentarily pink and then reverting to a deathlier white, as I watched that bag of tuberculous bones being held together by a nervous refusal to die, I shared the sense of waste which O'Rane had once expressed to me. An impulse came to me, and I acted on it before I could give myself time to be cautious and niggardly.
"If I can get you out to South Africa, will you go?" I asked him.
He tried to speak before he had finished coughing, and the attack redoubled in violence.
"That would be playing their game rather too much," he said with a skeleton's grin.
"You're playing their game as quickly and more permanently by staying here."