"You mean I'm going to die? Now, there you're wrong. Of course, I shall die some time like everyone else, but I'm actually getting better now. If you'd seen me a month ago——!" He looked round at the flowers with eyes that burned feverishly. "I've got so much to do, there's so much to live for! Don't you feel you can't die, you won't die, when you see all the new leaves with that shade of green which seems only to last for a day before it becomes dark, dull, mature, dirty.... And the first flowers—before we've had time to be sated with them. This is June, summer.... And long before that, the little pink, sticky buds bursting everywhere.... And those curious fluffy things which you find on some shrubs and which seem to serve no purpose in nature.... I shall die in the autumn, when I do die; I couldn't in the spring, when the whole world's renewing itself and there's so much to do. God! there is so much to do!"
He smiled to himself, and his eyes suddenly closed. It was more than time for me to be on my way, but the scrape of my heel on the gravel roused him, and he held out his hand.
"It was kind of you—about South Africa, I mean,—but I can't get away—for reasons which I needn't discuss. And in any event it isn't necessary; I'm going to get well without that."
I shook hands and turned my steps eastwards. There are few things more painful than the dying consumptive's belief that he will recover. Beresford called me back with a cry that brought on another fit of coughing.
"I'm in my old quarters," he said. "You were rather—disgruntled by your last visit, I remember, but, if you've got over the shock and can ever spare a moment to call——"
This time I shook my head without hesitation or compassion. I do not remember ever being more affronted. A chance encounter in the street might be excused me; one may be pardoned for not upbraiding one's worst enemy when he is as near his death-bed as Beresford was; but it was another thing altogether to condone the past and acquiesce in the present. It was also what Mrs. O'Rane had virtually challenged me to do, when she lost her temper in Beresford's flat and asked whether I should continue to know her when she had come to live with him.
"I shall not call," I said. "Good-bye."
Thereafter I denied myself the walk from Albert Gate to Hyde Park Corner and went to my office through Belgrave Square and the Green Park.
I kept my own counsel about our meeting and went on with my own work, trying not to think of the O'Rane tragedy until it was brought to my notice by a chance encounter with O'Rane himself. I was deliberately not seeking his company, but I was pleased when he joined me in the Smoking Room at the House.
"Your voice at least is quite unmistakable," he said with his old smile. "So is Grayle's. The people who beat me are most of the Irish and a sprinkling of the Labour men—fellows who don't open their mouths from one end of the session to the other. And I'm here so little that it's slow work learning. Still, I'll back myself to be right ninety-five times out of a hundred, if I've heard a voice more than once. Do you know whether old Oakleigh is about?"