So it was really none too much time that he had; and, in truth, he did not actually decide upon his three questions, until just a week before the fearful day when he was to put them.
It came at last, as every day of reckoning surely comes; and Dr. Hicok, memorandum in hand, sat in his comfortable library about three o’clock on one beautiful warm summer afternoon, as pale as a sheet, his heart thumping away like Mr. Krupp’s biggest steam-hammer at Essen, his mouth and tongue parched and feverish, a pitcher of cold water at hand from which he sipped and sipped, though it seemed as if his throat repelled it into “the globular state,” or dispersed it into steam, as red-hot iron does. Around him were the records of the vast army of doubters and quibblers in whose works he had been hunting, as a traveller labours through a jungle, for the deepest doubts, the most remote inquiries.
Sometimes, with that sort of hardihood, rather than reason, which makes a desperate man try to believe by his will what he longs to know to be true, Dr. Hicok would say to himself, “I know I’ve got him!” And then his heart would seem to fall out of him, it sank so suddenly, and with so deadly a faintness, as the other side of his awful case loomed before him, and he thought, “But if—?” He would not finish that question; he could not. The furthest point to which he could bring himself was that of a sort of icy outer stiffening of acquiescence in the inevitable.
There was a ring at the street-door. The servant brought in a card, on a silver salver.
MR. APOLLO LYON
“Show the gentleman in,” said the doctor. He spoke with difficulty; for the effort to control his own nervous excitement was so immense an exertion, that he hardly had the self-command and muscular energy even to articulate.
The servant returned, and ushered into the library a handsome, youngish, middle-aged and middle-sized gentleman, pale, with large melancholy black eyes, and dressed in the most perfect and quiet style.
The doctor arose, and greeted his visitor with a degree of steadiness and politeness that did him the greatest credit.
“How do you do, sir?” he said: “I am happy”—but it struck him that he wasn’t, and he stopped short.
“Very right, my dear sir,” replied the guest, in a voice that was musical but perceptibly sad, or rather patient in tone. “Very right; how hollow those formulas are! I hate all forms and ceremonies! But I am glad to see you, doctor. Now, that is really the fact.”