“Man has four passions,” she said—“love, power, food, and rhetoric; but rhetoric is the only one that is proof against satiety, ennui, and dyspepsia.”
A fortnight passed, and one morning Herbert Field, alone with Bella, had another attack of hæmorrhage, so that for awhile she thought him dying. He fainted from exhaustion, and in terror she sent for the local doctor. Presently he was brought round to consciousness, but it was obvious that the end had come; from this final attack he could never rally. Yet it seemed impossible that human skill should have no further power; surely there must be some last desperate remedy for which the moment was now at hand, and Bella asked Miss Ley whether Frank might be sent for.
“Anyhow, we shall never trouble him again,” she said.
“You don’t know Frank,” answered Miss Ley. “Of course he’ll come at once.”
A telegram was despatched, and within four hours Frank arrived, only to see that Herbert’s condition was hopeless. He hovered between life and death, kept alive by constant stimulants, and they could do nothing but sit and wait. When Bella repeated to her father, from whom so far as possible she had hidden her husband’s desperate state, that the boy could scarcely outlast the night, he looked down for a moment, then turned to Frank.
“Is he strong enough for me to administer the Holy Sacrament?”
“Does he want it?”
“I think so. I have talked to him before, and he told me that he wished to take it before he died.”
“Very well.”
Bella went to prepare her husband, and the Dean assumed the garments of his office. Frank also went into the bedroom to be at hand if needed, and stood by the window apart from those three who performed the sacred mystery; it seemed to him as though the Dean were invested strangely with a greater, more benignant dignity. A certain majesty had descended upon the minister of God, and while he read the prayers a light shone on his face like, that on the face of a pictured saint.