‘He is conscious, and was very glad to hear that you had come. But don’t let him try to speak much.’
The change that had come over his friend’s countenance was to Harold, of course, far more gravely impressive than to those who had watched at the bedside. In the drawn features, large sunken eyes, thin and discoloured lips, it seemed to him that he read too surely the presage of doom. After holding the shrunken hand for a moment he was convulsed with an agonising sob, and had to turn away.
Amy saw that her husband wished to speak to her; she bent over him.
‘Ask him to stay, dear. Give him a room in the hotel.’
‘I will.’
Biffen sat down by the bedside, and remained for half an hour. His friend inquired whether he had yet heard about the novel; the answer was a shake of the head. When he rose, Reardon signed to him to bend down, and whispered:
‘It doesn’t matter what happens; she is mine again.’
The next day was very cold, but a blue sky gleamed over land and sea. The drives and promenades were thronged with people in exuberant health and spirits. Biffen regarded this spectacle with resentful scorn; at another time it would have moved him merely to mirth, but not even the sound of the breakers when he had wandered as far as possible from human contact could help him to think with resignation of the injustice which triumphs so flagrantly in the destinies of men. Towards Amy he had no shadow of unkindness; the sight of her in tears had impressed him as profoundly, in another way, as that of his friend’s wasted features. She and Reardon were again one, and his love for them both was stronger than any emotion of tenderness he had ever known.
In the afternoon he again sat by the bedside. Every symptom of the sufferer’s condition pointed to an approaching end: a face that had grown cadaverous, livid lips, breath drawn in hurrying gasps. Harold despaired of another look of recognition. But as he sat with his forehead resting on his hand Amy touched him; Reardon had turned his face in their direction, and with a conscious gaze.
‘I shall never go with you to Greece,’ he said distinctly.
There was silence again. Biffen did not move his eyes from the deathly mask; in a minute or two he saw a smile soften its lineaments, and Reardon again spoke:
‘How often you and I have quoted it!—”We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our—”’
The remaining words were indistinguishable, and, as if the effort of utterance had exhausted him, his eyes closed, and he sank into lethargy.
When he came down from his bedroom on the following morning, Biffen was informed that his friend had died between two and three o’clock. At the same time he received a note in which Amy requested him to come and see her late in the afternoon. He spent the day in a long walk along the eastward cliffs; again the sun shone brilliantly, and the sea was flecked with foam upon its changing green and azure. It seemed to him that he had never before known solitude, even through all the years of his lonely and sad existence.
At sunset he obeyed Amy’s summons. He found her calm, but with the signs of long weeping.
‘At the last moment,’ she said, ‘he was able to speak to me, and you were mentioned. He wished you to have all that he has left in his room at Islington. When I come back to London, will you take me there and let me see the room just as when he lived in it? Let the people in the house know what has happened, and that I am responsible for whatever will be owing.’
Her resolve to behave composedly gave way as soon as Harold’s broken voice had replied. Hysterical sobbing made further speech from her impossible, and Biffen, after holding her hand reverently for a moment, left her alone.
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE SUNNY WAY
On an evening of early summer, six months after the death of Edwin Reardon, Jasper of the facile pen was bending over his desk, writing rapidly by the warm western light which told that sunset was near. Not far from him sat his younger sister; she was reading, and the book in her hand bore the title, ‘Mr Bailey, Grocer.’
‘How will this do?’ Jasper exclaimed, suddenly throwing down his pen.
And he read aloud a critical notice of the book with which Dora was occupied; a notice of the frankly eulogistic species, beginning with: ‘It is seldom nowadays that the luckless reviewer of novels can draw the attention of the public to a new work which is at once powerful and original;’ and ending: ‘The word is a bold one, but we do not hesitate to pronounce this book a masterpiece.’
‘Is that for The Current?’ asked Dora, when he had finished.
‘No, for The West End. Fadge won’t allow anyone but himself to be lauded in that style. I may as well do the notice for The Current now, as I’ve got my hand in.’
He turned to his desk again, and before daylight failed him had produced a piece of more cautious writing, very favourable on the whole, but with reserves and slight censures. This also he read to Dora.
‘You wouldn’t suspect they were written by the same man, eh?’
‘No. You have changed the style very skilfully.’
‘I doubt if they’ll be much use. Most people will fling the book down with yawns before they’re half through the first volume. If I knew a doctor who had many cases of insomnia in hand, I would recommend “Mr Bailey” to him as a specific.’
‘Oh, but it is really clever, Jasper!’
‘Not a doubt of it. I half believe what I have written. And if only we could get it mentioned in a leader or two, and so on, old Biffen’s fame would be established with the better sort of readers. But he won’t sell three hundred copies. I wonder whether Robertson would let me do a notice for his paper?’
‘Biffen ought to be grateful to you, if he knew,’ said Dora, laughing.
‘Yet, now, there are people who would cry out that this kind of thing is disgraceful. It’s nothing of the kind. Speaking seriously, we know that a really good book will more likely than not receive fair treatment from two or three reviewers; yes, but also more likely than not it will be swamped in the flood of literature that pours forth week after week, and won’t have attention fixed long enough upon it to establish its repute. The struggle for existence among books is nowadays as severe as among men. If a writer has friends connected with the press,. it is the plain
