his omission. He paused in the passage, with his face turned towards Raffles’s room, and he could hear him moaning and murmuring. He was not asleep, then. Who could know that Lydgate’s prescription would not be better disobeyed than followed, since there was still no sleep?
He turned into his own room. Before he had quite undressed, Mrs Abel rapped at the door; he opened it an inch, so that he could hear her speak low.
“If you please, sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give the poor creetur? He feels sinking away, and nothing else will he swaller—and but little strength in it, if he did—only the opium. And he says more and more he’s sinking down through the earth.”
To her surprise, Mr Bulstrode did not answer. A struggle was going on within him.
“I think he must die for want o’ support, if he goes on in that way. When I nursed my poor master, Mr Robisson, I had to give him port-wine and brandy constant, and a big glass at a time,” added Mrs Abel, with a touch of remonstrance in her tone.
But again Mr Bulstrode did not answer immediately, and she continued, “It's not a time to spare when people are at death’s door, nor would you wish it, sir, I’m sure. Else I should give him our own bottle o’ rum as we keep by us. But a sitter-up so as you’ve been, and doing everything as laid in your power”
Here a key was thrust through the inch of doorway, and Mr Bulstrode said huskily, “That is the key of the wine-cooler. You will find plenty of brandy there.”
Early in the morning—about six—Mr Bulstrode rose and spent some time in prayer. Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections? Bulstrode had not yet unravelled in his thought the confused promptings of the last four-and-twenty hours.
He listened in the passage, and could hear hard stertorous breathing. Then he walked out in the garden, and looked at the early rime on the grass and fresh spring leaves. When he re-entered the house, he felt startled at the sight of Mrs Abel.
“How is your patient—asleep, I think?” he said, with an attempt at cheerfulness in his tone.
“He’s gone very deep, sir,” said Mrs Abel. “He went off gradual between three and four o’clock. Would you please to go and look at him? I thought it no harm to leave him. My man’s gone afield, and the little girl’s seeing to the kettles.”
Bulstrode went up. At a glance he knew that Raffles was not in the sleep which brings revival, but in the sleep which streams deeper and deeper into the gulf of death.
He looked round the room and saw a bottle with some brandy in it, and the almost empty opium phial. He put the phial out of
