Within, however, his mind in that last weakness still busily turned; no longer considering as it had considered during the activity of a marvellous life what answers the great questions propounded to the soul of man should receive, still less noting practical and immediate needs or considering set problems. His mind for once, almost for the first time, was this last time seeing things go by.
First he saw dull pageantries which had been the common stuff of his life, and he was confused by half-remembered, half-restored, faint cheers of distant crowds, colours, and gold, and the twin flashes of gems and of steel. And through it now and then strains of solemn music, and now and then the tearing cry of bronze: the bugles. All these sensations, confused and blurred, re-arose, and as they re-arose, welling up into him like a mist, there re-arose those permanent concomitants of such things. He felt again the nervous dread of folly and mishap, wondered upon the correctness of his conduct, whether he had not given offence somewhere to someone ... whether he had not been the subject of criticism by some tongue he feared. And as all that part of his great life returned to him, his face even in that extremity showed some faint traces of concern such as it had borne when in truth and in the body he had moved in the midst of a Court.
Next, like shadows disappearing, all that ghostly hubbub passed, but before he could be alone another picture succeeded, and he thought to feel beneath him the rolling of the sea. He was a young man looking for land, with others standing behind upon the deck, watching him in envy because of the miracles he was to do with armed men when he should touch the shore. And yet he was not a young man. He was a man already weighted with disappointment and with loss of love, and with some confused conception of breaking under an immense strain; and those who were on the deck behind him watching him, watched him with awe and with pity, and with a sort of dread that did not relieve his spirit. So young and old in the same moment, he felt in the brain the swinging of a ship’s deck. So he strained for land, a land where he should conquer, and at the same time it was a land where he should be utterly alone, and utterly forget, and be filled with nothing but defeat. The contradiction held him altogether.