“I say, this looks rather as if it was prepared for the eternal sleep,” Stellan exclaimed. “For a marble statue.”
Stellan opened the door of a W. C. which the uninitiated would have taken for some kind of confession box. He suddenly grew furious and felt a desire to say something indecent; he wisely kept it back however.
“Excuse me, Percy, old chap, but do you really feel at home here?”
“Well, then, why the devil do you have it in this style, then?”
Percy looked at the ceiling of the alcove which was painted all over with pentagrams and spirals.
“Well, my architect did it,” he muttered resignedly. “He wanted it like this. And I dared not oppose him. It is so difficult when you are not able to say that you cannot afford it. It brings so many responsibilities. Do you know, Stellan, I don’t think it is possible really to will something, really to be something for your own sake if you have lots of money.”
Stellan thought that if that was the difficulty he was ready to ease him of his burden.
“Poor Percy,” he laughed sarcastically. “The prisoner of wealth, for life.”
But then he remembered the refined little boy dressed in white behind the gates at Stonehill. And it struck him that there might perhaps be a bitter blighting truth in his exclamation. And that Percy perhaps was a shade more serious this time than usual. Stellan drummed, a little embarrassed, on the rough carved block of black oak that constituted the foot of the bed.
“Well, to be frank, I had a rather serious hæmorrhage of the lungs a week and a half ago ... my chest has always been weak, you know.”
For various reasons Stellan was horrified:
“But your footman did not tell me so. I had not the slightest idea that....”
“Well, I don’t want to advertise my illness.”
“He shakes his head and says that I must lie quiet in bed for the present, only lie quiet.... But dash it all, Stellan, don’t take it so seriously. I myself am rather pleased. I have never been anything but a dilettante. But this will perhaps be my opportunity. A real danger! An honest compulsion! Sometimes I feel as if I would really be able to do something after all. Oh, there is a curious excitement in the fever and the imminence of death.”
Stellan was just pondering how best in these circumstances he might decorously prepare Percy for the comparative relief to be derived from backing a bill for five thousand. Then a head with fair straggling hair and broad good-natured features peeped in through the door and disappeared again with a smile of apology at the sight of Stellan. It was the nurse. There were red spots in Percy’s cheeks and his voice sounded worried and nervous: