s all right.

"Only Believe! 'Believe on me, and ye shall be saved'!"

Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idiotic
injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these
half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for no
reason whatever. The religieuse hovered sleepily in the background with
an overdue and neglected dose. In addition, the landlady had not only
got up herself, but roused an aged crone of a mother and a partially
imbecile husband, and there was also a fattish, stolid man in grey
alpaca, with an air of importance--who he was and how he got there, I
don't know. I rather fancy the doctor explained him to me in French I
did not understand. And they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastily
and carelessly dressed, intent upon the life that flickered and sank,
making a public and curious show of its going, queer shapes of human
beings lit by three uncertain candles, and every soul of them keenly and
avidly resolved to be in at the death. The doctor stood, the others were
all sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for them.

And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.

I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and he
hovered about the room.

"I think," he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to me, "I
believe--it is well with him."

I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety into
French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca. Then he knocked
a glass off the table, and scrabbled for the fragments. From the first
I doubted the theory of an immediate death. I consulted the doctor in
urgent whispers. I turned round to get champagne, and nearly fell over
the clergyman's legs. He was on his knees at the additional chair the
Basque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying aloud, "Oh,
Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child...." I hustled him up
and out of the way, and in another minute he was down at another chair
praying again, and barring the path of the religieuse, who had found me
the corkscrew. Something put into my head that tremendous blasphemy of
Carlyle's about "the last mew of a drowning kitten." He found a third
chair vacant presently; it was as if he was playing a game.

"Good Heavens!" I said, "we must clear these people out," and with a
certain urgency I did.

I had a temporary lapse of memory, and forgot all my French. I drove
them out mainly by gest