y. I've told you in my letters how he went on
after that collapse, that brain hemorrhage. I told you we got Ormond
Clive on to him. I told you we got him up here eventually to Clive's own
nursing home in Welbeck Place. Clive was a friend of that Lady Tybar.
She was with Sabre all the time he was in Queer Street--and it _was_
queer, I give you my word. Pretty well every day I'd look in. Every day
she'd be there. Every day Ormond Clive would come. Time and again we'd
stand around the bed, we three,--watching. Impenetrable and
extraordinary business! There was his body, alive, breathing. His mind,
his consciousness, his ego, his self, his whatever you like to call
it--not there. Away. Absent. Not in that place. Departed into, and
occupied in that mysterious valley where those cases go. What was he
doing there? What was he seeing there? What was he thinking there? Was
he in touch with this that belonged to him here? Was he sitting in some
fastness, dark and infinitely remote, and trying to rid himself of this
that belonged to him here? Was he trying to get back to it, to resume
habitation and possession and command? It was rummy. It was eerie. It
was creepy. It was like staring down into a dark pit and hearing little
tinkling sounds of some one moving there, and wondering what the devil
he was up to. Yes, it was creepy....

"Process of time he began to come back. He'd struck a light down there,
as you might say, and you could see the dim, mysterious glimmer of it,
moving about, imperceptibly coming up the side. Now brighter, now
fainter; now here, now there. Rummy, I can tell you. But he was _coming
up_. He was climbing up out of that place where he had been. What would
he remember? Yes, and what was he coming up to?

"What was he coming up to? That was what began to worry me. This divorce
suit of his wife's was climbing up its place in the list. He was
climbing up out of the place where he had been and this case was
climbing up towards hearing. Do you get me? Do you get my trouble? Soon
as his head emerged up out of the pit, was he going to be bludgeoned
down into it again by going through in the Divorce Court precisely that
which had bludgeoned him down at the inquest? Was I going to get the
case held up so as to keep him for that? Or what was I going to do? I
hadn't been instructed to prepare his defence. At Brighton, when I'd
suggested it, he'd told me, politely, to go to hell. I hadn't been
instructed; no one had been