Nutter shoved him a receipt across the table, and
swept the gold into his drawer.
‘Go over, Tom,’ he said to the bailiff,
in a stern low tone, ’and see the men don’t
leave the house till the fees are paid.’
And Sturk laughed a very pleasant laugh, you may be
sure, over his shoulder at Nutter, as he went out
at the door.
When he was gone Nutter stood up, and turned his face
toward the empty grate. I have seen some plain
faces once or twice look so purely spiritual, and
others at times so infernal, as to acquire in their
homeliness a sort of awful grandeur; and from every
feature of Nutter’s dark wooden face was projected
at that moment a supernatural glare of baffled hatred
that dilated to something almost sublime.
RELATING HOW, IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT, A VISION
CAME TO STURK, AND HIS EYES WERE OPENED.
Sturk’s triumph was only momentary. He
was in ferocious spirits, indeed, over the breakfast-table,
and bolted quantities of buttered toast and eggs,
swallowed cups of tea, one after the other, almost
at a single gulp, all the time gabbling with a truculent
volubility, and every now and then a thump, which
made his spoon jingle in his saucer, and poor, little
Mrs. Sturk start, and whisper, ‘Oh, my dear!’
But after he had done defying and paying off the whole
world, and showing his wife, and half convincing himself,
that he was the cleverest and finest fellow alive,
a letter was handed to him, which reminded him, in
a dry, short way, of those most formidable and imminent
dangers that rose up, apparently insurmountable before
him; and he retired to his study to ruminate again,
and chew the cud of bitter fancy, and to write letters
and tear them to pieces, and, finally, as was his wont,
after hospital hours, to ride into Dublin, to bore
his attorney with barren inventions and hopeless schemes
of extrication.
Sturk came home that night with a hang-dog and jaded
look, and taciturn and half desperate. But he
called for whiskey, and drank a glass of that cordial,
and brewed a jug of punch in silence, and swallowed
glass after glass, and got up a little, and grew courageous
and flushed, and prated away, rather loud and thickly
with a hiccough now and then, and got to sleep earlier
than usual.
Somewhere among the ‘small hours’ of the
night he awoke suddenly, recollecting something.
‘I have it,’ cried Sturk, with an oath,
and an involuntary kick at the foot-board, that made
his slumbering helpmate bounce.
‘What is it, Barney, dear?’ squalled she,
diving under the bed-clothes, with her heart in her
mouth.
‘It’s like a revelation,’ cried
Sturk, with another oath; and that was all Mrs. Sturk
heard of it for some time. But the surgeon was
wide awake, and all alive about it, whatever it was.
He sat straight up in the bed, with his lips energetically
compressed, and his eyebrows screwed together, and
his shrewd, hard eyes rolling thoughtfully over the
curtains, in the dark, and now and then an ejaculation
of wonder, or a short oath, would slowly rise up,
and burst from his lips, like a great bubble from
the fermentation.
