Eminent forensic lawyers are often failures in Parliament, and Gastineau was clever enough at the Bar to[11] make wiseacres pretty sure of his falling short in the House. But the short-sighted soothsayers who judge the individual from the aggregate had made no allowance for a certain quality which, beyond his grit, his talent, and his power of concentration, was to be an important factor in the success which he forthwith became. They forgot that he was not altogether an Englishman: there was Southern blood in his veins, a warmer tinge to his mind; he had the vivacity and intellectual chic of the Italian added to the determination of an Englishman. So he rose almost at a bound to a high position among the legal members of the House, and with that his position seemed assured.

[11]

Naturally when it was seen that this distinguished man was among the victims of the Spanish railway smash, something like a thrill ran through the country which was the stage of his career. Society speculated as to the extent of his injuries and his chance of recovery; his own profession believed, many of them hoped, that, even if he did recover, his flight would thenceforward be a drooping one, while our old friend, the man in the street, always ready with an obvious moral platitude, made much of the impending sword which Fate hangs over the heads of even the most brilliantly successful of poor humanity.

Meanwhile in a poor monastery near an obscure Spanish town Gastineau lay battling with characteristic determination to keep at bay Death who stood over him. When he had been extricated from the wreckage of the train he was placed aside on the ground to await means of removal to the improvised hospital; and he had lain there in what, to a man of his character and ambition, far exceeded the bitterness of death. His spine was[12] injured, he felt no pain, was, indeed, scarcely conscious of the strange numbness and deprivation of all muscular power. But, after the first stunning shock, his mind had become, even for him, abnormally clear and alert, the change from lethargic dizziness had come like the clearing off of vapours from the sun. “Thank Heaven,” he muttered to himself, “this is the end, the lightning before death; if only it will come quickly, for all is over with me.”

[12]

So in a state of savage, resentful impatience he lay there, looking up at the stars, all unconcerned in their cold glitter, types of the all-enduring, which mocked that poor transient clay which had aspired to be a planet in a system so mundane as to admit of 

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