railway accidents; and as he looked with despairing eyes he cursed them as the unjust rulers of his fate. Then, for his mind was in too great a state of exaltation to dwell long on any one thought, before him rose and passed as in an extraordinarily vivid panorama the salient incidents of his career, to be succeeded by the principal stages he had been wont justifiably to picture in his future. Never to be. The past was all he could claim now; the present was mere impotence, and the future had vanished at the touch of a sleepy signalman’s hand on the wrong lever. He ground his teeth as he thought of it; he had a good deal of cynical philosophy in him, but it failed here, the stake had been too great, the certainty of winning too absolute for him to regard this startling reverse with equanimity. Then he came to review his triumphs, his mistakes, his sins: the last had been mostly pleasant, none the less so, perhaps, that his ambition had required their concealment; he felt he would rather have lived for sin, flagrant, even, and[13] open, than died like this. If he had known how near the end was he would not have been so careful; the world’s opinion, bah! What was it worth now? Something came to his mind that since the jar of the accident he had strangely forgotten; something that had sent him there, sent him, as it turned out, to his death. Was there justice in that? Curiously his legally trained mind began to busy itself in weighing the equity of the penalty. It was at least strangely swift, fitting and thorough, but was it just? Summum jus, summa injuria. He smiled resentfully at the aptness of the adage, then became conscious that some one was speaking to him, was sympathetically asking as to his hurt. A young man knelt by his side and, with a cushion, tried to make his position more comfortable, talking cheerily to him the while. He was one of the uninjured passengers doing his best for his less fortunate fellow travellers. For the moment Gastineau hated his succourer in a wave of malicious envy; why had not this nobody, this worthy, common-place young Englishman, dull, probably, and mentally circumscribed, with the hallmark of Eton plainly showing, why had not this man been shattered, and he, the brilliant worker, with a name and a place in the world, have gone scatheless? So bitter was the selfish thought that for a while he could hardly bring himself to acknowledge the young stranger’s kindness; all he wanted was to be let alone, to die quickly. But the other was not to be easily rebuffed; perhaps he made allowance for a sufferer’s state of mind and temper; anyhow he soon won, by tactful assiduity, the wounded man’s gratitude, to such a degree, indeed, that when they came to bear Gastineau to the monastery he begged the young fellow not
Prev.
Back
Top