At night he dreamed of Sue, of his
boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and
talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some
garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster,
Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme
of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing
Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his
bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.
"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or into
the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.
The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible.
It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing
to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so
completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.
"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of
ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I
put upon the little play world in which he had been king."
In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard
sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and
into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a
thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had heard,
perhaps at his own dinner table.
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