But he was too
tired to continue the effort; and at last it was his man alone who
disembarrassed him of his heavy clothing and who laid him among the
bedclothes, where he sank back, relaxed, breathing loudly in the
dreadful depressed stupor of utter physical and neurotic prostration.
Meaningless to him the hurriedly intrusive attorneys--his own and
Ruthven's--who forced their way in that night--or was it the next, or
months later? A weight like the weight of death lay on him, mind and
body. If he comprehended what threatened, what was coming, he did not
care. The world passed on, leaving him lying there, nerveless,
exhausted, a derelict on a sea too stormy for such as he--a wreck that
might have sailed safely in narrower waters.
And some day he'd be patched up and set afloat once more to cruise and
operate and have his being in the safer and smaller seas; some day, when
the nerve crash had subsided and the slow, wounded mind came back to
itself, and its petty functions were once more resumed--its envious
scheming, its covetous capability, its vicious achievement.
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