trick of it all--what can a surgeon do?
This brandy will fetch him to his intellects. And by-and-bye crack'll go
his spine--aho!"

You have heard a lion growling on a bone. That is how Gabord's voice
sounded to me then--a brutal rawness; but it came to my mind also that
this was the man who had brought Voban to do me service!

"Come, come, Gabord, crack your jaws less, and see you fetch him on his
feet again," said Doltaire. "From the seats of the mighty they have said
that he must live--to die another day; and see to it, or the mighty folk
will say that you must die to live another day--in a better world, my
Gabord."

There was a moment in which the only sound was that of tearing linen,
and I could see the shadows of the two upon the stone wall of the
corridor wavering to the light of the torch; then the shadows shifted
entirely, and their footsteps came on towards my door. I was lying on my
back as when I came to, and, therefore, probably as Gabord had left
me, and I determined to appear still in a faint. Through nearly closed
eyelids however I saw Gabord enter. Doltaire stood in the doorway
watching as the soldier knelt and lifted my arm to take off the bloody
scarf. His manner was imperturbable as ever. Even then I wondered what
his thoughts were, what pungent phrase he was suiting to the time and
to me. I do not know to this day which more interested him--that
very pungency of phrase, or the critical events which inspired his
reflections. He had no sense of responsibility; his mind loved talent,
skill, and cleverness, and though it was scathing of all usual ethics,
for the crude, honest life of the poor it had sympathy. I remember
remarks of his in the market-place a year before, as he and I watched
the peasant in his sabots and the good-wife in her homespun cloth.

"These are they," said he, "who will save the earth one day, for they
are like it, kin to it. When they are born they lie close to it, and
when they die they fall no height to reach their graves. The rest--the
world--are like ourselves in dreams: we do not walk; we think we fly,
over houses, over trees, over mountains; and then one blessed instant
the spring breaks, or the dream gets twisted, and we go falling,
falling, in a sickening fear, and, waking up, we find we are and have
been on the earth all the while, and yet can make no claim on it,
and have no kin with it, and no right to ask anything of it--quelle
vie--quelle vie!"

Sick as I was, I