His appointment on the staff was in
abeyance--in fact, the vacancy on which it was expectant had not
definitely occurred--and all things were at sixes and sevens with poor
Dick Devereux.
That evening, strange to say, Sturk was still living; and Toole reported
him exactly in the same condition. But what did that signify? 'Twas all
one. The man was dead--as dead to all intents and purposes that moment
as he would be that day twelvemonths, or that day hundred years.
Dr. Walsingham, who had just been to see poor Mrs. Sturk--now grown into
the habit of hoping, and sustained by the intense quiet fuss of the sick
room--stopped for a moment at the door of the Phoenix, to answer the
cronies there assembled, who had seen him emerge from the murdered man's
house.
'He is in a profound lethargy,' said the worthy divine. ''Tis a
subsidence--his life, Sir, stealing away like the fluid from the
clepsydra--less and less left every hour--a little time will measure all
out.'
'What the plague's a clepsydra?' asked Cluffe of Toole, as they walked
side by side into the club-room.
'Ho! pooh! one of those fabulous tumours of the epidermis mentioned by
Pliny, you know, exploded ten centuries ago--ha, ha, ha!' and he winked
and laughed derisively, and said, 'Sure you know Doctor Walsingham.
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