"But I won't be carried out of this dirty hole (Bertolini's)--not feet first. Would you mind my gasping another day or two at your place? Rolfe has told me about it." We moved him, with infinite trouble. The journey woke his dormant capacities for invective. He cursed at the way they jolted him about; he cursed himself into a collapse that day, and we thought it was all over. Then he rallied, and became more abusive than before. Nothing was right. Stairs being forbidden, the whole lower floor of the house was placed at his disposal; the establishment was dislocated, convulsed; and still he swore. He swore at me for the better part of a week; at the servants, and even at the good doctor Malbranc, who came every morning in a specially hired steam-launch to make that examination which always ended in his saying to me: "You must humour him. Heart-patients are apt to be irritable." Irritable was a mild term for this particular patient. His appetite, meanwhile, began to improve. It was soon evident that my cook had not the common sense to prepare his invalid dishes; a second one was engaged. Then, my gardener and sailor-boy being manifest idiots, it became necessary to procure an extra porter to fetch the numberless odd things he needed from town every day, and every hour of the day. I wrote to the messenger people to send the most capable lad on their books; we would engage him by the week, at twice his ordinary pay. He arrived; a limp and lean nonentity, with a face like a boiled codfish. This miserable youth promptly became the object of O----'s bitterest execration. I soon learnt to dread those conferences, those terrific scenes which I was forced to witness in my capacity of interpreter. O---- revelled in them with exceeding gusto. He used to gird his loins for the effort of vituperation; I think he regarded the performance as a legitimate kind of exercise--his last remaining one. As soon as the boy returned from town and presented himself with his purchases, O---- would glare at him for two or three minutes with such virulence, such concentration of hatred and loathing, such a blaze of malignity in his black eyes, that one fully expected to see the victim wither away; all this in dead silence. Then he would address me in his usual whisper, quite calmly, as though referring to the weather: "Would you mind telling that double-distilled abortion that if he goes on making such a face I shall have to shoot him. Tell him, will you; there's a good fellow." And I had to "humour" him. "The gentleman"--I would say--"begs you will try to assume another expression of countenance," or words to that effect; whereto he would tearfully reply something about the will of God and the workmanship of his father and mother, honest folks, both of them. I was then obliged to add gravely: "You had better try, all the same, or he may shoot you. He has a revolver in his pocket, and a shooting licence from your government."