The doctor stood, the others were
all sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for them.
And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.
I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and he
hovered about the room.
"I think," he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to me, "I
believe--it is well with him."
I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety into
French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca. Then he knocked
a glass off the table, and scrabbled for the fragments. From the first
I doubted the theory of an immediate death. I consulted the doctor in
urgent whispers. I turned round to get champagne, and nearly fell over
the clergyman's legs. He was on his knees at the additional chair the
Basque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying aloud, "Oh,
Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child...." I hustled him up
and out of the way, and in another minute he was down at another chair
praying again, and barring the path of the religieuse, who had found me
the corkscrew.
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