The doctor came in at this moment and begged me to go and rest. “You are only distressing yourself, Mrs. Blair,” he said, “and needlessly, for he is absolutely unconscious and suffers nothing.” A pause. “My God! why do you look at me like that?” he exclaimed, frightened out of his wits. I think my face had caught something of that devil’s, something of that sneer, that loathing, that mire of contempt and stark despair.

I sank back into myself, ashamed already that mere knowledge--and such mean vile knowledge--should so puff one up with hideous pride. No wonder Satan fell! I began to understand all the old legends, and far more----

I told Doctor Kershaw that I was carrying out Arthur’s last wishes. He raised no further opposition; but I saw him sign to the male nurse to keep an eye on me.

The sick man’s finger beckoned us. He could not speak; he traced circles on the counterpane. The doctor (with characteristic intelligence) having counted the circles, nodded, and said: “Yes it is nearly seven o’clock. Time for your medicine, eh?”

“No,” I explained, “he means that he is in the seventh circle of Dante’s Hell.”

At that instant he entered on a period of noisy delirium. Wild and prolonged howls burst from his throat; he was being chewed unceasingly by “Dis”; each howl signalled the meeting of the monster’s teeth. I explained this to the doctor. “No,” said he, “he is perfectly unconscious.”

“Well,” said I, “he will howl about eighty times more.”

Doctor Kershaw looked at me curiously, but began to count.

My calculation was correct.

He turned to me, “Are you a woman?”

“No,” said I. “I am my husband’s colleague.”

“I think it is suggestion. You have hypnotized him?”

“Never; but I can read his thoughts.”

“Yes, I remember now; I read a very remarkable paper on Mind, two years ago.”

“That was child’s play. But let me go on with my work.”

He gave some final instructions to the nurse, and went out.

The suffering of Arthur was at this time unspeakable. Chewed as he was into a mere pulp that passed over the tongue of “Dis,” each bleeding fragment kept its own identity and his.

The papillae of the tongue were serpents, and each one gnashed its poisoned teeth upon that fodder.

And yet, though the sensorium of Arthur was absolutely unimpaired, indeed hyperaesthetic, his consciousness of pain seemed to depend upon the opening of the mouth. As it closed in mastication, oblivion fell upon him like a thunderbolt. A merciful oblivion? Oh! what a master stroke of cruelty! Again and again he woke from nothing to a hell of agony, of pure ecstasy of agony, until he understood that this would continue for all his life, the alternation was but systole and diastole; the throb of his envenomed pulse, the reflection in consciousness of his blood-beat. I became conscious of his intense longing for death to end the torture.

The blood circulated ever slower and more painfully; I could feel him hoping for the end.

This dreadful rose-dawn suddenly greyed and sickened with doubt. Hope sank to its nadir; fear rose like a dragon, with leaden wings. Suppose, thought he, that after all death does not end me!

I cannot express this conception. It is not that the heart sank, it had no whither to sink; it knew itself immortal, and immortal in a realm of unimagined pain and terror, unlighted by one glimpse of any other light than that pale glare of hate and of pestilence. This thought took shape in these words:--

I AM THAT I AM.

One cannot say that the blasphemy added to the horror; rather it was the essence of the horror. It was the gnashing of the teeth of a damned soul.