He never accepted Hooper as more than a distasteful necessity--somebody
must wait on him and do him menial service; he was not feared, indeed,
for surely such a dog would not dare to be false, but cordially disliked.
Beaumaroy won him from the beginning. Whom he conceived him to be
Beaumaroy himself never knew, but he opened his heart to him
unreservedly. Of him he had no suspicion; to him he looked for safety and
for the realization of his cherished dreams. Beaumaroy soothed his
terrors and humored him in all things--what was the good of doing
anything else, asked Beaumaroy's philosophy. He loved Beaumaroy far more
than he had loved anybody except himself in all his life. At the end,
through the wild tangle of mad imaginings, there ran this golden thread
of human affection; it gave the old man hours of peace, sometimes almost
of sanity.
So he came to his death, directly indeed of a long-standing organic
disease, yet veritably self-destroyed. And so he sat now, dead amidst his
shabby parody of splendor. He had done with thrones; he had even done
with Tower Cottage--unless indeed his pale shade were to hold nocturnal
converse with the robust and flamboyant ghost of Captain Duggle; the one
vaunting his unreal vanished greatness, mouthing orations and mimicking
pomp; the other telling, in language garnished with strange and horrible
oaths, of those dark and lurid terrors which once had driven him from
this very place, leaving it ablaze behind.
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