He had worked to the pitch of
exhaustion. He neglected a cold that settled on his chest. He began to
cough persistently and betray an increasingly irritable temper. In the
last fights in the Committee his face was bright with fever and he spoke
in a voiceless whisper, often a vast angry whisper. His place at table
was marked with scattered lozenges and scraps of paper torn to the
minutest shreds. Such good manners as had hitherto mitigated his
behaviour on the Committee departed from him, He carried his last
points, gesticulating and coughing and wheezing rather than speaking.
But he had so hammered his ideas into the Committee that they took the
effect of what he was trying to say.
He died of pneumonia at his own house three days after the passing of
the Majority Report. The Minority Report, his own especial creation, he
never signed. It was completed by Wast and Carmichael....
After their parting at Salisbury station Dr. Martineau heard very
little of Sir Richmond for a time except through the newspapers, which
contained frequent allusions to the Committee. Someone told him that Sir
Richmond had been staying at Ruan in Cornwall where Martin Leeds had a
cottage, and someone else had met him at Bath on his way, he said,
in his car from Cornwall to a conference with Sir Peter Davies in
Glamorganshire.
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