So there was no feud in the club worth speaking of but those of which Dr. Sturk was the centre; and Toole remarked this night that Sturk looked very ill — and so, in truth, he did; and it was plain, too, that his mind was not in the game, for old Slowe, who used not to have a chance with him, beat him three times running, which incensed Sturk, as small things will a man who is in the slow fever of a secret trouble. He threw down the three shillings he had lost with more force than was necessary, and muttering a curse, clapped on his hat and took up a newspaper at another table, with a rather flushed face. He happened to light upon a dolorous appeal to those ‘whom Providence had blessed with riches,’ on behalf of a gentleman ‘who had once held a commission under his Majesty, and was now on a sudden by some unexpected turns of fortune, reduced, with his unhappy wife and five small children, to want of bread, and implored of his prosperous fellow-citizens that charitable relief which, till a few months since, it was his custom and pleasure to dispense to others.’ And this stung him with a secret pang of insecurity and horror. Trifles affected him a good deal now. So he pitched down the newspaper and walked across to his own house, with his hands in his pockets, and thought again of Dangerfield, and who the deuce he could be, or whether he had really ever, anywhere — in the body or in the spirit — encountered him, as he used to feel with a boding vagueness he had done. And then those accursed dreams: he was not relieved as he expected by disclosing them. The sense of an ominous meaning pointing at him in all their grotesque images and scenery, still haunted him.

‘Parson Walsingham, with all his reading,’ his mind muttered, as it were, to itself, ‘is no better than an old woman; and that knave and buffoon, Mr. Apothecary Toole, looked queer, the spiteful dog, just to disquiet me. I wonder at Dr. Walsingham though. A sensible man would have laughed me into spirits. On my soul, I think he believes in dreams.’ And Sturk laughed within himself scornfully. It was all affectation, and addressed strictly to himself, who saw through it all; but still he practised it. ‘If these infernal losses had not come to spoil my stomach. I should not have remembered them, much less let them haunt me this way, like a cursed file of ghosts. I’ll try gentian tomorrow.’

Everything and everyone was poking at the one point of his secret fears. Dr. Walsingham preached a sermon upon the text, ‘remember the days of darkness for they are many.’ It went over the tremendous themes of death and judgment in the rector’s own queer, solemn, measured way, and all the day after rang in Sturk’s ear as the drums and fifes in the muffled peal of the Dead March used to do long ago, before his ear grew familiar with its thrilling roll. Sermons usually affected Sturk no more than they did other military gentlemen. But he was in a morbid state; and in this one or two terms or phrases, nothing in themselves, happened to touch upon a sensitive and secret centre of pain in the doctor’s soul.

For instance, when he called death ‘the great bankruptcy which would make the worldly man, in a moment, the only person in his house not worth a shilling,’ the preacher glanced unconsciously at a secret fear in the caverns of Sturk’s mind, that echoed back the sonorous tones and grisly theme of the rector with a hollow thunder.

There was a time when Sturk, like other shrewd, bustling fellows, had no objection to hear who had an execution in his house, who was bankrupt, and who laid by the heels; but now he shrunk from such phrases. He hated to think that a clever fellow was ever absolutely beggared in the world’s great game. He turned his eye quickly from the Gazette, as it lay with other papers on the club table; for its grim pages seemed to look in his face with a sort of significance, as if they might some day or other have a small official duty to perform by him; and when an unexpected bankruptcy was announced by Cluffe or Toole in the club-room, it made his ear ring like a slap, and he felt sickish for half an hour after.

One of that ugly brood of dreams which haunted his nights, borrowed, perhaps, a hint from Dr. Walsingham’s sermon. Sturk thought he heard Toole’s well-known, brisk voice, under his windows, exclaim, ‘What is the dirty beggar doing there? faugh!— he smells all over like carrion — ha, ha ha!’ and looki............