That night, I returned home, anticipating the felicitations of the most generous of tutors upon my first rehearsal, and anxious to minister to his health; but when I arrived, I found Mrs. Platt awaiting me, sitting upright without repose on an old fauteuil.

She instructed, “Tell Dr. Trefusis I find him uncommon rude.”

I submitted that no thought could be further from Dr. Trefusis’s intent than to incommode such an excellent hostess.

“He is indeed an atheist, is he not?”

I could not deny it; and yet endeavored to, when she demanded, “And the fine Dr. Trefusis don’t have a grout to his name, does he?”

I offered, “We do have a scheme, however, that shall cover our expenses, madam.”

“Capital,” said Mrs. Platt. “We shall all starve.” She walked from the room without dismissing me.

She returned a moment later to add, “Kindness is never repaid. I should have known no good would come of feeding a philosopher.” She turned and frowned, framed in the door; behind her in the gloom, circuits of soiled plates glowed faintly like the lunar phases. “His death will leave the chamber haunted.”

“I trust, madam,” I said calmly, “that there is no reason to anticipate his death.”

“He anticipates it constantly when you’re abroad,” she said. “He calculates.” She demanded, “He shall not die in that chamber. Philosophers require a whole retinue of devils for their removal from this world. They are the grandees of the infernal kingdom.” She turned and left me. “I may be sure of constant annoyance from red-eyed frogs.”

I lingered some minutes, being unaccustomed to retiring from a chamber without permission or direction; but our hostess having disappeared, I passed above-stairs to see what strife had occasioned such an outburst.

Dr. Trefusis lay abed, staring into the darkness, the smell of his perspiration and urine thick in the chamber.

No sooner had I made polite inquiry as to the disagreement below, than he asked me, “Do you recall what words I spake to you this morning?”

I considered, and admitted that I did not recall any specific thing.

“Yet those might have been my final words,” he said.

“Your health, I trust, is not declining, sir.”

“Oh, I am most sickly,” he said. “I must needs have blood let.”

I remonstrated that we did not have funds sufficient to call doctor or surgeon.

“Open my vein,” he said. He held out his arm. “We must flush the poison. I have been stirring helplessly all day.”

“Mayhap, sir, you stir because you mend.”

“Open my vein.”

“That seems a perilous course, sir.”

“I demand to be bled. My blood is hot.”

“Sir, we have no skill in that art.”

“My constitution is unbearably plethoric.”

This debate went on for some minutes, me demurring, he requiring, until his demands became so violent I feared damage through apoplexy, and discerned that indeed, he perhaps would be aided by exsanguination; though it pleased me not at all to be administering that remedy myself, for I had never attempted it before, and so little was it a course I had considered, I trembled at my inexperience.

Still, I querulously assented, and, upon his order, went to seek a knife.

Sally was in the kitchen. “The Devil’s in him today,” she said. “I took him his broth and asked after his wellness, and he didna’ give me no answer, so I asks him again, and still no answer, so I asks a third time, and he starts to rail and shout.”

I looked at her with quizzical eye.

“Don’t be asking me. He was all up about Nothing and the Void.”

I returned with the knife to Dr. Trefusis’s side. He raised himself up upon the bolster, and I slipped a pewter bowl beneath his arm. I lay the knife upon the skin.

“I do not know how deep to make the incision,” I said. “We have no benefit of lancet or fleam.”

“Light cuts,” he said. “The blood will come.”

I pressed one hand to his chest to restrain him, should he start when I pierced him. My teeth grit, I cut my tutor.

The blood flowed easily into the bowl. He groaned with relief at its exudation.

As we waited for the blood to pool, he said, “I spake to you this morning of the Void. I made a pretty speech regarding how all of what we know is but a small light space in the theater of matter; and that space is unfurled around us like a set piece upon a stage. I opined that nothing exists without us to perceive it.”

“I recall it now, sir,” said I.

“With me to remind you. If I had passed? Would you be able to publish my final words?”

“Those were not your final words, sir.”

“Precisely!” he said, shaking the arm that bled. “Sally asked so many garrulous, probative questions that at ten this morning I was reduced to answering, ‘I am sufficiently well, madam.’ Which only a fool would offer as his last words.”

“So, sir, you then repeated your original speech on matter.”

“It was more exact in my memory at the time.”

“Though she did not note it in detail.”

He made a flat, dismissive noise. “One might sooner scrawl on granite with a lilac than impress rhetorical niceties upon that woman.”

“You cannot anticipate your final removal in this way, sir.”

“Bind up the vein, if you please,” he said. “I am done with bleeding.”

I lay the knife in the bowl and slid a rag beneath his arm. The blood would not stop its flowing, though I tied the rag tightly about the incision. He did not watch the process, but surveyed the ceiling as my fingers, slippery now with his gore, worked to tighten the tourniquet.

I grew fearful that we would not be able to staunch the flow. The blood now drenched the sheets; his elbow had tipped the bowl so that the blood I had already let also stained his side.

I worked at the knot, but my fingers were too wet.

Jogged by my exertions, he murmured, “We may so easily slip out of ourselves.”

His looks were pallid and waxen.

I scrambled to find something else which might provide a tighter bond. Full of alarms, I surveyed the room. A woolen stocking presented itself to me upon the floor, and I pounced upon it, snatched it where it lay, and brought it to the patient’s bed.

I tied it so tight as I could, fearful also of empurpling the forearm.

The new tourniquet complete, I surveyed my gory handiwork. He raised the hand and placed it on my head. He whispered, “‘Do not weep: Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.’”

With that, he removed the hand from my head, curled it against him, and closed his eyes.

“You must not sleep,” said I, and called his name. “Dr. Trefusis,” I pled, “you must not sleep. I fear I bled you too extremely.”

He who had been my benefactor within the College of Lucidity now lay in his sheets looking as vulnerable as a child, blinking at me suddenly in fear; yet he did not speak.

“Are you alert?” said I.

He nodded gradually. I chafed his arms and rushed below-stairs for a basin of water with which to shock him. Upon my returning, I slapped at his face with the wet cloth as he snorted protests and held up his hands.

This I felt a sufficient proof of the continued activity of his vivid spirits. I was sensible in equal measure of relief at his delivery and shame at my incompetence. I wished to do or say something further, but he simply blinked and looked ruefully about the room.

I sat by him and watched the throb of his pulse in the wrist of the marked arm. Darkness was falling, and we could hear the sentries firing far off to mark the end of day.

Our hostess and Sally entered, and, seeing the blood upon the bed, were much disturbed, crying out to the good man upon the bed, urging his condition.

“Sir,” said Mrs. Platt, “are you well?”

He would not respond to them.

“Would you wish some broth?” asked Sally.

They plied him with more questions.

He looked at me in supplication.

“Speak a word to us, sir,” said Mrs. Platt.

He reached up and locked his mouth with his fingers.

“Oh, sweet mercy,” said Sally. “It will be your final words again, is it?”

He shrugged and nodded.

We got no more word out of him, he stubbornly avoiding all inquiries but those which might be satisfied with affirmative or negative; and after a time of this, I began to be aware that he enjoyed this peculiar pantomime; and Sally began to smile. Notwithstanding the displeasure of our hostess, who spake dismissively of old men who act the part of little boys, we even laughed, and the doctor was forced himself into merriment; and at length, he even nodded to an offer of solid bread, which delicacy we could not, as it transpired, provide him, having none in the house.

That night, I listened with care to his breathing as he slept; and I thought on final words, and that he did not believe he had a soul that would survive his decease. It pained me beyond measure that this man, the most magnanimous of mentors, the shield and buckler of my childhood, should confront death as mere negation, and by so doing, perhaps forfeit his chance at eternal bliss.

I considered his last sentences, his atheistic unction, and lamented that in his sight, the human character was itself little more than a sentence spoken, a succession of sounds that acquired meaning only with accretion; but which was only to be a succession, a train of one thing following another, rather than a thought entire and whole, as the soul should be, cohering beyond our breath; and looking at my tutor, I feared for that moment when the final word might be said and done.