Despairs Last Journey | Page 6

stand any more.'
He thrust the letter into his breast-pocket. 'Another impossibility. No
prodigal's return to end that story. Veal was never a favourite meat of
mine. Lord! I could laugh to see what a mess I have made of things. I
could cry if anybody else had made it, and had meant as well, and
hoped as blindly.
'Monday, the twenty-second. That was the day I came here. Strange it
is--strange! I'd have sworn he was alive that night--that first night in the
tent here. I seemed to feel him near me. We had that knack--the old
governor and I--poor old chap! He could jog my mental elbow when I
was a thousand miles away from him, and I could make him talk of me
at any time.
'Ghosts? No. Death is death, and there's an end of it. Ah!' He stood

suddenly arrested. 'Six hours' difference between here and England.
That explains it. His last wish was towards me. He loved nobody as he
loved me, I think. Well, I shall vex him no more. His tribulation is
over.
'Why cant a wrong-doer have a hell of his own, and be saved from
singeing innocent people? The smoke of my torment ascendeth, and
even George goes coughing at the smell of brimstone. George would be
much more comfortable if I had been virtuous--Madge would have
more to lend him.
'Now, if I had a bottle of whisky here, I'd put an end to this for an hour
or two. But I haven't, and I must do something. I must drug this down.
Bodily labour.' He laid his open palm on the knotted rind of the big tree
against which he had leaned his back whilst he read the first phrases of
the letter. 'You'll do as well as anything. It took many a score of years
to bring you here, but now you must come down. You'll sleep in the
gorge before I have done with you, old piny monster, three hundred
feet below your roots.'
He walked to the tent, and returning jacketless, axe in hand, fell upon
the tree with a measured frenzy. The sun was still high, and before he
had been at work ten minutes the sweat poured from his brow like rain.
He paused to breathe, and to survey the gash he had made in the side of
the tree. Compared with the girth of the forest giant, it looked the
merest trifle, but he nodded gaspingly.
'You'll sleep in the gorge before I have done with you, you old goliath
of your tribe. I shall have you down.'
He laboured with dogged fury. His hands blistered at the unaccustomed
task. The helve of the axe was stained with blood, and clung to his
grasp as if his palms were glued. His blows grew altogether ineffectual
The axe fell sideways often, and at such times the blow jarred him to
the spine. 'You will come down,' he said, 'if I die for it' He went back to
the tent, and casting himself on the turf before it, laved his hands in the
ice-cold mountain-stream. In half an hour he returned to his task, and
worked at it until he could no longer lift a hand. Even then, as he

walked brokenly away, he turned with an angry murmur:
'I'll have you down!'
He built his fire, and brewed and sipped his tea and munched his
rations in great weariness that night, and it was earlier than usual when
he rolled himself in his blanket and lay down. But though he ached
with fatigue from neck to heel, there was no sleep for him. He seemed
to hang suspended over a great lake of slumber, and to hold, in spite of
his own will, to a bar which magnetized his burning palms. He had but
to release the bar to fall deep into oblivion, but his grasp was fixed, and
he had no power to loose it. So, after many hours of tumbling this way
and that, he arose, and fed his fire with dry chips until it flamed; and
then, in alternate gushes of light and darkness, he read his father's
letter.
'Hendricks has just left me, and I succeeded in getting from him at the
last a plain statement of his opinion. I may last a month longer, but he
thinks it unlikely. I may go in a week. A chill, or a shock, or any little
trifle may precipitate the change, and make an end at any moment. I
can write for a few minutes at a time, and I am trying for Paul's sake to
say one or two things which will make my future task more likely of
success....
'I was fifty when my father died. I had been bred in