Despairs Last Journey | Page 5

and read.
He had occupied himself in this way for perhaps half an hour, when a sudden voice hailed him, and startled him so that he dropped his book.
'Hillo, you there! Come here!'
'Oh,'he said, 'is that you, Paul, old fellow? Where are you?'
'Here,' said the voice ungraciously.
The latest arrival made his way in the direction indicated, but though the voice had sounded not more than a score of yards away, he had to call out twice or thrice, and wait for an answer. The brush was dense and tangled, and he could have lost himself for a lifetime in it.
'Oh, there you are, Paul! Upon my word, I shouldn't have known you.'
'I heard you say you had a letter for me. I'd a good deal rather not have seen you, but since you are here you may as well discharge your commission, and when you've done that you can go.'
'I've got a letter for you, Paul. It's from poor dear Madge, and I'm bound to say that I think she's beastly ill-used, and very unfortunate.'
'Doubly unfortunate,' said the camper-out--'unfortunate in a brute of a husband and a cad of a brother. Give me the letter.'
'Here it is, Paul. You may think what you like about me, of course, but I have travelled something like seven or eight thousand miles to find you.'
'On Madge's money?' asked the other, balancing the letter in a careless grip between thumb and finger. 'Nobody asks you to stop to hear yourself described. You were a cad from your cradle; you were a liar as soon as you could learn to lisp, and a sponge from the happy hour when you found the first fool to lend you half a crown. You needn't wait, George, but so long as you are here I will do my best to tell you what you are. You are a fruitful theme, and I could be fluent for a week or two. Going? Well, luck go with you, of the sort you merit. I'd call you a cur, but there isn't a cur in all the world who wouldn't walk himself blind and lame to bite me in revenge for the insult I put upon him. Go--you infinitesimal! you epitome of unpitiable little shames!'
The bearer of the letter, who had travelled so far for so curious a welcome, had found a beaten trail which led him back to the woodland road. He had gone a score of yards by this time; but the voice pursued him--level, heavy, sonorous, driven by full lungs.
'Put your fingers in your ears, George, or I shall find a word to scorch you. You are the poorest thing in Nature's bag of samples. A well-bred woodlouse wouldn't employ you for a scavenger. If you shrank to your soul's dimensions you might wander lost for a century on the point of a cambric needle. You are the last rarefied essence of the contemptible--the final word of the genius of the mean.'
This was not shouted, but was sent out in a steady trumpet-note that swelled fuller and fuller, like the voice of a great speaker in haranguing a clamorous audience, rising steadily, as if measured just to dominate clamour, and no more. In the pauses of his speech the camper-out had heard the noise of running feet. The sound seemed still faintly audible, though perhaps only fancy caught it. He sent out one clarion cry of 'Good-bye, George!' and surrendered himself to a fit of uncontrolled laughter. This coming to an end of sudden gravity, he took up the letter, which had fallen on the moss between his outstretched legs, and looked at the superscription.
'Madge!' he said. 'Poor little Madge!'
He put the envelope to his bristly lips and kissed it. Then he broke the seal and began to read:
'My own darling Husband,
'You must have the enclosed, and George has promised not to rest until he finds you and lays it in your hands. The last lines your father ever wrote in this world----'
'What?' he said aloud. 'What?
'The last lines your father ever wrote in this world arrived on Saturday, the twentieth, and news of his death reached me by wire on Monday, the twenty-second.'
'That's a big enough dose for one day,' he said. 'I can't 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