“When our work is done, ’tis best,
Brother, best that we should go,
I am weary, let me rest,
I am weary, let me go.”
Always, always, day after day, sleeping and waking, he muttered those lines with the persistency of the delirious. But one day he varied them to:
“Lay me weary, I am low,
I am low—I’ve never done any work!”
and smiling at me with his fever-broken lips, closed his eyes for ever. Just four months after he had sat upon the summit of Anthony Kinsella’s hut playing subtly upon the flute!
My brother arrived the next day—the same old kindly tolerant debonair Dick of old; but yet with some of his gaiety and boyishness wiped from his face and replaced by a heavy look that it saddened me strangely to see, for I had begun to recognise that look and knew that it meant care. His eye had a strained expression, too; and when I saw that his arm hung useless by his side, and that he came limping towards me, I burst out crying.
“Oh, Dicky!” I cried. “They have shot you all to bits!”
But he only grinned.
“Nonsense, Goldie, I’m all right. What’s a chipped arm and a game leg if they’re not the honours of war? Some of the fellows haven’t a thing to show for their trouble. These are my trophies. I’m proud of ’em. I show ’em round.”
“That’s all very well,” I said, still sniffling and mopping up my tears, “but you’ve got a temperature too. I can see it by your eyes.”